What some touted as a triumph-the westward expansion of American authority-was for others a tragedy. The history of the late-nineteenth-century West is not a simple story.
Often in violation of its own treaties, the United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the West first as territories and then as states, and, for the first time in its history, controlled the enormity of land between the two oceans. 1 But then unending waves of American settlers, the American military, and the unstoppable onrush of American capital conquered all. Indigenous Americans have lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, perhaps as many as 250,000 Native people still inhabited the American West. But then the Civil War came and went and decoupled the West from the question of slavery just as the United States industrialized and laid down rails and pushed its ever-expanding population ever farther west. Spanish, French, British, and later American traders had integrated themselves into many regional economies, and American emigrants pushed ever westward, but no imperial power had yet achieved anything approximating political or military control over the great bulk of the continent. Linked culturally and geographically by trade, travel, and warfare, various Indigenous groups controlled most of the continent west of the Mississippi River deep into the nineteenth century. Native Americans long dominated the vastness of the American West. Rodeos, Wild West Shows, and the Mythic American West The Allotment Era and Resistance in the Native West
Western Economic Expansion: Railroads and Cattle The Indian Wars and Federal Peace Policies
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