Military campaigns were only one means
used to destroy traditional Plains Indian society.
The railroads joining East and West disturbed the
migrations of buffalo herds, thus threatening the
animals on which Plains Indians relied for every
necessity—from food to building materials to fuel.
The buffalo’s doom was further sealed when eastern
tanneries began to make leather from their hides in
the 1870s. To cash in on the demand for this new
product, white hunters flocked to the West and lit-
tered the Plains with bloody carcasses. Recognizing
that Plains Indian culture could not exist without
the buffalo, the military encouraged this mass kill-
ing, which in a matter of decades resulted in the
near extinction of the once-great herds.
The ways of western Indians were under siege
also by reformers, who hoped to see the Indians
assimilated into mainstream, non-Indian society.
Calling themselves the “Friends of the Indians,”
they mounted missionary efforts to convert Indi-
ans to Christianity and supported legislation that
would help transform Indian hunters into settled
farmers. One of the Assimilationists’ most effective
tools were Indian boarding schools. These institu-
tions separated Indian children from traditional
communities, then indoctrinated them in non-In-
dian customs. The value of this education was not
always clear. Rather than assimilating into white
society, many boarding-school students upon grad-
uation found themselves adrift, alienated from both
the Indian and non-Indian worlds.
Even more devastating to Indian society was
the Friends of the Indian’s trumpeting of the Allot-
ment policy. As the government whittled away at
reservation lands, these reformers rightly feared that
Indians were in danger of losing the small portions
of their ancestral lands they still retained. Allot-
ment supporters believed that the best means of
protecting Indian lands was to divide reservations
into small plots known as allotments. These tracts
would be held as private property and thus would
be legally protected from white encroachment. Inpart through reformers’ lobbying efforts, the U.S.
Congress passed the General Allotment Act of
1887, which provided for the large-scale allotment
of Indian lands, as well as the sale of “surplus land”
left over after all qualified allottees received their
tracts. The policy ultimately had the opposite effect
from what its most benevolent supporters had envi-
sioned: In a matter of decades, nearly 100 million
acres of Indian land would pass into non-Indian
hands as a direct result of Allotment.
Amid the many assaults on their traditional
ways, reservation Indians in the late 19th century
increasing looked to new religions for comfort.
The messages preached by Indian prophets such as
Wodziwob, Nakaidoklini, and John Slocum varied
in their particulars, but all promised adherents a
return to the traditional world Indians had known
before the arrival of non-Indians in their lands.
The most influential of these visionaries was
the Northern Paiute (Numu) Wovoka. He told fol-
lowers that if they lived in peace with whites and
danced the Paiute’s traditional Round Dance, their
dead ancestors would come back to life. Wovoka’s
message spread quickly from his people to tribes of
the Plains. Their version of his teachings, which be-
came known as the Ghost Dance, prophesied that
non-Indians would die as their ancestors were re-
vived. To demoralized reservation populations, the
appeal of the Ghost Dance was obvious. For reasons
just as clear, it also greatly unnerved their non-In-
dian neighbors.
However understandable, white panic over the
Ghost Dance led to tragedy. Army troops sent to
subdue the “rebelling” Indians set upon a group
of Ghost Dancers preparing to settle near the Pine
Ridge Agency to show their desire to keep the
peace. In the ensuing melee, more than 300 Lakota
women, men, and children were slaughtered. Often
cited as the end of Indian resistance in the West,
the massacre at Wounded Knee created a wound in
Indian and white relations that more than a century
later has yet to heal fully.1866 to 1890