Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the federal government broke treaties with American Indians, met resistance with military force, and confined American Indians to reservations between Sand Creek in 1864 and Wounded Knee in 1890.
• Explain how the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School together pursued the cultural assimilation of Native peoples, and identify the limits of that project.
• Describe how Mexican Americans in the Southwest experienced land loss, legal discrimination, and labor displacement after the Mexican-American War, and how that pattern intensified during Period 6.
• Explain why the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 became the first major federal statute to restrict immigration on the basis of race, and place that decision inside the broader history of federal immigration policy.
• Use Skill 3.C (Sourcing and Situation) to read at least one primary source on Native dispossession or assimilation in the historical situation that produced it.
• Account for the cultural persistence of Native nations and the rise of the dime-novel frontier mythology that retold the entire process for an Anglo audience.

The economic story of the trans-Mississippi West that Lesson 2 told (rails, mines, federal land grants, and a settler land rush) had a social and cultural cost that the College Board CED organizes under four points of KC-6.2.II. As migrant populations grew and the American bison population was decimated, competition for land and resources among white settlers, American Indians, and Mexican Americans produced rising violent conflict (KC-6.2.II.C). The U.S. government broke treaties with American Indians, met resistance with military force, and eventually confined American Indians to reservations and denied tribal sovereignty (KC-6.2.II.D). Many American Indians preserved their cultures and tribal identities despite government policies promoting assimilation, and they tried to develop self-sustaining economic practices (KC-6.2.II.E). And inside the same federalized West, smaller migrant streams (Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Chinese workers in California, and Mormon settlers in Utah) lived under the same pattern of land pressure, legal restriction, and cultural conflict that defined the period.

The Plains Wars open with the Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864. A Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on Sand Creek that had been promised federal protection, killed roughly 150 people (most of them women and children), and mutilated the bodies. A subsequent congressional investigation condemned the massacre, but the federal pattern was set: peace councils alternated with surprise attacks on settled camps, and the U.S. Army treated noncombatants as legitimate military targets. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 closed the first phase of the wars by recognizing the Great Sioux Reservation across western South Dakota, including the Black Hills, as permanently held by the Lakota and their allies. Within six years, an Army expedition under George Custer confirmed gold in the Black Hills, miners poured in, the federal government attempted to buy the Hills, and when the Lakota refused, the Army opened the war that ended at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, where a combined Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho force destroyed Custer's Seventh Cavalry detachment. The federal response was not negotiation but a punitive winter campaign that pushed the Lakota onto smaller reservations and seized the Black Hills outright (KC-6.2.II.D).

The wars closed at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890. The Pine Ridge agency had been militarized in response to the Ghost Dance revival, a millenarian movement that promised the return of the bison and the disappearance of the white settler. Units of the Seventh Cavalry, the same regiment that had been destroyed at the Little Bighorn fourteen years earlier, surrounded a Lakota Ghost Dance encampment under Spotted Elk and opened fire when a deaf elder refused to surrender his rifle. Roughly 250 to 300 Lakota men, women, and children were killed; the National Park Service estimates that more than half were noncombatants. After Wounded Knee, the federal record shows no further large-scale armed Native resistance against the U.S. Army on the Plains. Historians and the NPS treat December 29, 1890 as the conventional endpoint of the Indian Wars (KC-6.2.II.D).

The closing of the Plains Wars handed the federal Indian project off to the assimilation phase. The reservation system that the wars had imposed became the administrative platform on which the Bureau of Indian Affairs ran a long campaign to remake Native peoples in an Anglo-American mold. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, sponsored by Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, ended the federal practice of dealing with American Indian nations as collective sovereigns and replaced it with allotment. The president was authorized to break tribal landholdings into 160-acre family parcels; the remainder was declared surplus and sold to white settlers; allottees who accepted parcels and adopted Anglo-American habits were promised eventual citizenship. Senator Dawes and his allies framed the policy as humanitarian reform that would protect Native peoples by making them small farmers; in practice, allotment was the most effective land-transfer mechanism in the federal Indian arsenal. Between 1887 and 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act reversed the policy, American Indian landholdings collapsed from roughly 138 million acres to about 48 million. Two thirds of the surviving estate of Indian Country was transferred to white owners under the banner of assimilation (KC-6.2.II.D).

The cultural arm of the assimilation campaign ran through the boarding schools. The flagship was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania by U.S. Army captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt's stated philosophy, expressed in an 1892 speech to a national reform conference, was to "kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Children as young as five were removed from reservation families, transported by rail to Carlisle, given Anglo names and military uniforms, forbidden to speak their languages, and placed on a half-academic, half-industrial schedule. The Carlisle model spread to a federal network that eventually enrolled tens of thousands of Native children. The schools produced a generation of Native graduates who used Carlisle's Anglo-American literacy to defend tribal sovereignty in court and in print, but the policy also produced documented physical and cultural harm that the federal government did not formally acknowledge until the twenty-first century. Many American Indians preserved their cultures and tribal identities despite these government policies promoting assimilation (KC-6.2.II.E). The Ghost Dance, the ceremonial economy of the Plateau and Southwest peoples, the survival of tribal languages, and the political organization that produced the Society of American Indians in 1911 all date from this period.

Inside the same federalized West, three other migrant communities lived under the same pattern of land pressure, legal restriction, and cultural conflict. The first was the Mexican American Southwest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 had promised that the roughly 100,000 Mexican citizens who became U.S. residents at the close of the Mexican-American War would keep their property rights and the use of Spanish in courts and schools. In practice, the federal land courts that opened in California, New Mexico, and Arizona during Period 6 demanded documentary title in formats that the Spanish and Mexican land grant system had never used. By 1900, roughly four fifths of the Mexican land grants in California had been transferred to Anglo owners, and a smaller but still substantial share had been transferred in New Mexico and Arizona. Mexican American workers became a low-wage labor force on the railroads, in the copper mines of Arizona, and on the cattle ranches of south Texas, working under a dual-wage system that paid them less than Anglo workers for the same labor. Lynching of Mexican Americans in Texas, California, and Arizona during the 1870s and 1880s ran at rates per capita comparable to the lynching of African Americans in the South, a record that recent scholarship at the University of Texas and the Library of Congress has begun to document (KC-6.2.II.C).

The second was the Chinese American experience in California. Chinese workers had arrived in the Sierra Nevada gold camps in the early 1850s and built the western half of the transcontinental railroad between 1865 and 1869, working under Charles Crocker for the Central Pacific. By the 1870s, roughly one in ten California residents was Chinese, and an Anglo labor movement led by Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party of California built its political program around the slogan "the Chinese must go." The 1875 Page Act effectively barred Chinese women from entering the country; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 then suspended the entry of Chinese laborers entirely. Chinese exclusion was the first major federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of race or national origin, and it set the precedent for the racialized immigration regime that would govern federal policy until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. The Supreme Court upheld the law in Chae Chan Ping v. United States in 1889 by inventing the federal "plenary power" doctrine over immigration. Existing Chinese American communities, concentrated in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the smaller Pacific port cities, survived through family-association networks, the laundry and restaurant trades, and a series of federal court challenges that culminated in Wong Kim Ark in 1898, which secured birthright citizenship for the children of Chinese immigrants (KC-6.2.II.C, KC-6.2.II.E).

The third was the Mormon experience in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had migrated under Brigham Young to the Great Basin in 1847 and built an autonomous theocratic settlement in the Salt Lake Valley before the Mexican Cession. During Period 6, the federal government pursued a long campaign to break Mormon political autonomy and to suppress the practice of plural marriage. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 had criminalized polygamy in U.S. territories; the Edmunds Act of 1882 disenfranchised polygamists; the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church corporation, seized its property, and disenfranchised all Utah women. The church's Manifesto of 1890 abandoned the public practice of plural marriage, and Utah was admitted to the Union in 1896 only after the federal government had secured a state constitution that banned polygamy in perpetuity. The Mormon case shows the federal government applying the same tools (military occupation, land confiscation, and cultural restriction) that it had used against the Plains nations to a different community inside the same federal West (KC-6.2.II.B).

The cultural product of the entire process was the frontier mythology that Anglo America told itself about the West it had just built. Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, which toured the United States and Europe between 1883 and 1913, staged the Plains Wars as a form of patriotic entertainment, hiring Sioux veterans of the Little Bighorn (including, briefly, Sitting Bull) to play themselves in scripted reenactments of cavalry charges and stagecoach robberies. The dime novels of Beadle and Adams, Erastus Beadle's New York firm that began publishing in 1860 and reached peak distribution in the 1880s, sold millions of pamphlet westerns at ten cents apiece. The novels invented the gunslinger, the cattle drive, and the lone Anglo hero, and they fixed the iconography that Hollywood would inherit in the twentieth century. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier address of 1893 (treated in Lesson 1) gave the same mythology its academic respectability. The cultural story matters for the AP exam because it is the version of Period 6 that most Americans inherited, and contextualizing it against the documentary record is one of the central analytical tasks the CED asks students to perform.

The five excerpts below are drawn from the canonical Topic 6.3 source set. Each one anchors a different point on the arc from the Plains Wars through the assimilation campaign to the cultural persistence that survived it.

1. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 to the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. At which step in the chain do you think a different federal choice could have produced a different outcome, and on what evidence?
2. (Sourcing and Situation) Compare Chief Joseph's surrender speech of 1877 with Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor of 1881. Both texts were addressed to an Anglo audience back east. How does the situation of each author shape the argument the source makes, and which source does more analytical work for a student writing a DBQ on federal Indian policy?
3. (Continuity and Change) The Dawes Act of 1887 was framed by its sponsors as humanitarian reform and operated in practice as a land-transfer mechanism. Identify two continuities between the federal land policy of the 1840s removal era and the federal allotment policy of the 1880s, and one significant shift. Account for which set is more historically consequential.
4. (Comparison) The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the federal campaign against Mormon plural marriage in Utah, and the Dawes Act of 1887 all date from the same five-year window. Compare two of the three policies. What does the comparison reveal about how the federal government in the 1880s used immigration restriction, family law, and land allotment to define the limits of full inclusion in the American republic?
5. (Causation) Account for the rise of the dime-novel and Wild West Show frontier mythology in the 1880s and 1890s. How did the cultural production of the period reshape the way Anglo Americans understood the events that the documentary record describes, and what does that gap reveal about the politics of historical memory?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.