the contested plains book review Essay

The history of the Plains Indians and the American West is very interesting. The book Our Hearts Fell to the Ground by Colin G. Calloway really goes in depth on how life was for the Native American people, as well as the progression of the American West. I really felt that the book was a good source of information on the lives of the Native Americans and had an excellent outlook on how they lived their everyday lives. This book possesses many illustrations and documents that have their advantages and disadvantages. It also touches on the subject of how White soldiers really took over the Native American land and why this time was considered “a world in flux.”

“The Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand and, by the Indians involved, as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, was an armed engagement between combined forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which occurred on June 25 and 26, 1876 near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana Territory, was the most famous action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.”i Was this battle led by a courageous General or a desperate man is search of being seen as an American hero by the eyes of America?

Faragher, John Mack. Re-reading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

McDonough, James L. War In Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994

The conflict that occurred between the U.S. Government and the Native American Indian tribes, known as the Great Sioux War. It was a lengthy, disjointed struggle between the U.S. Army and the allied tribes of the Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians that occurred in the span of fifteen months between, March 1876 and May 18771. Hostilities between the U.S. Government and the Native American Indian tribes grew due to the movement of settlers on the land promised to them. The Northern Plains, which consist of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana, is where the majority of the war took place. The most prominent battle of this war was the Battle of Little Big Horn, due to the amount of casualties taken by the U.S. 7TH Cavalry led

One extreme change for the Indians was the arrival of Anglo-Europeans. Native peoples’ lives were changed at the blink of an eye while new ideas, practices and beliefs were shown to them. The arrival of the Europeans changed the way the Indians viewed their world and manipulated their resources. This new change could be viewed as positive as well as negative, for while some tribes entered into trade relations with the Anglos, others were used as slave labor and all were subject to disease brought on by the European newcomers. However, despite all the advantages and disadvantages, no other introduction changed the lives of the Indians more than firearms and horses. West outlines one of the most important evolutions for Native life and how it represented a new way to harness resources and gain power. In just a few chapters, we are able to see the great advancements the Indians made in hunting and trade due to these new technologies and how they allowed the Cheyennes to rise to a new purpose as the Called Out People.

were also motivated by greed and ambition. A small group of radicals led by John Ridge

Have you ever been in a place of green with forests and animals everywhere? Well, where some of the Native Americans lived, there were such things. Native American tribes such as the Crow lived in the Great Plains. The Crow tribe of the Great Plains were nomadic and followed the buffalo migrations which provided their food. This tribe spent a good part of the year living in camps that could easily be dismantled and moved to follow the buffalo migrations. Other tribes of the plains were more sedentary. These tribes lived in permanent villages year round.

Until gold was revealed in the Rocky Mountains in 1859, the native population was virtually undisturbed by outside influence and the prairies were freely used to sustain life. When the gold was discovered, a whole new attitude came across the land. The population exploded and that means that there came change. With the discovery of gold, the invaders from the east would make those changes. Just like the unearthing of this widely sought out metal a decade earlier in California by the forty-niners, the fifty-niners forced themselves in to stake and protect their claims. With these changes, those who had original title to the land would find themselves under new ideas, new laws, and a new way of life. But, just because there is gold to be had, not everybody will be successful. There will be new wealth and bitter disappointment. So, the question is who benefitted the most from this discovery and who got the wrong end of the stick?

Oklahoma was once referred to as the “Unassigned Lands” (Fugate,138). This land was land inside Indian Territory that had not been claimed by one of the tribes (Hoig). Whites believed they were entitled to this land and wanted to get the statement across that America is a “white man’s country” (Dorman, 38). Immediately after Benjamin Harrison, the United States of America’s president at the time, announced the land would be opened for settlement, people began gathering their belongings, loading their wagons, or preparing their horses for travel. Thousands of people crowded the borders of the Unassigned Lands in hopes of establishing a settlement in the area (Fugate,140). At noon on April 22, 1889, people dashed across the land with their belongings seeking a plot of land. The Oklahoma Land Run was an exciting, puzzling, and in some cases, a violent day in Oklahoma’s history.

The battle of the Plains of Abraham was fought on the 13th of September 1759. It was the result of a three-month British siege of the French North American capital of Quebec City. Although the battle lasted for a short period of time, involved comparatively few troops, and caused few casualties, the effects of the battle were far reaching. The British victory at the battle resulted both in the death of the French general – the Marquis de Montcalm – and the British major general James Wolf. More importantly, the battle resulted in the capture of Quebec, which in turn, led to the capture of the remaining French territories of North America.

One thing that it looks at is land allotments that the Indians would receive for moving west. Many of the Indians would receive “320 acres if it was a single family selling or 640 acres to ninety chiefs in the Creek nation” . Many Native Americans took the agreement for these lands that were west of the Mississippi. But soon trouble started. Some of the land companies forced Indians to sell their land even if the Indians didn’t want to move west. Other companies would pay Indians to pretend they were someone else so the companies could claim the land of an Indian who didn’t want to move. Sometimes white settlers would come onto the land they had bought before the actually time they were allotted. During this process many people were cheated out of their land and received very little compensation for their moving west

The Sand Creek massacre, known as “Chivington massacre,” that began on November 29, 1864, in Colorado Territory. This massacre, was stricken by a Colorado U.S Volunteer Cavalry led by John M. Chivington, attacked and easily destroyed a village of the Cheyenne and Arapaho. The Native Americans death totaled in an estimate of 70-160 deaths. Mostly, it was women and children who took part of these casualties. As the people wonder, why all of this just for a piece of the Great Plains of the Eastern Colorado. As the west wins, a step closer to Manifest

In early 1848, cries of gold findings flooded the West. White settlers flooded the area like a hurricane in search of riches never seen before to the common man. It was the single greatest migration of people in a shortest amount of time. The gold rush was a very dark period in American history and it shouldn’t be celebrated; the Native American’s were slaughtered in American thirst for gold Explosions of violence from both natives and settlers were common in this environment of prejudice and greed. Between 1850 and 1890 eighty percent of the total number of Native Americans in California died due to murder and massacre, disease, starvation, and forced migration from their native lands. The destruction of the culture and lives of the people native to California and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Greed changed the morals and values of the miners and Americans alike in the Gold Rush. The gold rush brought riches and highlighted racism of white Americans, while systematically destroying Native Americans in that region.

However then in the late 1830’s an awful Small Pox epidemic wiped out nearly 4/5 of the Indian population of North America. We know from the video we studied in class that after this outbreak, the white settlers who had gradually been taking the Indians land for years began stealing and dividing up even more of the land whilst leaving the Indians even less land or space, those that would not give up their land were killed or captured, the movement of the white settlers going west angered the Indians and the Indians began to fight back. The white settlers’ discovery of gold , also angered the Plains Indians, as this was another thing that went against the Indians beliefs because as it says above they didn’t believe the land should be cut up, and that was exactly what gold mining was, hacking the land to bits for a few lumps of golden rock. This created more conflict between the Plains Indians and the white settlers, and more and more Indians were being wiped out all over North America because they had less weapons, horses and men than the white settlers who were just going into the villages, killing the