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Native American Treatment
In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. She was among the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and Indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life. -
The Gnadenhutten Massacre
In 1782, a group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets. Ironically, the Delawares were the first Native Americans to capture a white settler. -
Westward expansion: economic development
Land, mining, and improved transportation by rail brought settlers to the American West during the Gilded Age. New agricultural machinery allowed farmers to increase crop yields with less labor, but falling prices and rising expenses left them in debt.
Farmers began to organize in local and regional cooperatives like the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance to promote their interests. -
Indian reservation system
The Indian reservation system was created to keep Native Americans off of lands that European Americans wished to settle. The reservation system allowed indigenous people to govern themselves and to maintain some of their cultural and social traditions. -
Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act authorized a series of migrations that became known as the Trail of Tears. This was devastating to Native Americans, their culture, and their way of life. -
Sioux Treaty of 1868
In the 19th century the American drive for expansion clashed violently with the Native American resolve to preserve their lands, sovereignty, and ways of life. The struggle over land has defined relations between the U.S. government and Native Americans and is well documented in the holdings of the National Archives. In 1865 a congressional committee began a study of the Indian uprisings and wars in the West, resulting in a Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes. -
The Indian Wars and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
The Indian Wars were a protracted series of conflicts between Native American Indians and white settlers over land and natural resources in the West. Many of these battles resulted from Indian resistance to the imposition of the reservation system and the repeated attempts of the US Army and white settlers to forcibly remove Native Americans from their tribal lands. -
Dawes Act of 1887
authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens. The objective of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream US society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions. As a result of the Dawes Act, over ninety million acres of tribal land were stripped from Native Americans and sold to non-natives. -
The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him in the guise of a Native American and had revealed to him a bountiful land of love and peace, Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world. -
Chinese immigrants and Mexican Americans in the age of westward expansion
In the nineteenth century, Mexican American, Chinese, and white populations of the United States collided as white people moved farther west in search of land and riches. Neither Chinese immigrants nor Mexican Americans could withstand the assault on their rights by the tide of white settlers. Ultimately, both ethnic groups retreated into urban enclaves, where their language and traditions could survive.