An exhausted Indian sits slumped forward from the
waist atop his horse, the animal itself so weak that
its legs are buckling beneath the weight of its bur-
den. Cast in bronze, this allegorical figure achieved
international renown as The End of the Trail (1915),
a sculpture by James Earle Fraser. Its meaning was
obvious: The Indian, once noble, had become a
dying breed who would soon disappear forever.
Fraiser’s warrior was only one of many popu-
lar images that predicted, and even celebrated, the
demise of Indian peoples in the early 20th century.
From the photographs of Edward Curtis to the nov-
els of Zane Grey, Indians were said to be a “vanishing
race.” As Grey wrote in The Vanishing American
(1925), “[The Indian’s] deeds are done. His glory
and dream are gone. His sun has set.” For most
Americans, an even more constant reminder of the
Indian’s eminent death was the Indian-head nickel,
issued in 1913. Designed by Fraiser, it depicted an
Indian man’s profile on one side and a buffalo on the
other—a none-too-subtle suggestion that the Indian,
like the buffalo, was doomed to become a casualty of
the United States’s expansion westward.
As the prevalence of this imagery implies, the
notion of the vanishing Indian was embraced by
many non-Indians. It not only confirmed that the
bloody and costly Indian Wars of the 19th century
had in fact been won, but it promised that the vic-
tors need not worry over what to do about their
defeated enemy. Centuries of bloodshed, disease,
and forced assimilation had at last solved what pol-
icy makers had once called the Indian Problem.
The ultimate death of the Indian indeed
seemed so certain that non-Indians could now af-
ford to romanticize the peoples and cultures that
they had long worked to destroy. Not surprisingly,
the myth of the vanishing Indian blossomed simul-
taneously with the birth of the western film, the Boy
Scouts’ Indian merit badge, and a tourist industry
that touted the remaining Indians in the West as an
attraction for eastern vacationers.
There was, however, one obvious problem with
the idea of the vanishing Indians: Indians were still
very much alive. They had not become extinct; they
had merely become easy to ignore. Owing largely
to the federal Indian policies of the 19th century,
by 1890 the Indian population of the United States
had dropped to less than 250,000, an all-time low.
Most lived in dire poverty, and many were land-
less. The immediate culprit of their misery was the
policy of allotting tribally owned lands as individual
plots to be held as private property. Lauded by some
The Dispossession Years
1891 TO 1933
