142 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
and industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie,
and J. P. Morgan used these laws to amass wealth in the East, Le
land Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles
Crocker in the West grew rich from building railroads with eastern
capital on land granted by the US government.18
Indigenous nations, as well as Hispanos, resisted the arrival of
railroads crisscrossing their farms, hunting grounds, and homelands,
bringing settlers, cattle, barbed wire fencing, and mercenary buffalo
hunters in their wake. In what proved a prelude to the genocidal
decades to follow, the Andrew Johnson administration in 1867-68
sent army and diplomatic representatives to negotiate peace treaties
with dozens of Indigenous nations. The 371 treaties between Indig
enous nations and the United States were all promulgated during the
first century of US existence.19 Congress halted formal treaty mak
ing in 1871, attaching a rider to the Indian Appropriation Act of that
year stipulating "that hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the
territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized
as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United
States may contract by treaty. Provided, further, that nothing herein
contained shall be construed to invalidate or impair the obligation
of any treaty heretofore lawfully made and ratified with any such
Indian nation or tribe."2 0 This measure meant that Congress and
the president could now make laws affecting an Indigenous nation
with or without negotiations or consent. Nevertheless, the provision
reaffirmed the sovereign legal status of those Indigenous nations
that had treaties. During the period of US-Indigenous treaty mak
ing, approximately two million square miles of land passed from
Indigenous nations to the United States, some of it through treaty
agreements and some through breach of standing treaties.
In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and com
pliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy
the basic economic base of the Plains Nations-the buffalo. The
buffalo were killed to near extinction, tens of millions dead within a
few decades and only a few hundred left by the 'r88os. Commercial
hunters wanted only the skins, so left the rest of the animal to rot.
Bones would be gathered and shipped to the East for various uses.
Mainly it was the army that helped realize slaughter of the herds.^21