HIST 102 — United States History Since 1877 Chapter 18, Lecture 1
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What This Lecture Is NOT
A battle-by-battle history of the "Indian Wars"
A story of inevitable progress
Frontier romance or mythology
What it IS: An analysis of how conquest functioned in practice
Guiding Question
What does conquest look like when the goal is not merely territorial control, but the transformation—or elimination—of entire ways of life?
Key premise: Battles matter as moments that reveal larger strategies—but policy, environment, law, and culture ultimately proved more decisive.
Part I
Native Nations Before Conquest
Political, Social, and Economic Systems
Political Organization
Plains nations functioned as sovereign political communities
Authority rested in councils and recognized chiefs/headmen
Decision-making emphasized consensus over coercion
Effective for mobile societies—but vulnerable to centralized nation-states
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Sovereign Political Communities
Native nations governed themselves independently with their own laws, leadership structures, and diplomatic relations. They made treaties as equals with European powers and the U.S. government—evidence that even the U.S. recognized their political legitimacy.
Key point: U.S. officials often misread decentralized authority as political weakness rather than structural difference.
Economic Systems
Plains economies organized around:
Buffalo hunting as the economic foundation
Seasonal migration following resources
Regional trade networks spanning thousands of miles
🔑 Key Difference
Wealth and status tied to kinship, mobility, and animals—NOT land ownership
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The Buffalo Economy
The buffalo provided virtually everything Plains peoples needed:
Food: Meat, both fresh and preserved as pemmican
Shelter: Hides for tipis
Clothing: Leather, fur, and wool
Tools: Bones, sinew, horns
Spiritual meaning: Central to religious ceremonies
This is why destroying the buffalo was such an effective weapon of conquest.
Gender Roles and Power
Men's Roles
Hunting
Warfare
Diplomacy
Political/military authority
Women's Roles
Food processing
Shelter construction
Clothing production
Control of household resources
Women exercised substantial influence through kinship networks and marriage alliances
The Challenge for Conquest
🔑 Why This Matters
To dismantle these societies, the United States did not simply need military victory—it needed to undermine the ecological, economic, and social foundations of Native autonomy.
This explains why conquest took so many forms beyond battlefield combat.
Part II
Violence and Conquest
When Battles Matter—and When They Don't
Why Battles Aren't the Center
Hundreds of armed conflicts occurred across the West
Focusing on tactics obscures:
Structural power imbalances
Demographic pressure
Industrial capacity
Long-term policy outcomes
Native resistance failed not due to lack of courage—but due to asymmetries in logistics, population, and environmental control.
Two Battles That Matter Symbolically
1876Little Bighorn — Rare Indigenous military victory; showed limits of U.S. control
1890Wounded Knee — A massacre, not a battle; symbolic end of armed resistance
Key Takeaway
Battles punctuate the story, but policy finishes it.
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Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)
On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers massacred approximately 250-300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.
The Lakota were being disarmed after practicing the Ghost Dance—a spiritual movement promising renewal. The military interpreted religious practice as military threat.
Historical significance: Marks the violent end of organized armed resistance on the Plains and coincides with intensified assimilation efforts.
Part III
Buffalo Destruction
Economic and Ecological Warfare
Buffalo Destruction
IMAGE PLACEHOLDER 400x350px
Search: "pile of buffalo skulls 1870s" or "buffalo bone pile railroad"
Sources: Library of Congress, National Archives
Destruction driven by:
Railroad expansion
Commercial hide markets
Deliberate military strategy
The acknowledged logic:
Destroy the buffalo → Force dependence → Eliminate autonomy
Three Forms of Warfare
Economic
Destroyed the foundation of Plains economies
Ecological
Transformed the Great Plains environment
Cultural
Eliminated sacred and ceremonial center of life
🔑 Analytical Point
Where military conquest proved costly or incomplete, environmental destruction succeeded.
Regional Variation: California
The Logic of Elimination
Gold Rush (1849) created immediate settler pressure
Minimal treaty-making or reservation planning
Native peoples viewed as obstacles, not populations to manage
Forms of Violence
Vigilante campaigns
State-funded killing
Federal inaction
Interpretation
Many historians describe this as genocide
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Genocide in California
Historian Benjamin Madley documents that California's Indigenous population fell from approximately 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 by 1873—an 80% decline in less than 30 years.
This included:
State-funded militia campaigns
Bounties for Native scalps and heads
Enslavement under indenture laws
Deliberate starvation
Madley's book is titled An American Genocide (2016)—the scholarly consensus increasingly supports this characterization.
📝 Check Your Understanding
Quick Question
Why did U.S. officials and commercial interests systematically destroy the buffalo herds?
To clear land for railroad construction
To force Native peoples into dependency on reservations
To supply the commercial hide market
All of the above
Part IV
The Reservation System
Containment and Dependency
The Reservation System
Reservations as tools of spatial and political control
Fixing mobile peoples in place enabled:
Surveillance
Ration-based coercion
Administrative oversight
Traditional authority eroded under federal agents
🔑 Key Point
Dependency was not an accident but a structural feature. Reservations were designed to manage Native peoples, not preserve Native cultures.
Allotment: The Dawes Act (1887)
What It Did
Broke up communal landholding
Assigned individual plots (160 acres)
Declared "surplus" land open to whites
Underlying Goals
Dismantle communal sovereignty
Impose private property norms
Restructure family/gender relations
Results: Native land holdings fell from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by 1934
Boarding Schools
Conquest Across Generations
IMAGE PLACEHOLDER 450x300px
Search: "Carlisle Indian School before after" or "Native American boarding school children"
Sources: National Archives, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center
Forced removal from families
Suppression of language and religion
Renaming, uniforms, discipline
Cultural erasure as explicit goal
"Kill the Indian, save the man"
— Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Carlisle
Resistance and Survival
Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
The Ghost Dance: spiritual movement emphasizing renewal and hope
Not inherently violent—rooted in belief and meaning-making
U.S. officials interpreted religious practice as military threat
The Ghost Dance promised that faithful practice would restore the buffalo, bring back the ancestors, and renew the earth—a response to unimaginable loss.
×
The Ghost Dance Movement
Founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka around 1889, the Ghost Dance spread rapidly among Plains peoples experiencing devastation from conquest.
Core beliefs:
Faithful dancing and moral behavior would bring renewal
Ancestors would return
The buffalo would come back
White settlers would disappear or leave
This was a peaceful religious movement—the violence came entirely from the U.S. military's response.
Conclusion: Mechanisms of Conquest
Conquest operated through multiple mechanisms:
Military
Ecological
Administrative
Legal
Cultural
U.S. Indian policy was adaptive, not uniform
Native survival occurred under conditions of extreme coercion
Coming Next: The Mythic West
As conquest solidified, Americans faced a new problem— how to remember what they had done,
and how to transform violence into national memory.
Lecture 2 examines how the "Wild West" became American mythology.