AP U.S. History 6.3: Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development

Larger numbers of migrants moved West after the Civil War. Many hoped for self-sufficiency and independence, often in the form of land or a business of their own. They went to rural areas to farm and ranch, and to boomtowns, places that grew almost overnight around a mine or a new rail line.

The railroads needed workers. To build the first transcontinental line, the Union Pacific employed more than 8,000 Irish, German and Italian immigrants, while the Central Pacific's workforce included over 10,000 Chinese laborers. Mining drew others: in 1874 miners seeking gold went with an army expedition into the Black Hills. Farmers came under the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered 160 acres to a settler who lived on the land for five years; the National Archives notes that most homesteaders came from nearby, such as Iowans moving to Nebraska and Minnesotans to South Dakota. Cattle owners and miners were among those who received much of the public land the government handed out.

Sources: Pacific Railway Act (National Archives); Homestead Act (National Archives); Treaty of Fort Laramie (National Archives).

As migrants poured in, competition for land and resources grew among white settlers, American Indians and Mexican Americans, and violent conflict increased.

Railroads crossed American Indians' ancestral lands, and the builders met conflict there. The 1862 Pacific Railway Act had already promised that "The United States shall extinguish as rapidly as may be the Indian titles to all lands falling under the operation of this act." In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Sioux and Arapaho agreed that "they will withdraw all opposition to the construction of the railroads now being built on the Plains."

The same treaty shows what the American bison meant. The tribes kept hunting rights in their older territory, but only "so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase." As the bison population was decimated, that right lost its value, and competition for the land that remained grew sharper.

In the Southwest, Mexican Americans were drawn into the same contest. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war with Mexico, promised to protect the property of Mexican nationals living inside the new borders, but the U.S. Senate struck out Article X, which guaranteed Mexican land grants. When settlers and railroads arrived after the Civil War, Mexican American landholders had no treaty article guaranteeing their grants.

Sources: Pacific Railway Act (National Archives); Treaty of Fort Laramie (National Archives); Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (National Archives).

The Treaty of Fort Laramie opened with a promise: "From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease." It set apart the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills, which are sacred to the Sioux people. Article XII said no cession of reservation land would be valid unless "executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians occupying or interested in the same."

The promise did not hold. In 1874 an army expedition led by George A. Custer entered the Black Hills with miners seeking gold. Once gold was found, miners moved onto Sioux hunting grounds, and the army was ordered against Sioux bands hunting there under their treaty rights. In 1876 Custer's detachment met an encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn River and was destroyed. The United States kept fighting until the government confiscated the Black Hills in 1877. Confiscation is taking without consent, the opposite of the signed cession Article XII required. To this day, the National Archives notes, ownership of the Black Hills remains in legal dispute between the U.S. government and the Sioux Nation.

The Black Hills fit a wider pattern: the government violated treaties, answered resistance with military force, confined American Indians to reservations and denied tribal sovereignty, a nation's right to govern itself.

Source: Treaty of Fort Laramie (National Archives).

Historians call the goal of federal policy from the 1870s through the 1880s assimilation: absorbing American Indians into white American ways of life. Words like civilization and wards show the authors' view that American Indian ways of life should be replaced. In 1885 President Grover Cleveland called American Indians "wards of the Government" whose "education and civilization" should be promoted.

The Dawes Act, approved on February 8, 1887, put assimilation into law. It let the President break up reservation land held in common by a tribe into allotments for individuals, "To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section." Section 6 made citizens of every American Indian "to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act," and of any who lived apart from the tribe and "has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States." Accepting an allotment itself brought citizenship. The National Archives notes that many did not want to take up farming, and American Indian communities lost vast acreage. From 1893, a federal commission's negotiations with the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations led to acts that allotted their common land in exchange for abolishing their tribal governments.

Yet many American Indians preserved their cultures and tribal identities despite these policies, and they attempted to develop self-sustaining economic practices of their own.

Sources: Cleveland's First Inaugural Address (Avalon Project); Dawes Act (National Archives).