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Bureau of Indian Affairs ~ Boarding Schools
The boarding school experience for Indian children began in 1860 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the first Indian boarding school on the Yakima Indian Reservation in the state of Washington. These schools were part of a plan devised by well-intentioned, eastern reformers Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast, who also helped establish organizations such as the Board of Indian Commissioners, the Boston Indian Citizenship Association and the Women’s National Indian Association. -
Homestead Act of 1862
The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. -
Morrill Land-Grant Act 1862
The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are United States statutes that allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges in U.S. states using the proceeds of federal land sales. The Morrill Act of 1862 was enacted during the American Civil War and the Morrill Act of 1890 expanded this model. -
Pacific Railroad Act of 1862
The Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 were a series of acts of Congress that promoted the construction of a "transcontinental railroad" in the United States through authorizing the issuance of government bonds and the grants of land to railroad companies. -
Sand Creek Massacre
The Sand Creek massacre (also known as the Chivington massacre, the battle of Sand Creek or the massacre of Cheyenne Indians) was a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army in the American Indian Wars. -
Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868
Between April 29 and November 6, 1868, tribal leaders from the northern plains came forward to sign a treaty with representatives of the United States government setting aside lands west of the Missouri River for the Sioux and Arapaho tribes. In this written agreement, negotiated at Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming, the United States guaranteed exclusive tribal occupation of extensive reservation lands, including the Black Hills, sacred to many Native peoples. -
Medicine Lodge Treaty, Chief Satanta, 1868
It was an astonishing spectacle: 165 wagons, 600 men, and 1,200 horses and mules, all stretched across the plains of the Kansas territory in October 1867. Their purpose? To escort a cohort of seven men, appointed by Congress to put an end to the bloodshed between the U.S. military and the Indian tribes of the Great Plains, to the sacred site of Medicine Lodge Creek. -
Little Big Horn, 1876
The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and also commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which resulted in the defeat of U.S. forces, was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. -
Great Sioux War, 1876-1881
The Great Sioux War of 1876, also known as the Black Hills War, was a series of battles and negotiations which occurred in 1876 and 1877 between the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and the United States. The cause of the war was the desire of the U.S. government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills. -
Chief Joseph 1877
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (or Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it in Americanist orthography), popularly known as Chief Joseph, Young Joseph, or Joseph the Younger (March 3, 1840 – September 21, 1904), was a leader of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce, a Native American tribe of the interior Pacific Northwest region of the United States, in the latter half of the 19th century. He succeeded his father Tuekakas (Chief Joseph the Elder) in the early 1870s. -
Exodustors
Exodusters was a name given to African Americans who migrated from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century, as part of the Exoduster Movement or Exodus of 1879. It was the first general migration of black people following the Civil War. -
Dawes Severalty Act, 1887
The Dawes Act of 1887 (also known as the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887; named after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts) authorized the President of the United States to subdivide Native American tribal landholdings into allotments for Native American heads of families and individuals, transferring traditional systems of land tenure into government-imposed systems of private property. -
Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890
The Wounded Knee Massacre, also called the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a domestic massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians, almost half of whom were women and children, by soldiers of the United States Army.
