![]() ![]() ![]() We seem not to have coveted the lands in the first Indian-fighting days we fought rather for the trails than for the soil. The Army had to learn to become half Indian before fighting the Indians on anything like even terms. They were accustomed to living upon that country and did not need to bring in their own supplies hence the Army fought them at a certain disadvantage. For a considerable time, the Indians themselves were able to offer very effective resistance to the enterprise. This was a process not altogether simple. Soon after the Civil War, the Army fell to the task of exterminating, or at least evicting, the savage tribes overall this unvalued and unknown Middle West. But as men began to work farther and farther westward in search of homes in Oregon or in quest of gold in California or Idaho or Montana, the Indian question came to be a serious one. ![]() This unsettled land so long held in small repute by the early Americans was, as we have pointed out, the buffalo range and the country of the Horse Indians - the Plains tribes who lived upon the buffalo.įor a long time, it was this Indian population that held back the white settlements of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado. So here, somewhere between the Missouri River and the Rockies advancing, gaining and losing, changing a little more every decade - and at last so rapidly changed as to be outworn and abolished in one swift decade all its own. California, Oregon, all the early farming and timbering lands of the distant Northwest - these lay far beyond the Plains, and as we have noted, they were sought for, even before gold was dreamed of upon the Pacific Slope. The land between the Missouri River and the Rockies, along the Great Plains and the high foothills, was crossed over and forgotten by the men who were forging on into farther countries searching for lands where fortune was swift and easy. Lakota Sioux Camp, by John Graybill, 1891 ![]()
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