QUESTIONS
1. Your author refers to the Great West. Where was it? Describe it. Who inhabited it?
The Great West was a rough square that measured about a thousand miles on each side that embraced mountains, plateaus, deserts, and plains. The plains was inhabited by Indians, the buffalo, the wild horse, the prairie dog, and the coyote. Twenty-five years later the entire domain had been carved into states and the four territories of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and "Indian Territory," or Oklahoma. Pioneers flung themselves greedily onto the land because they have probably never before in human experience had so huge an area been transformed so rapidly.
2. Even before the arrival of the white man, migration and conflict played important roles in the history of the American plains. Explain.
The Comanches had driven the Apaches off the central plains into the upper Rio Grande valley in the 18th century. Harried by the Mandans and Chippewas, the Cheyenne had abandoned their villages along the upper reaches of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the century before the Civil War. The Sioux, displaced from the Great Lakes woodlands in the late 18th century, emerged onto the plains to prey upon the Crows, Kiowas, and Pawnees. Mounted on Spanish-introduced horses, peoples like the Cheyenne and the Sioux transformed themselves within just a few generations from foot-traveling, crop-growing villagers to wide-ranging nomadic traders and deadly efficient buffalo hunters. They were so deadly that they threatened to extinguish the vast bison herds that had lured them onto the plains in the first place.
3. The text states that the white man misunderstood the Indian government and society. Explain.
The white man misunderstood the Indian government and society because "tribes" and "chiefs" were often fictions of white imagination. The white man could not grasp that Native Americans lived in scattering bands and therefore recognized no authority outside of their immediate family, or perhaps a village elder. Also, the nomadic culture of the Plain Indians was utterly alien to the concept of living out of one's life in the confinement of a defined territory.
4. In 1874 Chief Sitting Bull and Sioux went on the warpath. Why? What were the results?
Chief Sitting Bull and Sioux went on the warpath because in 1874 a new round of warfare began when Custer led a "scientific" expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota (part of the Sioux reservation) and announced that he had discovered gold. Hordes of greedy gold seekers swarmed into the Sioux reservation and this aggrieved the Sioux since the white man was trespassing on their land. Colonel Custer's Seventh Cavalry set out to suppress the Indians and to return them to the reservation. Attacking a superior force of 2,500 well-armed warriors who camped along the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana, the "White Chief with Yellow Hair" and his 264 officer and men were completely wiped out in 1876 because two supporting columns failed to come to their aid. The Indians were successful in their first battle.
5. What happened to Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce? To Geronimo and the Apaches?
Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce were goaded into a daring flight after the US authorities attempted to herd them onto a reservation. Chief Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some 700 Indians after a torturous 17-hundred mile, three-month trek across the Continental Divide toward Canada. There Jospeh hoped to rendezvous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refuge after the battle of Little Bighorn, and was betrayed into believing they would be returned to their ancestral lands in Idaho. Instead they were sent to a duty reservation in Kansas, where 40% of them perished and the survivors were eventually allowed to return to Idaho. The Apaches were the most difficult to subdue and they were led by Geronimo. They were pursued into Mexico by federal troops using the sun-flashing heliograph (communication device, "big medicine") and the scattered remnants of warriors were finally persuaded to surrender after the Apache women were exiled into Florida. The Apaches ultimately became successful farmers in Oklahoma.
