Westward Expansion

From the start to the end of the 19th century, the lives of the Native Americans drastically changed, going from having distinct and independent cultural lives to having this stripped of them, with their culture being destroyed and therefore the Native American society being destroyed also. There are numerous reasons for this: the Federal Government, white settlers and their expansion westwards, and the Native Americans themselves. The Federal Government being the most significant factor in the destruction of Native American societies is derived by Philbrick’s interpretation that the American army was used by the Federal Government to carry out “dirty work of American Imperialism1,” showing how the government only cared for the “white expansion”- …show more content…
This is due to the idea of the buffalo. The buffalo had huge significance in the lives of the Plains Indians – being their source of food, clothing, housing, and livelihood. He argues that “commercial hunters would soon render the North American bison extinct” and “so few buffaloes remained that nomadic Indians of the Plains abandoned the hunt and surrendered to the reservation system.” This claims that it was the actions of the white hunters – and not the federal government – that contributed to the submission of Indians to reservation policy. The idea of the near extinction of the buffalo that led to reservations for Plains Indians is quite convincing, due to how much some tribes relied on the buffalo – their destruction meant that many Natives could not sustain their nomadic lifestyle. For example, the Lakota Sioux were a powerful tribe on the Plains – and based their lives on the buffalo. The buffalo were sacred to the Lakota, and they followed them everywhere. This shows how with the removal of the buffalo – the whole way of life of certain tribes was destroyed, giving weight to the argument that white settlers and westward expansion were the most important reason for the eradication of Native American culture and society. However, another part of Isenberg’s view can be brought into question. Historian Smits argues that the destruction of the buffalo was due to the Federal Government rather than the settlers themselves. “The frontier army’s well calculated policy of destroying the buffalo in order to conquer the Plains Indians proved more effective than any other weapon in its arsenal.” This shows once again how the government used the army to do their “dirty work” (from Philbrick) in destroying the buffalo – a weapon used by the federal government to successfully attack the Native Americans and push them onto

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