P
1893The U.S. government forces an allotment
agreement on the Quechan.
In negotiations with U.S. government representa-
tives, the Quechan Indians of southern Arizona are
compelled to cede much of the most fertile land
along the Colorado River to the United States.
Some of the signatures on the cession agreement
are coerced; others are forged. According to the
document’s terms, the Quechan consent to take al-
lotments and allow the government to sell “surplus”
lands to whites. In exchange, the U.S. government
agrees to irrigate the Indians’ lands, but the prom-
ised irrigation system will never be built.
The Navajo (Dineh) agent compels Indian
children to attend school.
Under the supervision of the Presbyterian Church,
the Fort Defiance Boarding School is established for
Navajo (Dineh) students. When few Navajo families
allow their children to attend, Indian agent Dana
Shipley tries to round up students and force them to
go to school. Furious at Shipley, a headman named
Black Horse and his followers confront the agent at
the Round Rock Trading Post. They drag him from
the building and beat him nearly to death before
Navajo policemen are able to stop the assault.
March 3
Congress appoints the Dawes Commission.
Pressured by the flood of non-Indians into Oklahoma
Territory (see entry for MAY 1890), the U.S. govern-
ment seeks to open the neighboring Indian Territory
to white settlement by allotting the reservations of
the Five Civilized Tribes. Toward this end, Congress
forms the Dawes Commission, headed by Henry
Dawes, a former senator and the sponsor of the Gen-
eral Allotment Act (see entry for FEBRUARY 8, 1887).
The commission is charged with evaluating the situ-
ation in Indian Territory and negotiating allotment
agreements with Indian leaders. The Dawes Com-
mission will be authorized to survey tribal lands in
1895 and to prepare rolls of tribal members in 1896.
“We ask every lover of justice,
is it right that a great and pow-
erful government, year by year,
continue to demand cessions of
land from weaker and depen-
dent people.... We have lived
with our people all our lives
and believe that we know more
about them than any Com-
mission, however good and
intelligent, could know from a
few visits.... [The commission-
ers] care nothing for the fate
of the Indian, so that their own
greed can be gratified.”
—Choctaw and Chickasaw
leaders protesting the work
of the Dawes Commission in an
1895 letter to the president
and the SenateJulyHistorian Frederick Jackson Turner presents
his thesis of the “frontier.”
As part of the World’s Congress of Historians and
Historical Students at the Columbian Exposition
in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian
at the University of Wisconsin, delivers a speech
about the American frontier. He receives little re-
sponse until the lecture is published later in the
year as “The Significance of the Frontier in Ameri-
can History.”
The essay cites American democracy as a direct
outgrowth of the “existence of an area of free land,
its continuous recession, and the advancement of
American settlement westward.” In Turner’s eyes,
the frontier is “the meeting point between sav-
agery and civilization,” with Indians on one side