Conquest of the West

The system that allotted land with designated boundaries to Native American tribes in the West, beginning in the 1850s and ending with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.

• Borderland

• Reservation system

• Dawes Severalty Act

• 100th Meridian

Massacre of more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, in Colorado by the US Army under the leadership of Colonel John Chivington. The battle was controversial because the Indians had been told to camp in this area and because of the atrocities committed by Chivingon and his men, which included mutilation, scalping, and torture.

• Borderland

• Battle of the Little Bighorn

• Battle of Wounded Knee

• Sand Creek Massacre

A particularly violent example of the warfare between the whites and Native Americans in the late nineteenth century is also known as "Custer's Last Stand". In two days, June 25 and 26, 1876, the combined forces of 2,500 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians defeated and killed more than 250 US soldiers, including Colonel George Custer.

• Borderland

• Battle of the Little Bighorn

• Battle of Wounded Knee

• Sand Creek Massacre

President Ulysses S. Grant's plan to remove corrupt Indian agents and replace them with "pious" agents he believed to be morally superior.

• Reservation system

• Peace Policy

• 100th Meridian

• Borderland

An act that broke up Indian reservations and distributed land to individual households. Leftover land was sold for money to fund US government efforts to "civilize" Native Americans.

• Reservation system

• Peace Policy

• Dawes Severalty Act

• Borderland

A battle between the US Army and the Dakota Sioux, in which two hundred Native Americans and twenty-nine US soldiers died. Tensions erupted violently over the "Ghost Dance", which the US government had outlawed, and the dispute over whether Sioux reservation land would be broken up because of the Dawes Act.

• Borderland

• Battle of the Little Bighorn

• Battle of Wounded Knee

• Sand Creek Massacre

After gold and silver strikes in Colorado, Nevada, and other western territories in the second half of the nineteenth century, fortune-seekers rushed to the West to dig. These metals were essential to the US industrial growth and were sold in world markets.

• Reservation system

• Mining Industry

• 100th Meridian

• Borderland

An imaginary line, running north to south from the Dakotas through west Texas separates two climatological regions. The area to the east has access to more water, while the western region is semiarid.

• Reservation system

• Peace Policy

• 100th Meridian

• Borderland

An area that co-mingles with surrounding regions.

• Reservation system

• Dawes Severalty Act

• 100th Meridian

• Borderland

Author of the famous "frontier thesis" in which he argued that the taming of the West had shaped Americans' characteristic embrace of individualism and democracy.

• Frederick Jackson Turner

• Red Cloud

• Chief Joseph

• John Wesley Powell