Conquest of the Plains: The Final Frontier, 1862-1890

After the Civil War, the focus of American expansion shifted to the Great Plains — the vast grasslands between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, home to the Plains Indians whose entire culture was built around the enormous buffalo herds.

The Homestead Act, 1862:

The Homestead Act offered 160 acres of land free to any settler willing to farm it for five years. Between 1862 and 1900, over 600,000 homesteads were claimed. Hundreds of thousands of settlers — including many European immigrants — poured onto the Plains. For the Plains Indians, this was catastrophic: their hunting grounds were fenced and ploughed by strangers who had no understanding of or respect for Native cultures.

The Transcontinental Railroad, 1869:

The completion of the first transcontinental railroad on 10 May 1869 (when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines were joined at Promontory Summit, Utah) was the single most transformative event in the opening of the West. Journey time from New York to California fell from six months by wagon to six days by train. The railroad brought settlers, goods, and US Army troops to the Plains in unprecedented numbers. It also enabled the systematic destruction of the buffalo herds: hunters rode the trains and shot from the carriages.

Destruction of the Buffalo:

The buffalo was the foundation of Plains Indian life — food, clothing, shelter, tools, and spiritual significance. In 1800, an estimated 30-60 million buffalo roamed the Plains. Commercial hunters slaughtered them for hides and sport. By 1889, fewer than 1,000 remained. The US Army recognised that destroying the buffalo would destroy the resistance of the Plains peoples: General Philip Sheridan told the Texas legislature in 1875 that buffalo hunters deserved congressional medals for "destroying the Indians' commissary." Without the buffalo, the Plains Indians could not survive independently.

Wars on the Plains:

The Plains Indians fought back. The conflicts of the 1860s-1890s combined military campaigns, broken treaties, and massacres on both sides:

• Battle of Little Bighorn (25-26 June 1876): Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led the 7th Cavalry into a Sioux and Cheyenne camp in Montana. His force of approximately 210 men was annihilated by a combined force of 1,500-2,000 warriors under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. "Custer's Last Stand" shocked white America — but the US Army's response was intensified campaigns that destroyed the Plains Indian resistance within two years.
• Wounded Knee Massacre (29 December 1890): US 7th Cavalry soldiers opened fire on a camp of approximately 350 Lakota Sioux who had surrendered and were being disarmed. Between 250 and 300 Sioux were killed, many of them women and children. Wounded Knee is generally regarded as the end of armed Native American resistance.

End of the Frontier, 1890:

In 1890, the US Census Bureau formally declared the frontier closed — there was no longer a continuous line of settlement separating "civilised" America from "wilderness." Historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 that the frontier had been the defining force in American democracy and national character. With its closure, a century of westward expansion had reached its end.