Guerras Indias

Guerras Indias. A pesar de sus diversas culturas del nómada al pueblo que habita, los nativos americanos en los Llanos mantuvo una economía de subsistencia en gran medida en la que el búfalo era central. Cuando los blancos comenzaron a establecer los Llanos, que mató a millones de búfalos para que por la década de 1880 sólo unos pocos cientos se quedaron. La destrucción afectado la vida en los Llanos, el aumento de los conflictos entre los nativos americanos. Desde la masacre de Sand Creek en 1862 a la llamada Batalla de Wounded Knee en 1890, se llevó a cabo los combates esporádicos entre el Ejército de los Estados Unidos y los indios de llanos.

Reservations and Reform. Meanwhile in the 1860s and 1870s the government sought to push the Native Americans onto reservations, specific territories that supposedly were protected from white settlement and where the indigenous peoples could be “civilized”. Reformers in the East, such as the Indian Rights Association, protested this policy, arguing instead for a policy of assimilation. Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881) dramatically recounted the history of white mistreatment of Indians. The Dawes Act (1887) embodied many of the reformers’ ideas and replaced tribal with individual ownership of property. Unfortunately, the new policy was disastrous to the Native Americans, as much of the reservation land ended up in the hands of white and tribal authority disintegrated.

Expansion of the Nation

Agriculture. Between 1865 and 1890 hundreds of thousands of people poured into the prairies of Eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas and then spilled into the Great Plains, placing more acreage under cultivation than in all previous American history. Congress passed several laws that encouraged this migration. The Homestead Act (1862) provided 160 acres of free land in exchange for five years of settlement and cultivation. The Timber Culture Act (1877) provided potential irrigators with 640 acres for the low down payment of 25 cents an acre.

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