The Negative Impact Of Land Influence On Native Americans
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'America is a stolen country'
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By , it had become clear that life at the reservation was unsustainable. General William Tecumseh Sherman visited the reservation and wrote of the inhumane situation in which the Navajo were essentially kept as prisoners, but lack of cost-effectiveness was the main reason Sherman recommended that the Navajo be returned to their homeland in the West. The attacks on Native nations in California and the Pacific Northwest received significantly less attention than the dramatic conquest of the Plains, but Native peoples in these regions also experienced violence, population decline, and territorial loss.
They fought a guerrilla war for eleven months in which at least two hundred U. Despite appeals from settlers acquainted with the Modoc, the federal government hanged Kintpuash and three others leaders in a highly choreographed and publicized public execution. Four years later, in the Pacific Northwest, a branch of the Nez Perce who, generations earlier, had aided Lewis and Clark in their famous journey to the Pacific Ocean refused to be moved to a reservation and, under the leadership of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known to settlers and American readers as Chief Joseph, attempted to flee to Canada but were pursued by the U. The outnumbered Nez Perce battled across a thousand miles and were attacked nearly two dozen times before they succumbed to hunger and exhaustion, surrendered, were imprisoned, and removed to a reservation in Indian Territory.
Army officer, became a landmark of American rhetoric. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. The treaties that had been signed with numerous Native nations in California in the s were never ratified by the Senate. Over one hundred distinct Native groups had lived in California before the Spanish and American conquests, but by , the Native population of California had collapsed from about , on the eve of the gold rush to a little less than 20, A few reservation areas were eventually set up by the U. Aside from agriculture and the extraction of natural resources—such as timber and precious metals—two major industries fueled the new western economy: ranching and railroads.
Railroads made the settlement and growth of the West possible. By the late nineteenth century, maps of the Midwest were filled with advertisements touting how quickly a traveler could traverse the country. No railroad enterprise so captured the American imagination—or federal support—as the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad crossed western plains and mountains and linked the West Coast with the rail networks of the eastern United States.
Constructed from the west by the Central Pacific and from the east by the Union Pacific, the two roads were linked in Utah in to great national fanfare. But such a herculean task was not easy, and national legislators threw enormous subsidies at railroad companies, a part of the Republican Party platform since Between and alone, railroad companies received more than ,, acres of public land, an area larger than the state of Texas.
Investors reaped enormous profits. If railroads attracted unparalleled subsidies and investments, they also created enormous labor demands. By , approximately four hundred thousand men—or nearly 2. Much of the work was dangerous and low-paying, and companies relied heavily on immigrant labor to build tracks. Companies employed Irish workers in the early nineteenth century and Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century. By , over two hundred thousand Chinese migrants lived in the United States. Once the rails were laid, companies still needed a large workforce to keep the trains running.
Much railroad work was dangerous, but perhaps the most hazardous work was done by brakemen. Speed was necessary, and any slip could be fatal. Brakemen were also responsible for coupling the cars, attaching them together with a large pin. It was easy to lose a hand or finger and even a slight mistake could cause cars to collide. The railroads boomed. In , there were 9, miles of railroads in the United States. In there were ,, including several transcontinental lines.
Of all the Midwestern and western cities that blossomed from the bridging of western resources and eastern capital in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most spectacular. It grew from two hundred inhabitants in to over a million by By it and the region from which it drew were completely transformed. Chicago became the most important western hub and served as the gateway between the farm and ranch country of the Great Plains and eastern markets.
Railroads brought cattle from Texas to Chicago for slaughter, where they were then processed into packaged meats and shipped by refrigerated rail to New York City and other eastern cities. Such hubs became the central nodes in a rapid-transit economy that increasingly spread across the entire continent linking goods and people together in a new national network.
This national network created the fabled cattle drives of the s and s. The first cattle drives across the central Plains began soon after the Civil War. Railroads created the market for ranching, and for the few years after the war that railroads connected eastern markets with important market hubs such as Chicago, but had yet to reach Texas ranchlands, ranchers began driving cattle north, out of the Lone Star state, to major railroad terminuses in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. Ranchers used well-worn trails, such as the Chisholm Trail, for drives, but conflicts arose with Native Americans in the Indian Territory and farmers in Kansas who disliked the intrusion of large and environmentally destructive herds onto their own hunting, ranching, and farming lands.
This photochrom print a new technology in the late nineteenth century that colorized images from a black-and-white negative depicts a cattle round-up in Cimarron, a crossroads of the late nineteenth-century cattle drives. Detroit Photographic Co. Cattle drives were difficult tasks for the crews of men who managed the herds. Historians estimate the number of men who worked as cowboys in the late-nineteenth century to be between twelve thousand and forty thousand. Much about the American cowboys evolved from Mexican vaqueros : cowboys adopted Mexican practices, gear, and terms such as rodeo , bronco , and lasso. While most cattle drivers were men, there are at least sixteen verifiable accounts of women participating in the drives. Some, like Molly Dyer Goodnight, accompanied their husbands.
Others, like Lizzie Johnson Williams, helped drive their own herds. Williams made at least three known trips with her herds up the Chisholm Trail. Many cowboys hoped one day to become ranch owners themselves, but employment was insecure and wages were low. And it was tough work. On a cattle drive, cowboys worked long hours and faced extremes of heat and cold and intense blowing dust. They subsisted on limited diets with irregular supplies.
Cowboys like the one pictured here worked the drives that supplied Chicago and other mid-western cities with the necessary cattle to supply and help grow the meat-packing industry. Their work was obsolete by the turn of the century, yet their image lived on through vaudeville shows and films that romanticized life in the West. John C. But if workers of cattle earned low wages, owners and investors could receive riches. Although profits slowly leveled off, large profits could still be made. And yet, by the s, the great cattle drives were largely done. The railroads had created them, and the railroads ended them: railroad lines pushed into Texas and made the great drives obsolete.
But ranching still brought profits and the Plains were better suited for grazing than for agriculture, and western ranchers continued supplying beef for national markets. Ranching was just one of many western industries that depended on the railroads. By linking the Plains with national markets and rapidly moving people and goods, the railroads made the modern American West. As the rails moved into the West, and more and more Americans followed, the situation for Native groups deteriorated even further. Treaties negotiated between the United States and Native groups had typically promised that if tribes agreed to move to specific reservation lands, they would hold those lands collectively. Each head of a Native family was to be allotted acres, the typical size of a claim that any settler could establish on federal lands under the provisions of the Homestead Act.
Single individuals over age eighteen would receive an eighty-acre allotment, and orphaned children received forty acres. A four-year timeline was established for Indian peoples to make their allotment selections. If at the end of that time no selection had been made, the act authorized the secretary of the interior to appoint an agent to make selections for the remaining tribal members. Allegedly to protect Indians from being swindled by unscrupulous land speculators, all allotments were to be held in trust—they could not be sold by allottees—for twenty-five years. Lands that remained unclaimed by tribal members after allotment would revert to federal control and be sold to American settlers.
Both men served as delegates to Washington, D. Americans touted the Dawes Act as an uplifting humanitarian reform, but it upended Native lifestyles and left Native nations without sovereignty over their lands. Under the terms of the Dawes Act, Native nations struggled to hold on to some measure of tribal sovereignty. The stresses of conquest unsettled generations of Native Americans. Many took comfort from the words of prophets and holy men. He had traveled, he said, from his earthly home in western Nevada to heaven and returned during a solar eclipse to prophesy to his people. You must not fight. And they must, he said, participate in a religious ceremony that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. If the people lived justly and danced the Ghost Dance, Wovoka said, their ancestors would rise from the dead, droughts would dissipate, the whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would once again roam the Plains.
Native American prophets had often confronted American imperial power. Some prophets, including Wovoka, incorporated Christian elements like heaven and a Messiah figure into Indigenous spiritual traditions. Perhaps the most avid Ghost Dancers—and certainly the most famous—were the Lakota Sioux. The Lakota were in dire straits. South Dakota, formed out of land that belonged by treaty to the Lakota, became a state in But, the missions also impacted California Indian cultures in negative ways. Europeans forced the natives to change their civilization to match the modern world. In the process, local traditions, cultures and customs were lost. Additionally, Spanish missionaries brought diseases with them that killed untold thousands of natives.
Prior to the California missions, there were about , Native Californians. By , scholars believe there were only about 20, remaining. Easter Sunday protest over Serra planned at Carmel Mission. Monterey Herald. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Tourists flock to Baja California—separated from the rest of Mexico by the Sea of Cortez—to visit its stunning shoreline and test their mettle at sport fishing.
The international port of Ensenada, located on Since Baja California Sur occupies the southern end of a peninsula, overland travel to the rest of Mexico is The California Gold Rush was sparked by the discovery of gold nuggets in the Sacramento Valley in early and was arguably one of the most significant events to shape American history during the first half of the 19th century. As news spread of the discovery, thousands of The Inquisition was a powerful office set up within the Catholic Church to root out and punish heresy throughout Europe and the Americas.
Beginning in the 12th century and continuing for hundreds of years, the Inquisition is infamous for the severity of its tortures and its The area developed into a popular pilgrimage site and commercial district, although it was abandoned following the move of The Bible is the holy scripture of the Christian religion, purporting to tell the history of the Earth from its earliest creation to the spread of Christianity in the first century A. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have undergone changes over the centuries, An early convert to Mormonism, Brigham Young succeeded founder Joseph Smith as the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in ; he led the church until his death in After guiding an exodus of thousands of Mormons westward to the Great Salt Lake In , L.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. San Diego Mission The native Indians who occupied the region were initially resistant to the mission. Radical disruption of Indigenous burning practices occurred with European colonization and forced relocation of those who had historically maintained the landscape. By the early 20th century, fire suppression had become the official US federal policy.
Authors such as William Henry Hudson , Longfellow , Francis Parkman , and Thoreau contributed to the widespread myth [14] that pre-Columbian North America was a pristine, natural wilderness, "a world of barely perceptible human disturbance. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans had played a major role in determining the diversity of their ecosystems. The most significant type of environmental change brought about by Precolumbian human activity was the modification of vegetation. Natural fires certainly occurred but varied in frequency and strength in different habitats. Anthropogenic fires, for which there is ample documentation, tended to be more frequent but weaker, with a different seasonality than natural fires, and thus had a different type of influence on vegetation.
The result of clearing and burning was, in many regions, the conversion of forest to grassland, savanna, scrub, open woodland, and forest with grassy openings. William M. Denevan [17]. Fire was used to keep large areas of forest and mountains free of undergrowth for hunting or travel, or to create berry patches. When first encountered by Europeans, many ecosystems were the result of repeated fires every one to three years, resulting in the replacement of forests with grassland or savanna, or opening up the forest by removing undergrowth.
There is some argument about the effect of human-caused burning when compared to lightning in western North America. The presence of Indians did, however, undoubtedly increase the frequency of fires above the low numbers caused by lightning. Reasons given for controlled burns in pre-contact ecosystems are numerous and well thought out. They include:. By the time that European explorers first arrived in North America, millions of acres of "natural" landscapes were already manipulated and maintained for human use. In the American west, it is estimated that , hectares , aces burned annually pre-settlement in what is now Oregon and Washington. By the 17th century, native populations were on the verge of collapse due to the genocidal structure of settler colonialism.
As Native people were forced off their traditional landbases or killed, traditional land management practices were abandoned and were eventually made illegal by settler governance. By the 19th century, many Indigenous nations had been forced to sign treaties with the federal government and relocate to reservations , [33] which were sometimes hundreds of miles away from their ancestral homelands. As sociologist Kari Norgaard has shown, "Fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in during the apex of genocide in the northern part of the state.
Light burning is also been called "Paiute forestry," a direct but derogatory reference to southwestern tribal burning habits. Removal of indigenous populations and their controlled burning practices have resulted in major ecological changes, including increased severity of wild fires, especially in combination with Climate change. They are now learning from traditional fire practitioners and using controlled burns to reduce fuel accumulations, change species composition, and manage vegetation structure and density for healthier forests and rangelands. This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the United States Department of Agriculture.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Further information: Pre-Columbian savannas of North America. Main article: Population history of American indigenous peoples. Forgotten fires: Native Americans and the transient wilderness. Tulsa, OK: Univ. ISBN Journal of Forestry. Flames in Our Forest. Island Press. K, and M. Native American land-use practices and ecological impacts. Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape.
