HIS125 Wk 2 TheWest

Cassandra Rollins
HIS125: The West
Week 2: Linda Rhoades-Swartz
January 18, 2015

1. How did the western settlement, particularly in terms with railroad expansion and farming, lead to inevitable conflict with the Native Americans? Highlight at least one engagement in your answer.
In 1862, the passing of the Homestead Act awarded 160 acres to settlers who engaged the land for at minimum five years. This indication to the making of above 300,000 ranches built, and where ultimately two million society arose to live. The country’s rising rail system offered additional, improved, and inexpensive networks to the markets of the East. Moving possessions western was one of the main reasons for railroad expansion. The migration west sparked conflict with Indians. The Indians were focus to discrimination and being told what is best for them without regard to what they wanted. Throughout the second half of the 1800s there was a string of small wars between white Americans and Indians. The Sand Creek Battle was one of the worst. The “Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians clashed with white settlers who have been drawn to Colorado by the 1859 Pike’s Peak gold rush” (Schultz, 2012). Next, the white settlers wanted the extermination of the Indians. A few Chiefs wanted peace. During a round of negotiations, one group of Indians was told that they would be safe until the end of negotiations. The Colorado militiamen attacked sleeping Indians more than 200 Cheyenne lay dead at the end of the day. Once news of the massacre spread violence escalated between white settlers and Indians tribes.

2. Describe President Grant’s Peace Policy and the subsequent widespread adaptation of the reservation as a solution to dealing with the Native Americans in the western territories. What was life like on a reservation in, say, 1890?
The “Peace Policy” of the Grant administration was one phase of a Protestant Crusade which reached a climax with the passage of legislation looking to the solution of the American Indian problem in the west. It was establish through Protestant influence in order to clear the Great Plains for white settlement and to undertake Indian assimilation in a period when opinion was against legislative reform favoring the Indian. The men who sought government adoption of the policy were aware of the enormity of the task. Their plan was practical. Contrary to the accepted view, the “Peace Policy” in American Indian affairs was not “a product of confusion regarding the proper course to pursue” but an intelligent attempt, in view of adverse circumstances, to deal with complex problems that were associated with the settlement of the western frontier of America.
Sentimental among white settlers was prejudice against Indians belonging to the “Wild Tribes” of the plains leaving no room for acceptance of a plan to incorporate them within American society. Whatever his merits, the Indian was looked upon as a nuisance in the white community. With such a view in the West and with the people in the East largely unconcerned, Congress was neither disposed to appropriate the funds necessary to teach reservation Indians the “white man’s way” nor to consider the question of developing a new policy.