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A number of Native American tribes continued to fight against the U.S. army and to resist assimilation after Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce surrendered in 1877. They were opposed by an onslaught of soldiers, missionaries, homesteaders, and miners. By the early 1880s, the Utes were forced to give up their lands in Western Colorado for a reservation in Utah. In Montana, the Blackfoot and Crow tribes were restricted to reservations. In the Southwest, the Apaches, under chiefs Cochise and Geronimo, resisted government efforts to relocate them to a reservation until the mid-1880s.
Facing military conquest, assimilation, restriction to reservations, settlers and the market economy, some Native Americans sought relief in a religious movement: the Ghost Dance.
Sometime in the late 1880s, a Paiute named Wovoka began to have visions of his ancestors. They told him that if Native Americans returned to their traditional ways, the buffalo would return and White Americans would be swept away. Members of other Native American tribes traveled to Wovoka’s home in Nevada to hear him speak about these visions. When they returned to their reservations, they organized ceremonial gatherings that became known as the Ghost Dance movement.
When the movement spread to the Lakota (Sioux) reservation in South Dakota in 1890, authorities worried that Sitting Bull, who was still regarded as a leader of the Lakota, would join the movement and lead an uprising against the United States. On December 15, 1890, the authorities sent tribal police to arrest Sitting Bull, but when they attempted to do so, they were prevented by tribal members who sought to protect him. The standoff deteriorated into violence: thirteen people were killed, including Sitting Bull. The U.S. army subsequently conducted a roundup of all Lakotas in the area.
In late December of 1890, approximately 350 Lakota followers of the Ghost Dance surrendered to the army and established a camp along Wounded Knee Creek. On December 29th, military officers entered the camp and ordered the Lakota to turn over their firearms. When some of the Lakota resisted, the Wounded Knee Massacre began.
Accounts of the massacre are unclear, but a possibly-accidental rifle discharge by a young man laying down his weapon led the soldiers to fire indiscriminately on those assembled. Some of the Lakota attempted to defend themselves by firing back with rifles they had concealed, but the soldiers ultimately killed 150 people, including many women and children. The army suffered 25 fatalities during the fight, most of whom were killed by crossfire from other soldiers.
The Wounded Knee massacre shattered the Ghost Dance movement and is considered to be the last of the Indian Wars.
While the Native American population in the Western United States plummeted, the settler populations soared. The U.S. Census Bureau released a bulletin in 1890 which included the following statement:
U.S. Census Bureau, 1890
“Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.”
Prior to 1890, the Census Bureau defined any portion of the Western United States as frontier territory if it featured a population density of less than two people per square mile (excluding Native Americans). In previous reports, such as in the map of American settlement in 1850 provided below, the Bureau was able to indicate a distinct “frontier line” that continually marched westward across the continent.
Additional Resource
Explore this interactive from the United States Census Bureau to learn more about frontier expansion between 1790 and 1890.
By 1890, the Census could no longer locate any part of the United States with fewer than two people per square mile. This suggested that settlers had populated the West in significant numbers.
It was in the context of these developments—the end of the Indian Wars, and of the frontier, and the continued expansion of American industry—that members of the American Historical Association (a professional organization for U.S. historians) met during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in the summer of 1893.
During the meeting, a young historian from Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, presented one of the most important papers ever written by an American historian: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
In his paper, Turner argues that Western expansion had been integral to the development of American democracy, as well as to the development of aspects of the American character. These included rugged individualism, optimism, adaptability, and self-reliance. According to Turner, Western expansion had made the United States unique among nations:
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
“....Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life…. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West….” (Turner, p. 19)
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Continued)
“Stand at Cumberland Gap (in the Appalachian Mountains) and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.”
Recall what you’ve learned about the interpretation of John Gast’s American Progress (1872). Compare it to Turner’s paper, which was written two decades after American Progress.
John Gast’s American Progress and Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” both contributed to the perception of the West as a land of opportunity for individual White Americans. Examining the strengths and flaws of this perception has continued to be an important task for American historians, especially those who study the West.
During the last years of the 19th century and the initial decades of the 20th, most American historians accepted Turner’s core assertions, which reinforced widely-held perceptions of American progress and exceptionalism. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the American economy continued to expand and the United States acquired territory overseas. These gains enabled the nation to count itself among the world’s great powers. Advocates of American economic and imperial expansion suggested that both trends continued processes that Turner associated with the settlement of the West during the 19th century.
Turner’s conclusions about the processes of Western settlement received their first significant criticism during the 1930s and 1940s—during the Great Depression and World War II. The economic devastation of the Depression challenged American optimism and faith in “progress”, both of which underlay Turner’s conclusions. Historians, including Walter Prescott Webb, viewed Turner’s frontier thesis as insufficient in explaining the development of the West as a distinct region in the United States.
Webb argued that the Western environment, particularly the lack of water in much of the region, affected settlement patterns and the evolution of Western society in ways that Turner did not consider. Webb suggested that the environment of the Great Plains—vast expanses of treeless prairie, “a climate deficient in rainfall”—played a significant role in settlement:
Walter Prescott Webb, Excerpt from The Great Plains
“As one contrasts the civilization of the Great Plains with that of [the Eastern United States], one sees what may be called an institutional fault (comparable to a geological fault) running from middle Texas to Illinois or Dakota…. At this fault the ways of life and living changed. Practically every institution that was carried across it was either broken and remade or else greatly altered. The ways of travel, the weapons, the method of tilling the soil, the plows and other agricultural implements, and even the laws themselves were modified.”
Webb went on to argue that settlement in the environment of the Great Plains would not have succeeded without the industrial advances of the late 19th century, including railroads and windmills, which enabled Plains farmers to pump water from underground.
Historians have recently focused on groups and individuals that Turner did not consider when reaching his conclusions. When he examined frontier settlement, Turner grouped people into broad categories like hunters, miners, and farmers. This led him to overlook the range of individuals present in the West, as well as the different groups that lived there.
Criticism of Turner’s omissions took many forms by the late 20th century and continued into the 21st.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History”. access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
REFERENCES
Following the Frontier Line, 1790 to 1890. Retrieved from bit.ly/2n69uND. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau
Turner, F. J. (2008). The significance of the Frontier in American history. London: Penguin
Webb, W. P. (1981). The Great Plains. (p. 6, 8-9) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press