At the end of the civil war the god-fearing Christian whites believed that god had told them to spread the freedom and democracy of the United States westward into North America. This was the manifest destiny. Whites everywhere were willing to fight for the land and for god. The fact that the Native Americans were not very good long-term fighters, made the natives weak, also the whites had just been in a long term wars so they had many physically powerful men. This proves that the manifest destiny and the end of the civil war were one of the reasons as to why the Native Americans lost the Plains wars.
Another factor that is to be considered is that the Whites and the Native Americans both had different attitudes to land. The Native Americans believed that land could not be owned, and looked at it as a life source, while the Whites though the private ownership of land was extremely important. This made the Native Americans more likely to lose because, if a white settler came and lived on some land, the white would think e owned the land, while the Native Americans wouldn’t mind because they thought that the land couldn’t owned by the Whites. This scenario would not have been a problem, but if the amount of whites increased, the Native Americans would eventually have no space for their living. The Native Americans didn’t notice this, and the population