The Consequences of the Gilded Age

The Consequences of the Gilded Age The Gilded Age is the period in United States history between the 1870’s and 1900’s. The term “Gilded Age” was first written by Mark Twain. This era was called the Gilded Age because although life in the United States looked abundant with prosperity and hope, underneath the surface there were actually lots of poverty and corruption. One of the new characteristics the Gilded Age brought to America were new policies dealing with Native Americans. There was a great change in the way the government dealt with the Indians during the time of the Gilded Age opposed to before hand, mostly due to a massive western migration of United States settlers and a need to domesticate the Native American tribes in an attempt to “Americanize” them more. Before the Gilded Age there was a great deal of violence and head butting between the Native Americans and the new Americans settling on their lands. Native American policy was not very compassionate and they were viewed as a savage and unfriendly group. There for the government seldom tried to make treaties with the Indians and when they did they were not fair and it was apparent that the Native Americans would be dominated and taken advantage of some way or another. This includes many occurrences such as the Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act. Although government policy before the Gilded Age was harsh it ended up becoming worse.
During the Gilded Age, Americans needed to branch out and explore new areas of the country in hopes of finding new departments for prosperity since many jobs and successful paths were becoming hard to acquire with the massive rates of immigration. Now that there were railroads, which allowed more and more Americans to travel from the east to the west, there were many new settlers and new land would need to be acquired. The main problem with this was the fact that many Native American tribes presided in those areas since they had been forcibly relocated there