Closing the Frontier

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Closing the Frontier

• The Indian Problem and the Chinese Experience

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Indian Culture on the Great Plains

• Impact of the Horse
• Strengthened the more nomadic tribes
• Sioux, Kiowa, Cheyenne
• More Nomadic, more warlike
• Dependence on the Buffalo

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Romantic View of Indians Hunting Buffalo
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Indians on the Plains

• Romanticism and Realism

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The Traditional View of the West
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William Buffalo Bill Codys Wild West Show
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The Real and Romanticized

• Plains Tipi

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Buffalo Bill Cody Sitting Bull
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Realism or Romanticism?
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Realism
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Sources of Conflict

• Land
• Whites assumed expansion into the plains
• Necessary to reach California and Oregon before
  1860
• After 1860, gold and Homestead Act attracted
  settlers

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Sources of Conflict

• Cultural Differences
• To whites, Indians and lifestyle were
  uncivilized
• Policy of assimilation Indians must accept white
  ways
• Christianity
• Private property

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Sources of Conflict

• Land
• Indians refused to surrender lifestyle and
  Culture
• Anger over white violations of treaties
• War was only alternative

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Indian Wars

• More or less continuous conflict, 1865-1877
• Bozeman Trail and Gold
• Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIR) Corruption
• Railroad and Mining Intrusion onto Indian Land

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The Settlement of the Trans-Mississippi West,
18601890
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The Oklahoma Land Rush, 18891906
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The Mining and Cattle Frontiers, 18601890
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Transcontinental Railroads and Federal Land
Grants, 18501900
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Major Indian-White Clashes in the West
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The Battle of Little Big Horn1876
Gen. GeorgeArmstrong Custer
Chief Sitting Bull
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Battle of the Little Big Horn
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7th Cavalry Headstones on Last Stand Hill
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Geronimo

• Led Comanche Resistance
• Surrendered 1886

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Chief Joseph I will fight no more
forever!
Nez Percé tribal retreat (1877)
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Results Of Conflict

• Defeat and decimation of remaining tribes
• Destruction of the Buffalo
• Only 228,000 remain by 1890
• The Dawes Act (1887)

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Destruction of the Buffalo
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Helen Hunt Jackson
A Century of Dishonor (1881)
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The Dawes Act

• Goals
• Restrict Indian to Reservations
• Assimilate via land ownership

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The Dawes Act

• Provisions
• Tribes lose legal status as nations
• Tribes lose legal claims to territory
• Indians become citizens
• Head of Household receives 160 acres
• Surplus land held in trust by U.S. government
  for 25 years

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The Dawes Act

• Consequences
• Cultural disaster alcoholism and despair
• Poverty Land unsuitable to agriculture
• Corruption Bureau of Indian Affairs misuses
  trust 138,000 acres reduced to 48,000 by 1934.

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The Ghost Dance

• Origin
• Despair of life under the Dawes Act
• Longing for a return to the old ways
• Wovokas vision
• Paiute shaman
• during an eclipse of the sun in
• saw the second coming of Christ and received a
  warning about the evils of the white man.

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The Ghost Dance

• Origin
• converts of the new religion were supposed to
  take part in the Ghost Dance to hasten the
  arrival of the new era as promised by the messiah

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Ghost Dance Song

• The whole world is coming,A nation is coming, a
  nation is coming,The eagle has brought the
  message to the tribe.The Father says so, the
  Father says so.Over the whole earth they are
  coming,The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are
  coming,The crow has brought the message to the
  tribe,The Father says so, the Father says so.

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The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

• Whites fear dance as preparation for war
• Dance Banned by BIA
• Sioux continue
• Soldiers sent to arrest leaders and disarm men

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Ghost Dance Shirt
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Massacre at Wounded Knee

• 150-300 Sioux men, women and children killed
  Ironically - by U.S. 7th Cavalry
• Symbolizes the end of Indian resistance to white
  settlement

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Ghost Dance Shield
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Frozen Corpses at Wounded Knee
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Mass Grave at Wounded Knee
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The Battle of Wounded Knee

• Consequences
• Officially 146 Indian men, women and children
  Killed by 7th Cavalry troops
• Some claim as many as 300 died
• Most killed as they ran
• Signaled the end of Indian resistance

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Western Indian Reservations, 1890
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(No Transcript)
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The Chinese-American Experience

• In the mid-19th century, Chinese came to "Gold
  Mountain," as they called America, to join the
  "Gold Rush" that began at Sutters Mill,
  Sacramento, California.

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Chinese Labor

• Chinese became a significant part of the labor
  force that laid the economic foundation of the
  American West.
• Chinese are best known for their contribution to
  the construction of the Transcontinental
  Railroad, the completion of which united the
  country economically and culturally.

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Chinese Labor

• Some migrated to the east coast

• Chinese in New England

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The Chinese-American Experience

• Chinese suffered severe exploitation and
  discrimination.
• White workers viewed them as economic competitors
  and racial inferiors.
• Discriminatory laws were passed
• The commission of widespread acts of violence
  against the Chinese followed.

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The Chinese-American Experience

• Under the racist slogan, "Chinese must go!" an
  anti-Chinese movement emerged that worked to
  deprive the Chinese of a means of making a living
  in the general economy.
• Hostility hindered efforts by the Chinese to
  become American.
• It forced them to flee to the Chinatowns on the
  coasts,
• In these ghettos, they were isolated from the
  rest of the population, making it difficult if
  not impossible to assimilate into mainstream
  society.
• Native-born Americans criticized them for their
  alleged unassimilability.

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American nativism

• According to historian John Higham
• No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever
  approached the violent extremes to which
  anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870s and
  1880s. Lynching, boycotts, and mass
  expulsionsharassed the Chinese.

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Discrimination
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The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

• Identified for the first time a specific group of
  people by name as undesirable for immigration to
  the United States,
• The act marked a fateful departure from the
  traditional American policy of unrestricted
  immigration.

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The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

• After China became an ally during World War II,
  the exclusion laws were finally repealed by the
  Magnuson Act in 1943.
• This bill made it possible for Chinese to become
  naturalized citizens and gave them an annual
  quota of 105 (!!)  immigrants.