Wounded Knee, the Dawes Act and the End of the Frontier

The End of a Continent’s Wildlife

In 1850 around 30 million bison roamed the Great Plains. By 1890 there were perhaps 1,000 left. The destruction was driven by three connected pressures: the railroads, which sold seats to hunters and cleared track for shipments; eastern leather demand, which paid handsomely for hides; and the US Army, which under General Philip Sheridan endorsed the slaughter explicitly as a strategy to defeat the Indigenous peoples of the Plains. Sheridan reportedly told the Texas legislature in 1875 that the buffalo hunters had ‘done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years’.

The collapse of the herd ended the horse-buffalo culture in a generation. Indigenous nations whose food, shelter, fuel, clothing and trade had centred on the bison now depended on government rations on shrinking reservations. The very logic that had let Plains nations stay independent — mobility on horseback after a moving food source — was no longer possible.

Reservations and Carlisle

By the 1870s most Plains nations had been pushed onto reservations far smaller and poorer than the lands they had hunted across. Rations were issued by federal Indian agents, often late and often short. Disease, malnutrition and dependence rose together. Federal policy turned from confining Indigenous peoples to actively reshaping them. In 1879 Captain Richard Henry Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania — the first off-reservation boarding school. His motto was ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’: children were stripped of their language, names and clothing, dressed in military uniforms and trained to be farmers and domestic servants. Carlisle became the model for over 25 federal boarding schools that operated for the rest of the period.

The Black Hills and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876

The 1868 second Fort Laramie Treaty had recognised Lakota ownership of the Black Hills. In 1874 a US Army expedition under Custer found gold there. Within months prospectors were pouring in; Washington responded by ordering all Lakota and Cheyenne onto smaller reservations by 31 January 1876. Many bands refused. A coalition under Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota) and Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota) gathered in the Powder River country.

On 25–26 June 1876 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, leading the US 7th Cavalry, attacked a much larger village along the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Custer split his command into three. His own column of around 210 men was annihilated within an hour by a Lakota and Cheyenne force of perhaps 1,500 fighters. Around 268 US soldiers died in total. The victory was real and shocking, but short-lived: federal forces poured into the Plains over the following five years. Crazy Horse was killed in custody at Fort Robinson in September 1877; Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881 after exile in Canada.

Continued Settlement: Exodusters and Oklahoma

While the Plains wars were ending, settlement was still spreading. In 1879 around 20,000–40,000 Black migrants from the post-Reconstruction South moved to Kansas in what became known as the Exoduster movement, organised by Benjamin ‘Pap’ Singleton. They were fleeing the rise of Jim Crow and seeking the same homestead opportunities white settlers had been claiming for two decades. Kansas could not absorb them all, but Black townships such as Nicodemus survived as proof that the Plains were a refuge as well as a frontier.

Ten years later, settlement reached its most theatrical moment. On 22 April 1889 around 50,000 settlers raced across the line of former Indigenous land in central Oklahoma at noon to claim 160-acre plots in a single afternoon — the Oklahoma Land Rush. The Cherokee Outlet run of 16 September 1893 — the Oklahoma land rush the specification names — repeated the spectacle on a far larger scale, with around 100,000 racing for claims. By the time the dust settled, almost no ‘unsettled’ land remained on the Great Plains.

The Dawes Act, 1887

Congress’s answer to the ‘Indian question’ was the Dawes Act, written by Senator Henry Dawes and passed in 1887. It broke up reservations into 160-acre family allotments. Each Indigenous family was meant to live as homesteaders, farming their plot in the manner of the 1862 Homestead Act. Citizenship was promised to those who took allotments. Whatever land was left over was declared ‘surplus’ and sold to white settlers.

The figures show what the Dawes Act actually did. Indigenous landholding fell from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million by 1934 — the legal mechanism by which two-thirds of remaining Indigenous territory was transferred to white ownership in less than fifty years. Allotment also undermined communal Plains landholding traditions and forced families onto plots too small to support buffalo-tradition life. The Act was sold as a reform; it functioned as the engine of dispossession.

The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, 1890

In 1889 the Paiute prophet Wovoka had a vision in Nevada: if Indigenous peoples danced the Ghost Dance and lived peacefully, the buffalo would return, the dead would rise and settlers would be swept from the land. The dance spread through the reservations during 1890. Among the Lakota, suffering under failed crops and reduced rations, it took on a more militant edge. Federal Indian agents panicked and called in the US Army.

Sitting Bull was killed during a botched arrest at the Standing Rock reservation on 15 December 1890. His followers fled south to join Big Foot’s band, which surrendered to the 7th Cavalry near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge reservation. On the morning of 29 December 1890, as soldiers attempted to disarm the camp, a shot was fired and the cavalry opened fire with rifles and Hotchkiss guns. Around 250–300 Lakota were killed, the great majority of them unarmed and including women and children. Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to the soldiers involved. Wounded Knee marked the effective end of armed Indigenous resistance on the Plains.

The Frontier ‘Closed’, 1890–93

In 1890 the US Census declared that there was no longer a continuous line of unsettled land in the West — the frontier was ‘closed’. Three years later, at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. Turner’s Frontier Thesis argued that the experience of the frontier had forged American democracy and an exceptional national character. It would dominate writing about the West for most of the next century.

Later historians have sharply revised that picture. Patricia Nelson Limerick’s ‘The Legacy of Conquest’ (1987) replaced the word ‘frontier’ with ‘conquest’, arguing the West was a story of dispossession and unfinished business, not progress. Richard White and Pekka Hämäläinen reframed Plains nations as imperial powers in their own right rather than passive victims of an inevitable westward march. From this view, the ‘closing of the frontier’ in 1890 was a settler-colonial euphemism for completed dispossession — not the end of Indigenous history, which continues. For your exam, the safe move is to know both the Turner story (because it shaped the period’s self-understanding) and its limits (because the events of 1887–1890 are not progress when seen from the Lakota side at Wounded Knee).