The Conquest of the WestThe Conquest of the West 16

CONTENTS

■InThe Picture Writer’s Story(1884), George de Forest Brush shows an older

Mandan Indian documenting the story of a battle. The futility of the struggle is

reflected in the young Indian’s disinterested face.

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annually, a windfall for the tiny Mashantucket Pequot

tribe. But the Little Big Horn Casino, located in southeast-

ern Montana near the battlefield where Custer lost his

scalp, yielded a profit of only $100 a month during its first

year of operation. Half of all reservation Indians live in

Montana, Nevada, North and South Dakota, and

Oklahoma, far from potential throngs of gamblers; those

Indians remain mired in poverty.

The plight of most Indians today was determined

by events that transformed the West after 1865.

Ranchers and farmers acquired more Indian land.

Railroad construction destabilized the habitat that sus-

tained Indian life, especially the grazing lands of the

buffalo, and brought still more settlers. The discovery of

new deposits of gold, silver, and other valuable miner-

als caused miners and prospectors to swarm over and

onto Indian lands. The federal government pushed

Indians onto reservations, often on land unsuitable for

cultivation, and sent troops to harass those who refused

to abandon nomadic life. The new civilization that

emerged in the West—initially the work of individual

farmers, prospectors, ranchers, and businessmen—was

increasingly controlled and organized by large-scale

business enterprises.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the economic

foundations of tribal life had been destroyed; relief,

when it finally arrived many decades later, came in the

form of slot machines. That so many Native Americans

■The West After the Civil War

■The Plains Indians

■Indian Wars

■The Destruction of Tribal Life

■The Lure of Gold and Silver in

the West

■Farmers Struggle to Keep Up

■Big Business and the Land

Bonanza

■Western Railroad Building

■The Cattle Kingdom

■Open-Range Ranching

■Barbed-Wire Warfare

■Debating the Past:

Did the Frontier Promote

Individualism and Democracy?

■American Lives:

Nat Love

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