The Destruction of Tribal Life 441In 1879 an army officer founded the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania to “civilize” young Indians. These photographs are “before” and “after”
renderings of three Lakota boys. No longer do they sit on the floor.
hunters; even the shameful practice of gunning down
the beasts directly from the cars was allowed.
The discovery in 1871 of a way to make commer-
cial use of buffalo hides completed the tragedy. In the
next three years about 9 million head were killed;
after another decade the animals were almost extinct.
No more efficient way could have been found for
destroying the Plains Indians. The disappearance of
the bison left them starving and homeless.
By 1887 the tribes of the mountains and deserts
beyond the plains had also given up the fight. Typical
of the heartlessness of the government’s treatment of
these peoples was that afforded the Nez Percé of
Oregon and Idaho, who were led by the remarkable
Chief Joseph. After outwitting federal troops in a
campaign across more than a thousand miles of rough
country, Joseph finally surrendered in October 1877.
The Nez Percé were then settled on “the malarial
bottoms of the Indian Territory” in far-off
Oklahoma. When Geronimo, leader of the Apache
Indians of the Southwest, was captured in 1886, the
Apache gave up, too.
By the 1880s, the advance of whites into the
plains had become, in the words of one congress-
man, as irresistible “as that of Sherman’s to the
sea.” Greed for land lay behind the pressure, but
large numbers of disinterested people, including
most of those who deplored the way the Indians
had been treated in the past, believed that the only
practical way to solve the “Indian problem” was to
persuade the Indians to abandon their tribal culture
and live on family farms. The “wild” Indian must
be changed into a “civilized” member of
“American” society.
To accomplish this goal Congress passed the
Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Tribal lands were to
be split up into individual allotments. To keep specu-
lators from wresting the allotments from the Indians
while they were adjusting to their new way of life, the
land could not be disposed of for twenty-five years.
Funds were to be appropriated for educating and
training the Indians, and those who accepted allot-
ments—took up residence “separate from any tribe,”
and “adopted the habits of civilized life”—were to be
granted U.S. citizenship.
The sponsors of the Severalty Act thought they
were effecting a fine humanitarian reform. “We must
throw some protection over [the Indian],” Senator
Henry L. Dawes declared. “We must hold up his
hand.” But no one expected all the Indians to accept
allotments at once, and for some years little pressure was
put on any to do so. The law was a statement of policy
rather than a set of specific rules and orders. “Too great
haste...should be avoided,” Indian Commissioner