Introduction to the Conflicts with Western Tribes (1864–1890)

Native Americans traversed the vast American continent for thousands of years before Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the early 1500s. Three hundred years later, European Americans began what some historians call a “conquest” of those Indian lands. The westward expansion that took place between 1800 and 1900 was devastating to the Indians. The growing American capitalist economy, the Industrial Revolution, and the dramatic influx of European and Chinese immigrants effectively destroyed the Native American culture and way of life. During westward expansion, clashes over land rights caused the majority of battles that made up the Indian Wars. For fifty years, the U.S. military fought Native Americans, signed and broke treaties with them, and eventually subjugated them completed. By 1890, the last “free” Indians were rounded up and forced to live on reservations.

With the American Industrial revolution came dramatic urbanization in the eastern states, an influx of European and Chinese immigrants to both coasts, and rapid exploitation of the entire country's natural resources. Farmers and immigrants looking for a way to escape the surge in technology and wage labor in the east settled the uncharted western frontier with the help of the Homestead Act of 1862. Following the homesteaders were prospectors hungry for gold. Moving further west, these prospectors invaded Indian lands looking for routes to gold-laden hills, which were also located on or near Indian lands that were supposedly protected by treaties. The construction of the first transcontinental railroad brought further feuds between whites and Indians. The first waves of violence against immigrants came soon after. Chinese immigrants made up a majority of the laborers hired by the Central Pacific Railroad, and their willingness to work for paltry wages angered many white Americans anxious about the competition. Racist violence against the Chinese led to riots and the lynching of hundreds of these Asian immigrants in the 1880s.

The American cultural landscape changed almost overnight—immigrants from all over the world flooded the country's shores. The once-rural nation became an urban one, and mechanization created huge corporations and a new class of wage laborers that shifted the economy away from small farms and businesses. The get-rich-quick climate inspired political scandals, fraudulent business practices, and widespread layoffs. Goods were produced abundantly—and cheaply—so Americans became consumers for the first time. Despite the country's growth, city dwellers and farmers began to feel the pinch of unfair corporate business practices. The discrepancy inspired the formation of the most powerful third political party in the nation's history: the People's Party. The populists changed American politics forever.

On the international stage, the colonization of Asia and Africa, especially Africa, led to countless wars and land grabbing. British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese colonists, motivated by greed and a paternalistic belief in the superiority of white Europeans, displaced or ruled indigenous Asian and African populations simply by claiming sovereignty over them. This led to the destruction of native cultural traditions, the weakening of family ties, and the enforcement of alien systems of economy and law. Expansion, it seemed, was not limited to the American West.