The Reservation Era – 1850-1887

By 1850, most eastern tribal members had been forced to leave their homelands and move to territories west of the Mississippi.  At the same time, White settlers began to cross the Great Plains to reach Oregon, Washington and California.  As European Americans increased their demands for land, the U.S. government created a new policy.  It began forcing entire tribes to live in areas the U.S. government dictated. The areas in which the U.S. sought to force individual tribes to live were called reservations.  Another name for reservations is agencies.  

The reservation system illustrates a fundamental difference in a culture that perceives land as a thing to be owned by individuals, and a culture that perceives land as territories to be tribally occupied, to be hunted or farmed, but not formally owned.  Many Plains tribes were nomadic, meaning they moved their villages to hunt herds of animals, and to harvest wild-growing plants for food and other uses.  By preventing the free movement of the tribes to find and harvest resources, the reservation system pushed the tribes from their independent status as sovereign nations into a status of dependence on the U.S. 

In 1851, the landmark Horse Creek Treaty began pushing Great Plains tribes onto reservations.  In this lesson, you will explore the Horse Creek Treaty, formally known as the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. 

Watch:

Mapped history of how Native American land was taken | FlowingData

The Invasion of America – YouTube