The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

The continent on which Columbus landed was as vast culturally as it was territorially. The earliest archaeological evidence of North American settlement exists in Meadowcraft Rockshelter, 35 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, and in Monte Verde in Chile. Both were tribal villages. The sites show that there were people in North America long “before the Bering land bridge formed about ten thousand years ago” (27), confirming Indigenous peoples’ stories that they are not descended from Asiatic nomads but have their own origins within the Americas. While it is true that Indigenous peoples share DNA with Asian populations and with Europeans, it is possible that Europeans who traveled to the Far East conceived offspring with people there whose descendants later journeyed to the Americas.

Tribal origin stories vary. Some stories are bottom-up, meaning that the tribe believes they sprang from the earth. Others, like the Ojibwe, believe that they came from a heavenly Creator.

During the Age of Exploration, there were hundreds of tribes along the Atlantic coast (29). The typical village held around 150 people who tended to migrate frequently, spending some part of the year on the coast and the other inland. They subsisted on fish and game and occasional harvests of nuts and berries. The size of populations depended on the availability of these food resources.

When Ponce de Léon landed in Florida in 1513, he did not realize that the tribes living there had been settled for around 12,000 years. Agriculture was less prevalent in Florida than elsewhere in the Southeast, and some tribes did not farm even during the time of Spanish exploration. Among the tribes were the Apalachee and the Pensacola. All of them would quickly decline several years after Spanish encroachment into the region.

It is unlikely that Ponce de Léon was the first Spaniard to explore La Florida, or “the land of flowers.” The Indigenous people whom he encountered already knew some Spanish and were wary of Spaniards. There were also others after Ponce de Léon. Pedro de Salazar became a slaver, capturing up to 500 Indigenous peoples, and spread smallpox and measles during his treks along the Atlantic coast. The Indigenous tribes were not always victims, however. They attacked and impeded the Spanish everywhere the explorers went. By the 16th century, the Indigenous had largely lost their battle against colonization. The Spanish set up missions in present-day Georgia and Florida. Indigenous peoples were enslaved there, working for both the crown and the Church. The benefit of this was that members of previously distinct tribes met new peoples. They formed alliances and, eventually, “new tribal identities” (31). The newly amalgamated groups included the Seminole, Creek, Muscogee, Chickasaw, and Cherokee. These tribes played an important role in some of the most notorious historical episodes to occur in the Southeast.

The first episode was the removal of Indigenous tribes. Thomas Jefferson regarded them as impediments to civilization due to their supposed preference for hunting over farming and the raising of livestock. In fact, by the start of the 18th century, most tribes living in the East were agricultural, maintaining crops of yams, beans, corn, and squash. They also cultivated cotton and other cash crops, which they farmed on plantations. Many Southeastern tribal members, including the Cherokee, owned enslaved Black people.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson penned secret memos to military officer and future ninth president William Henry Harrison in which he detailed a plan for removing Indigenous peoples from the Southeast. The plan was to set up trading houses to tempt prosperous Indigenous people into investments. When they ran into debt, they would eventually have to pay them by selling off their property. Jefferson was unable to achieve these aims during his presidency. Forced removal did not occur until Andrew Jackson succeeded him in 1829.

President Jackson offered the Southern tribes two options: move west of the Mississippi River or becomes subjects of their states. Cherokee chief John Ross took the case of his people to the Supreme Court and won. The court ruled that the removal of tribes was unlawful. Jackson ignored the ruling and proceeded with removal. For two decades, starting in 1830, over 125,000 Indigenous people from the Southeast were forced west of the Mississippi. They made the trek on foot and during winter. Around 3,500 Creek and 5,000 Cherokee people died on the journey. Others died of starvation when they arrived in their new homeland. Although they lived according to the standards of the new republic, including developing agriculture, white settlers remained determined to be rid of them.

The Seminole were a tribe formed out of some Creek and Choctaw tribal members from Georgia and Alabama who had settled in northern Florida. The Seminole had worked with Spanish colonists to remove other tribes, many of whom ended up in Cuba, where they were enslaved on plantations. In 1818, Andrew Jackson started a campaign to subordinate the Seminoles, return runaway slaves who had fled to Florida, and remove the Spanish from the state. This campaign led to the First Seminole War. By the time the war ended, the United States had absorbed all of northern Florida, and after signing the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, the government moved the Seminole tribe onto a reservation on non-arable land in Central Florida.

In 1832, a few false chiefs signed the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, which promised the Seminole tribe land west of the Mississippi River. This time, the young and fiercely opinionated warrior Chief Osceola raised an objection, stating that White people would not treat him like an enslaved Black person. He promised to fight back with deadly force. In the end, the Seminoles who fought lost their claim to their land, and the US government moved captured warriors westward.

In the 1850s, remaining Seminoles once again attacked White settlers who moved into Florida, launching the Third Seminole War. Again, the US government defeated them and moved those who survived the battle westward. The Seminole Wars officially ended on May 8, 1858. Still, there remained fewer than a thousand Seminole people. They retired to “the backcountry and swamps of Florida” and have remained there since (37).

The Northeastern tribes, whose homelands stretched from Virginia to the territories near the Saint Lawrence River, were diverse and subsisted on a diet that included swordfish, cod, duck, deer, and shellfish. By 1000 BCE, they were producing pottery. A few hundred years later, the climate cooled, making it difficult for them to rely on certain foods, such as nuts, for calories. Around this time, corn reached the Northeast from Mexico and became a staple of tribal diets. By 1200 CE, corn crops were standard and helped to revive depleting populations. Inevitably, intertribal wars began.

Bison also occupied the region around this time. Indigenous peoples who lived inland in what are now New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio deforested large swaths of land to make room for bison. The tribes in this region had complex social networks and, through their trade routes, had heard about European settlers and explorers long before they encountered any. Worse, European diseases arrived long before any colonists did. In 1592, the Seneca tribe suffered a measles epidemic that killed thousands of its people within a decade. Between 1616 and 1619—one year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Colony—around “90 percent of the population of the New England tribes was wiped out” (41). By 1890, most remaining Indigenous peoples in New England had been absorbed into other tribes, removed from their ancestral lands, or exterminated.

The Great Lakes region, which stretches to the rim of the Great Plains, “was home to some of the bloodiest fighting and also some of the most aggressive and effective Indian resistance to colonization on the entire continent” (42). Indigenous peoples in this region subsisted on fish, game, and waterfowl. Customs now regarded as common to Indigenous tribes, such as the use of a bow and arrow, pottery making, and plant domestication, were shared between tribes that lived between the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. Their villages were small, comprising no more than 150 family members who lived in dome-shaped wigwams.

During the Middle Woodland period, which lasted from approximately 200 BCE to 300 CE, the Hopewell culture arose. Hopewell cultures constructed homes in or near riverbends and floodplains, thereby taking advantage of rich soil and aquatic sources of food. Around 500 CE, these cultures and their artwork disappeared due to war and a change in climate that made their traditional food sources scarce.

Unlike tribes in other regions, those west of the Appalachian Mountains had little contact with White settlers, though they did encounter disease and foreign trade goods, particularly from French settlers who hoped to catch furs. In 1608, Samuel de Champlain, credited with being the “father of New France,” explored the land west of the Saint Lawrence, which later became Quebec. Those who settled the future province wanted to catch furs coming from the north, thereby avoiding the British, who had settled further east in Canada, and the Spanish, who were slowing coming from the south.

The local Indigenous people preferred dealing with the French, whose focus was on trade. Thus, they were more eager to learn and adapt to Indigenous customs. The French traded metal goods and firearms with the Huron in exchange for corn. The Huron had good relations with the Algonquians, who had access to the furs that the French wanted.

The fur trade boomed at the start of the 17th century and was, for several centuries, the most important global industry. In 1609, the Anishinaabe tribes of the Great Lakes used their influence to get the French to fight with them against the Iroquois Confederacy, which was a threat southeast of the Great Lakes. They were also unafraid to go against the French when the latter failed to comply with their trade terms, going instead to the British to trade until the French bent to the tribes’ will. In the mid-18th century, the French began losing power to the British, leading to a pan-Indigenous alliance that attacked the French and formed trading relations with the British. However, European powers deemed this alliance a threat to their power, resulting in several skirmishes that erupted into the First Anglo-Indian War. This war ignited the larger French and Indian War, which, in turn, ignited the Seven Years’ War in Europe. In the end, the French lost much of their power in North America, leaving the British, and, ultimately, the Americans, who eventually forced the Great Lakes tribes into unfair treaties and removed them to reservations.

About 2,300 years ago, a group of nomads “traveled north through the Sonoran Desert and settled on the Gila River, about thirty miles from modern-day Phoenix” (51). They built small dwellings, dug canals, and planted seeds that they had probably brought with them. Their first village was called Snaketown because the area was full of snakes. The people are referred to as the Hohokam. They may have been the first people to harvest agave and, more remarkably, to do so in unirrigated soil.

The Hohokam also had an evolved culture. They made decorative pottery and held intricate ceremonies. They also constructed ball courts that were half of the size of present-day football fields. Around 1450 CE, Hohokam culture ended, and Snaketown may have been burned down. The Hohokam people disbanded into smaller tribes and migrated elsewhere.

The Mogollon people of southern Arizona, New Mexico, and much of northern Mexico were another ancient society. They were foragers and hunters who came from the desert and became an agrarian people. They built pit houses along what is now the Arizona-New Mexico border. With increase in food sources, the Mogollon culture evolved materially and architecturally. They replaced the pit houses with structures made of soil and adobe. Later, they formed cliff dwellings. Then, around 1400 CE, the Mogollon culture, too, vanished. In this instance, too, villages were either incinerated or abandoned, though the people remained in their ancestral lands. The western Pueblo peoples and the Hopi trace their lineages back to the Mogollon.

Of all the prehistoric southwestern Indigenous cultures, the Anasazi may have been the most sophisticated. Their homeland existed in “the Four Corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah” (53). Like the Hohokam and the Mogollon, the Anasazi also began as hunter-gatherers. Due to a scarcity of available game, they turned to agriculture. They, too, built pit houses and, later, adobe structures. The latter differed from the Mogollon in that the Anasazi constructed “interconnected rooms accessed by ladders dropped down from roofs” (54).

Around 1200 CE, Athabascan hunter-gatherers migrated to the Southwest from present-day Alaska and British Columbia, learning “pottery making, basket weaving, and the use of the bow and arrow” (54). After the Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi disbanded, this group was free to settle. The Athabascan would later evolve into the Diné (Navajo), the Western Apache, and the Kiowa and Lipan peoples who adapted to the Plains region. By the time the Spanish entered New Mexico looking for one of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold, they found sophisticated societies that had been organized for millennia by the Diné, Pueblo, Apache, Pima, and O’odham tribes. Still, Spanish saw nothing in these tribes that they felt bound to respect. For this reason, the Spanish have the worst reputation of all the colonial powers that settled in the Americas.

When Hernando de Soto entered Florida, he used attack dogs to force Indigenous peoples into slavery. During his search for gold in New Mexico in 1540, Francisco de Coronado arrived with his army in the Zuni village of Hawikuh and ate all of the tribe’s corn and other vegetables and the turkeys they raised. The Zuni, in an effort to rid themselves of Coronado, told him that the Hopi had more gold than they. Coronado followed their advice and went east, past present-day Santa Fe. He went as far as the Plains, where he saw large herds of bison, but there was no gold. He returned to New Mexico.

Although they never discovered the mythical Seven Cities of Gold, the Spanish continued their incursions into the Southwest. In 1600, they made greater efforts to settle permanently. Unable to farm land near the Pueblos, they encroached onto the land of the neighboring tribe. When Franciscan monks arrived, they attempted to convert Indigenous peoples there. Failing to do so, they enslaved the people, forcing them to build missions. Additionally, they destroyed tribal ceremonial objects and banned tribal dances and ceremonies, calling them forms of devil worship.

The introduction of horses to the region significantly changed intertribal relations. By the late 1600s, smaller tribes were repeatedly raided by Apache and Diné (58). The Diné began enslaving the Hopi, and the Hopi enslaved members of other tribes. Attacks on horseback also allowed the tribes to seize livestock, particularly cattle and sheep.

Meanwhile, the Spanish continued their reign of terror. In 1675, the Spanish military and the Franciscans publicly flogged 47 Pueblo ceremonial leaders. This resulted in “the largest and most successful resistance to Spanish rule yet seen” (58). The Pueblo killed men, women, and children, destroyed churches, and smeared feces on religious icons. Ultimately, they succeeded in getting the Spanish to leave the region. The few who survived went down to Juárez to regroup, but it would be another 12 years before they returned to Pueblo land. When they did, they did not deign to assert their superiority over the Southwestern Indigenous tribes.

Many Spaniards remained in the Southwest but never went further north or west than Santa Fe and Tucson. Instead, they went to California. By the mid-1800s, Texas had been annexed, thereby ending Spanish and Mexican control of the Southwest. Tribes, too, formed new alliances. The Pueblos of the Rio Grande and the Hopi aligned themselves with the United States to protect themselves from Northern tribes, especially the Apache and Comanche. In turn, the Pueblo “raided and killed the Diné and stole women and children to sell into slavery” (61). Adding to their suffering, the American government encroached onto Diné land and forced them into unfair treaties. Eventually, the Diné were forced to march to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, 300 miles away from their ancestral lands. Bosque Redondo lacked food resources and was occupied by the Mescalero Apache, adversaries of the Diné. If internecine warfare were not enough, smallpox arrived to kill more tribal members. After five difficult years, the Diné were allowed to return to their homeland.

Though Indigenous peoples experienced cruelty everywhere in the Americas after European conquest, arguably, those in present-day California experienced the most difficult trials. Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo set sail from Navidad, Mexico, rounding the Baja Peninsula and landing on the western coast of North America. He, too, was motivated to find cities filled with gold. Cabrillo had worked for Cortés in Mexico and became wealthy after mining for gold in Honduras and Guatemala. His enrichment was partly due to his ruthlessness. He broke up Indigenous families, forced the men to work in gold mines or to harvest timber for ships, and sold women and children into slavery. Some women were forced to become the concubines of his soldiers.

Around the time that Cabrillo landed in California, historians estimate that more Indigenous people lived in the present-day state than anywhere else in all of the United States combined. There were over 500 distinct tribes who spoke in 300 dialects of 100 languages. The Indigenous people who lived in California had been there for over 1,700 years, subsisting on seafood, game, nuts, berries, and yucca. Tribes there were also expert in basketry and canoe making.

California was named after a mythical island described in a Spanish novel. In the story, the island was populated “by beautiful black women who kept griffins as pets and fed any men who ventured there to them” (64). The beautiful land quickly became an important trade route to the East. By 1565 the Spanish had begun a profitable trade in spices and silk with China. It wasn’t until the late-1700s, however, that the Spanish made a serious effort to colonize California.

The first California settlers faced hardship in the forms of starvation and disease. Scurvy was a common problem, and the California climate was inhospitable to corn crops. Jesuit priests soon settled and brought European livestock, leading to overgrazing (65). Moreover, each mission received one million acres of land. The invasive species they planted overtook native plants. Indigenous peoples began going to the missions—not because they sought to become Christians, but to find refuge from the ecological disaster the Jesuits had wrought, which caused starvation. The Jesuits took advantage of the tribes’ vulnerability and forced them to convert to Christianity. They also conscripted the tribes into labor. The Jesuits were gentler than the Dominicans and Franciscans, who also soon settled the region and brought with them the same practices they had implemented in the Southwest.

When California became a part of Mexico in 1822, the Mexicans maintained the mission system but administered it less efficiently than the Spaniards had. Working conditions for the Indigenous peoples were poor, and disease was rampant. In 1770, around 133,000 Indigenous people lived around missions. By 1832, there were only 14,000. The religious orders sent out soldiers to replenish their labor forces. Mostly women were captured.

Matters worsened for Indigenous Californian tribes after California became an American state in 1847 and, particularly, after gold was found in 1848. After the first wave of mining, a new technology called hydraulic mining, which used high-powered jets to dislodge stones, came into use. After that, miners used dredging, or underwater excavation. After overgrazing and overpopulation, these mining methods damaged the land further, essentially turning it into a wasteland. To open up the land further for mining, the state funded a mission between 1850 and 1860 “to hire militia to hunt down and kill Indians” with the aim of making all tribes extinct (67).

Due to the wetness of the Pacific Northwest, its prehistory is more difficult to trace than in other regions. The earliest known evidence of settlement dates from approximately 8,000 BCE. Farther inland, archaeological evidence from Oregon suggests a strong settlement that may have existed as early as 14,500 BCE, though the region was very likely developed much earlier.

By 500 CE, the tribal cultures of the Pacific Northwest coast were vibrant and produced many crafts. Villages were also well-defended against potential encroachment. By the time Europeans arrived around 1500, there was no agriculture in the region; the tribes were hunter-gatherers. They were also more sedentary than tribes in other regions and thus developed more elaborate villages with “very well developed hierarchical societies” (69). Contrary to popular belief that Indigenous peoples do not believe in private ownership, the tribes in this region also owned fishing, hunting, and berrying rights.

Sir Francis Drake was the first European explorer to reach the Pacific Northwest, landing somewhere between present-day Washington state and Northern California in 1579. Drake named the region New Albion and then left to complete his circumnavigation of the globe. Juan de Fuca was the next explorer to land, in 1592, though no one knows how he discovered the strait that is named after him. By the mid-1700s, Russian explorers may have reached the Russian River, which is 137 miles west of present-day Sacramento. A handful of Russian settlers remained in the area and set up trading posts, but their numbers never expanded.

In the 1780s and early 1790s, however, the Spanish and English expanded their reach in the region. After a brief dispute in 1789, the Spanish seized California, while the British occupied the territory from Oregon to Alaska. Several years later, between 1792 and 1794, George Vancouver navigated and mapped most of the Pacific Northwest from Puget Sound up to what is now British Columbia. Seventy-five years later, white settlers would populate the area more earnestly. Coastal populations suffered due to the spread of diseases, including chlamydia and syphilis, thereby depleting their numbers from around 200,000 in 1774 to fewer than 40,000 a century later.

In 1853, white settlers drew up the plans for what would become the city of Seattle, “at the expense of the Duwamish, who lived there” (72). The timber industry further developed in the region, and after a flurry of treaties were signed between 1840 and 1870, tribal power declined further.

The Great Basin comprises much of what are now Nevada and parts of Utah, Oregon, Idaho, and inland Southern California. Humans have lived in this region for around 10,000 years. The first Indigenous peoples were nomadic and, therefore, did not develop settlements as intricate as those in the Southwest. They lived, instead, in pit houses. They began using the bow and arrow around 500 BCE and, in some areas, grew corn. Like the Southwestern tribes, they dispersed, forming the Shoshone, Ute, Mono, and Northern Paiute tribes, which still exist. Some of these tribes migrated eastward, over the Rocky Mountains, while others joined the Comanche and other Plains tribes.

After a series of treaties with Spain, Great Britain, and Mexico, the Great Basin fell within American control by 1848. Around this time, the first permanent White settlement was founded near Salt Lake in Utah by the Mormons, who had moved west to escape persecution in the Midwest. Utah, however, was not far enough to escape the control of the US government, which became concerned about the Mormons’ expanding theocracy and their practice of polygamy. President James Buchanan sent an army to the state in 1857. Around the same time, a wagon train of well-heeled White settlers, called the Baker-Fancher party, headed west to California from Arkansas. Mormon leader Brigham Young feared that they were somehow connected to President Buchanan’s army, and the Mormons prevented them from moving forward.

On September 7, 1857, Mormon militiamen and Indian agent and militiaman John Lee disguised themselves as Paiute and attacked the Baker-Fancher party by circling their wagons. During the first attack, around seven settlers died. The settlers were then told that the Paiute had agreed to let them go “in the care of the Mormons as long as they left all their cattle and supplies” (78). The settlers agreed to this condition. Once they were led away to supposed safety, the Mormons killed all of the men and, later, the women and children. Children who were considered too young to remember the massacre of the 120 travelers were taken into Mormon families. Meanwhile, the party’s livestock and supplies were sold. Brigham Young later led an investigation into the attack that was sent to the commissioner of Indian affairs, concluding that the Paiute had organized the attack. Later, the government sent its own investigators, but it wasn’t until 1877 that John Lee was charged and faced a firing squad for participating in the massacre.

The Great Plains stretch across 10 states: Wyoming, Texas, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Throughout the region were ample grasslands, buffalo, and numerous Indigenous tribes. Before 1800, around 60 million bison lived in the region. By 1900, there were only 541—not merely in the Plains, which held the largest population of buffalo, but on the entire planet.

In Texas, as in the Southwest, there were three major tribal groups: the Mound Builders of the East, the Mesoamerican cultures in the central-south, and the proto-Pueblan peoples of the western Rio Grande. The Spanish were the first Europeans to travel through the region in the 16th century, and the Gulf Coast was mapped in 1519. Nearly a decade later, Álvar Núñez de Vaca began to explore inland Texas. He noticed that nearly half the Indigenous people he encountered were suffering from stomach ailments that were probably symptoms of influenza. The Spanish would not settle Texas in significant numbers until the late 17th century. Around the same time, horses arrived in the Plains. The tribes in or near the Plains, including the Apache and Pawnee, became staunch fighters and hunters on horseback, but no tribe commanded horses like the Comanche.

The Comanche people originated with the Shoshone “along the North Platte River in Wyoming” and likely “migrated up from Mexico” hundreds of years earlier (80). By 1700, the Comanche settled Oklahoma, New Mexico, and central Texas. With their ample food sources and strong defense capabilities, their numbers grew. By the early 19th century, there were 40,000 Comanche who existed within 30 different groups, “each with their own hierarchy and leaders” (80).

The Comanche were fearless and routinely raided not only other tribes, but also Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers. The empire ended when Quanah Parker, the leader of one of the larger Comanche groups, surrendered in 1875. The Comanche had, by this time, suffered a severe drop in numbers. The 3,000 who remained went to live on reservations in Oklahoma.

Before the 1830s, Oklahoma had been home to numerous tribes, including the Apache, Kiowa, and Osage. It was “Indian territory”—the place where Jefferson intended to relocate the Eastern tribes to get them out of the way. By 1888, over 30 tribes from all over the United States lived in Oklahoma. This adopted homeland was, in some ways, more secure than those that the resettled tribes left behind, though this would not remain the case.

As the Texas cattle industry developed in the 1870s and 1880s, ranchers needed to get their beef to railroads in Kansas, but Indian Territory sat in their way. This complication led to the passage of the 1889 Indian Appropriations Act, which sought to take away tribal land rights and replace it with individual lots of 160 acres. Land left over from the allotment was given away to White homesteaders. The Osage resisted to their benefit. Though they eventually sold their lands and moved to a reservation, they negotiated from a position of strength after they discovered oil under their new soil. They demanded that oil companies pay them directly for access to their land. This ability to negotiate to the benefit of their tribe is a main reason why they remain.

The Indigenous tribes of the Northern Plains include the Crow, Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Plains Ojibwe. The Northern Plains was “one of the last regions of North America to be settled by Europeans” (84). Much of the land was too cold for too long for farming. Thus, major settlement did not occur until after 1850.

The prehistoric Northern Plains tribes were hunter-gatherers who killed mammoth, musk oxen, horses, and camels. When the ice of the last glaciation retreated, they hunted the new species that emerged—elk, deer, antelope, and buffalo. There is little evidence of how they lived, but the tribes that emerged from them—the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—lived in small, family-oriented groups. They resided in teepees and followed the bison.

By the 15th century, tribes along “the southeastern edge of the Plains” turned to farming (85). The Ojibwe and Odawa tribes moved further west and south, due the power they had gained from the fur trade. By the mid-17th century, the Ojibwe had made it into Minnesota. Around this time, the French went further north of the Great Lakes, looking for furs. As part of the trade, the French offered the Indigenous tribes guns, something the British were loath to do.

Plains tribes were diverse and adaptable to European technology, particularly the uses of firearms and horses. It is possible that the reason Plains tribes still exist is that they learned how to fight with these new tools. They were not especially warlike but simply began to fight against European encroachment, particularly when traveling wagon trains headed to California “tore up the ground and disrupted the buffalo” (89).

The US government knew that it lacked the reinforcements to take on tens of thousands of efficient and mounted fighters in the Plains. They instead resorted to treaties to ensure that settlers could pass through Plains territory unharmed. The first was the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which affirmed the tribes’ title to their land and promised $50,000 per year as a toll in exchange for allowing settlers to move through their territory.

Farther west, the Blackfeet had come to power and consolidated their power by fighting with other tribes. This consolidation allowed them to expand their number of horses and to gain more bison. The Blackfeet dominated Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho from 1790 to 1850 and tolerated no encroachment, neither by other Indigenous tribes nor by White settlers. The only foreigners who were welcome were traders who provided them with the goods they needed to maintain their standard of living. However, it was this openness to trade that predicated their doom.

In 1837, the American Fur Company knowingly sent in a band of traders who had contracted smallpox. Around 15,000 Blackfeet died of the virus, which ended their dominance. Though a smallpox vaccine had been available for 40 years, trading companies had not made vaccination a requirement. Vaccines were also never made available to Indigenous tribes. In the end, White travelers crossed the Plains, and settlers moved in, regardless of any previous treaties. War resulted.

Between 1850 and the 1870s, the Plains Indian Wars included nearly every Plains tribe “and involved settlers, militia, and the U.S. Army” (92). During these wars, 20,000 Indigenous peoples died, while 8,000 White settlers and soldiers were killed in battle. The recorded number of Indigenous deaths, kept by the US Army, is likely too low.

Most of the fighting in the Plains Indian Wars began in what is now Minnesota. The lands there had been preserved for the Dakota by treaty, but the government broke its own promise. The tribe watched as White settlers came in and set up farms. The Dakota rose up against them, alongside some Ojibwe allies. The tribe attacked and burned farms, killing hundreds of settlers while driving others away. In 1862, 38 Dakota warriors were executed “in what is still the largest mass hanging in U.S. history” for daring to try to expel illegal White settlers from their homeland (92).

Fearful of what had occurred in Minnesota, White militias in Colorado had begun to shoot Indigenous people on sight. In November 1864, Colonel John Chivington and members of the Colorado and New Mexico militias “attacked a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado” (93). The militiamen were merciless, killing women, children, and the elderly.

Each time Indigenous people fought back against treaty violations, they were met with violence. Red Cloud, an Oglala Lakota war chief, successfully resisted the United States in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming in the mid-19th century. His resistance forced the government to sign the second Treaty of Fort Laramie, which created the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868. The Lakota were also granted hunting rights in unceded territory. This arrangement ceased when gold was discovered in the Black Hills Mountains in 1874. Miners and prospectors were menaces who harassed and murdered Indigenous people, in addition to upsetting their bison herds.

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer destroyed Lakota villages in the winters of 1874 and 1875. In the summer, the US Army conducted a campaign “to round up any and all Indians” who refused to settle on the Great Sioux Reservation (95). On June 25, at dawn, Custer and his soldiers saw a large group of Indigenous people around the Little Bighorn River. Thinking that his soldiers could handle the small bands, he launched an assault, not realizing that there were thousands of warriors nearby prepared for battle. Custer and his men were quickly overwhelmed by the Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, as planned by Sitting Bull and other chiefs. After two days, Custer’s men were wiped out. To retaliate, the US government systematically slaughtered bison herds, thereby starving the tribes into submission. Thus, the reservation period officially began.

By 1890, the frontier was officially closed. Indigenous peoples had lost all of their land and were scattered around the country in small groups. Tribal government was replaced by the paternalistic Office of Indian Affairs. Despite this dismal fate, some Indigenous peoples survived, including the Seminole and the Iroquois. The Great Lakes tribes continued to trap, hunt, and harvest wild rice, as they always had. Those in the Pacific Northwest became loggers and worked in fisheries. In 1890, the US Census Bureau counted “fewer than two hundred thousand Indians left alive, of populations that had likely numbered over twenty million” (96).