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17th -18th - 19th century > America, USA
Native Americans
Timeline in articles, pictures, podcasts and videos
An 1892 map of the Indian and Oklahoma territories showing the boundaries of tribal reservations.
Soon after, the federal government started the process of dividing the tribally-held land despite resistance by tribal leaders.
Photograph: Library of Congress
In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next.
The 19th Amendment did not bring the right to vote to all Native women, but two experts in a conversation said it did usher in the possibility of change. NYT Published July 31, 2020 Updated Aug. 11, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/
Map of Indian Territory (Oklahoma), 1885
https://www.archives.gov/files/education/lessons/
National Archives and Records Administration Records of the General Land Office Record Group 49
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/
Map of Indian Territory (Oklahoma), 1891 http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fed-indian-policy/images/territory-map-02.jpg
National Archives and Records Administration Records of the General Land Office Record Group 49 http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fed-indian-policy/index.html
Clement V. and William P. Rogers' Application For Enrollment in the Five Civilized Tribes
https://www.archives.gov/
National Archives and Records Administration Record Group 49 http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fed-indian-policy/index.html
A portrait of Chief Spotted Tail by David Frances Barry, circa 1880.
Photograph: Denver Public Library/Bridgeman Images
This 19th-Century Law Helps Shape Criminal Justice in Indian Country And that’s a problem — especially for Native American women, and especially in rape cases. NYT July 19, 2020, 11:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/
1910s-1930s
Osage County, Oklahoma Osage Indian murders
The Osage Indian sisters, from left, Minnie, Anna and Mollie Burkhart.
...Mollie Burkhart, whose sisters and other family members are picked off one by one
The beautiful and implacable faces of Mollie and her brown-eyed sisters gaze, as if in accusation, across the ages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/
Credit: Raymond Red Corn
The Osage Indians Struck It Rich, Then Paid the Price NYT April 12, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/
In the early 1900s, the Osage Nation bought their land in Oklahoma after leaving their Kansas reservation.
This happened at a time when Osages were being forced to allot their land — give up communally owned land for 160 acre plots.
Leftover land would then be sold to white settlers.
Many Osages resisted allotment but eventually, Chief James Bigheart reached a deal:
the Osages would accept allotment but retain the ownership of the mineral rights underneath, which would be put into a trust managed by the federal government.
The government was obligated to safeguard Osage interests.
Each share was given to Osages on a roll and were known as headrights.
In 1906, it became known as the Osage Mineral Estate and still exists today.
A decade later, when oil was discovered, those headrights were sought after, and put a target on the back of Osages who owned them.
People from all over flocked to Osage County to try to get some of that money and wealth for themselves.
Dozens of Osages were murdered in a plot to obtain wealth and headrights.
https://www.kosu.org/arts-culture/2023-05-18/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.kosu.org/arts-culture/2023-05-18/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/
Henry Laurens Dawes 1816-1903
TITLE: Dawes, Hon. Henry L. of Mass. REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-cwpbh-04976 (digital file from original neg.) MEDIUM: 1 negative : glass, wet collodion. CREATED/PUBLISHED: [between 1865 and 1880]
NOTES: Title from unverified information on negative sleeve. Annotation from negative, scratched into emulsion: Sen H.L. Dawes, 1333, 1315, 497. Forms part of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress). FORMAT: Portrait photographs 1860-1880. Glass negatives 1860-1880. REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA DIGITAL ID: (digital file from original neg.) cwpbh 04976 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04976 http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?pp/PPALL:@field(NUMBER+@band(cwpbh+04976)) TIFF > JPEG by Anglonautes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/
Sitting Bull c. 1831-1890
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/01/
February 8, 1887
The Dawes Act
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 America 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 by forcing Native Americans to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship with property" that did not previously exist.
The act also opened remaining Native land for appropriation by white settlers.
Before private property could be dispensed, the government now had to determine "which Indians were eligible" for allotments, which propelled an "official search for a federal definition of Indian-ness." - 20 April 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fed-indian-policy
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fed-indian-policy
Great Sioux War
1876
Battle of Little Bighorn / Custer’s Last Stand
Sitting Bull. (Bust). Photograph by D. F. Barry, 1885.
Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-2315 Digital ID: cph 3a06022 Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-2315 (b&w film copy neg.) Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540 USA http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/i?pp/PPALL:@field(NUMBER+@band(cph+3a06022)) http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html TIFF > JPEG by Anglonautes. Library of Congress > Pictorial Americana > Selected Images Western Life and Indian fighting http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/01/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/
Indian genocide > California
The state of sunshine and pleasure is drenched in the blood of Indians, the victims of mass killings.
These peaked between 1846, when Americans conquered California from Mexico, and 1873, when they snuffed out the last group resistance by natives in the state.
The slaughter of California’s Indians was rapid and thorough even by the grim standards prevailing elsewhere in North America.
Before 1846, California’s native peoples suffered great losses from diseases and dispossession.
But Spanish colonizers and their Mexican successors wanted to preserve Indians as mission inmates or as cheap and dependent farm labor.
The American newcomers, however, came by the thousands and treated natives as menaces best destroyed, the sooner the better.
Lacking firearms, subdivided into many distinct groups, and greatly outnumbered by 1852, the California natives were more vulnerable to attack than Indians elsewhere.
As Benjamin Madley writes in “An American Genocide,” by 1873, roaming bands of Indian-killers played a major role in reducing native numbers by more than 80 percent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/
American Old West > Pioneers
The pioneer's home. On the western Frontier. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1867, after F. F. Palmer.
Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-21 Digital ID: pga 00861 Source: digital file from original print Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-pga-00861 (digital file from original print) , LC-USZC2-3442 (color film copy slide) Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA TIFF > JPEG by Anglonautes. Library of Congress > Pictorial Americana > Selected Images Western Life and Indian fighting https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/
1890
Battle of Wounded Knee
killing of scores of unarmed Lakota men, women and children by soldiers of the United States Army’s Seventh Cavalry http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/opinion/save-wounded-knee.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/
Off-reservation boarding schools
The federal government began sending American Indians to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s, when the United States was still at war with Indians.
An Army officer, Richard Pratt, founded the first of these schools.
He based it on an education program he had developed in an Indian prison.
He described his philosophy in a speech he gave in 1892.
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," Pratt said.
"In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this:
that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.
Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
https://www.npr.org/2008/05/12/
When the U.S. federal government began its Indian Boarding School Initiative in the mid-19th century, the goal was clear:
to erase Indigenous cultures through a process of forced assimilation.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/10/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
January 1870
Lt Gustavus C Doane, a US army cavalry captain and explorer (...) led a massacre that killed around 175 Blackfeet people, and he continued to brag about the incident throughout his life.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/05/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/05/
1868
The Treaty of Fort Laramie (also the Sioux Treaty of 1868) was an agreement between the United States and the Oglala, Miniconjou, and Brulé bands of Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation, following the failure of the first Fort Laramie treaty, signed in 1851.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2018/aug/03/
1864
Sand Creek Massacre
In 1864, Col. John Chivington led a group of soldiers in an attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho village.
After attempting to make peace, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle had been ordered by the U.S. Army to camp along the banks of Sand Creek and fly an American flag, but this did not protect them from Colonel Chivington’s attack.
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Dakota War of 1862
Dakota Conflict Trials
Execution of thirty-eight Sioux Indians - December 26, 1862
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html
(The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862) started when Indian agents withheld food and supplies guaranteed under treaty with the Dakota people, part of an effort to force the Dakota off their land.
Hundreds died in the war that lasted a little over a month.
More than 300 Dakota warriors were sentenced to death, but there was public outcry.
Many religious leaders protested the executions to President Abraham Lincoln.
He reviewed each case and reduced the number to 38.
About 1,700 Dakota people, mostly women and children, who weren’t sentenced to death or prison were removed from Lower Agency to Fort Snelling in November 1862.
On Dec. 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato.
It was the largest single-day mass execution in U.S. history.
Lincoln signed the death warrants.
Two more Dakota chiefs were executed two years later.
Many of the incarcerated Dakota women and children died of cold and hunger that winter.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/12/23/
Execution of the thirty-eight Sioux Indians at Mankato, Minnesota, December 26, 1862.
Lithograph by Milwaukee Lith. & Engr. Co., 1863.
Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-193
Digital ID: cph 3a04167
Source: digital file from b&w film copy neg.
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
TIFF > JPEG by Anglonautes.
Library of Congress > Pictorial Americana > Selected Images Western Life and Indian fighting
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/12/23/
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/us/
https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/
Dakota War of 1862
Dakota Conflict Trials
Henry Benjamin Whipple 1822-1901
TITLE: H. P. Whipple REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-cwpbh-03015 (digital file from original neg.) MEDIUM: 1 negative : glass, wet collodion. CREATED/PUBLISHED: [between 1855 and 1865]
NOTES: Title from unverified information on negative sleeve. Forms part of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress). FORMAT: Portrait photographs 1850-1870. Glass negatives 1850-1870. REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA DIGITAL ID: (digital file from original neg.) cwpbh 0301 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.03015 TIFF > JPEG by Anglonautes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
1864-1866
The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo (Navajo: Hwéeldi), was the 1864 deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the United States federal government.
Navajos were forced to walk from their land in western New Mexico Territory (modern-day Arizona) to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico.
Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.ksut.org/culture/2024-01-05/
July 21, 1861
First Battle of Bull Run
The First Battle of Bull Run (the name used by Union forces), also known as the First Battle of Manassas (the name used by Confederate forces), was the first major battle of the American Civil War and was a Confederate victory.
The battle was fought on July 21, 1861 in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of the city of Manassas and about 25 miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C.
The Union's forces were slow in positioning themselves, allowing Confederate reinforcements time to arrive by rail.
Each side had about 18,000 poorly trained and poorly led troops in their first battle.
It was a Confederate victory, followed by a disorganized retreat of the Union forces. - 20 April 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
17 September 1851
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was signed on September 17, 1851 between United States treaty commissioners and representatives of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_Laramie_(1851)
1817-1818
1835-1842
1855-1858
the three Seminole Wars
https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/09/03/
The Trail of Tears
five Southern tribes were forced West in the 1830s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/
1835
Treaty of New Echota
In 1835, U.S. officials traveled to the Cherokee Nation’s capital in Georgia to sign a treaty forcing the Cherokees off their lands in the American South, opening them to white settlers.
The Treaty of New Echota sent thousands on a death march to new lands in Oklahoma.
The Cherokees were forced at gunpoint to honor the treaty, which stipulated that the Nation would be entitled to a nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives.
But Congress reneged on that promise.
Now, amid a growing movement across Indian Country for greater representation and sovereignty, the Cherokees are pushing to seat that delegate, 187 years later.
“For nearly two centuries, Congress has failed to honor that promise,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a recent interview in the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma.
“It’s time to insist the United States keep its word.”
The Cherokees and other tribal nations have made significant gains in recent decades, plowing income from sources like casino gambling into hospitals, meat-processing plants and lobbyists in Washington.
At the same time, though, those tribes are seeing new threats to their efforts to govern themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/
May 28, 1830
Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders.
A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy.
During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly moved west by the United States government.
Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this forced march, which became known as the "Trail of Tears."
https://guides.loc.gov/indian-removal-act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://guides.loc.gov/indian-removal-act#:
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/
https://www.npr.org/sections/
Florida’s Forgotten ‘Above-Ground’ Railroad
The Daily 360 The New York Times
Escaped slaves and Native Americans created a thriving community in the Florida Panhandle, but hundreds were killed when U.S. forces attacked it in 1816.
Here’s their story.
https://www.youtube.com/
https://www.youtube.com/
1803-1806
Lewis and Clark expedition
The Lewis and Clark Expedition from August 31, 1803 to September 25, 1806, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was the first expedition to cross the western portion of the United States.
It began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made its way westward, and crossed the Continental Divide of the Americas before reaching the Pacific coast.
The Corps of Discovery was a select group of U.S. Army and civilian volunteers under the command of Captain Meriwether Lewis and his close friend Second Lieutenant William Clark. - 20 April 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Clark_Expedition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/lewis-clark/
1786
The United States established its first Native American reservation
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/learn/
Documents about Native Americans
NARA
Native American Records at the National Archives
https://www.archives.gov/research/
https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/
NARA
Teaching With Documents:
Maps of Indian Territory
Dawes Act
Will Rogers' Enrollment Case File
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/
NARA
Pictures of Native Americans in the United States
https://www.archives.gov/research/
Library of Congress
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian
The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis is one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced.
Issued in a limited edition from 1907-1930, the publication continues to exert a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture.
Curtis said he wanted to document "the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners."
In over 2000 photogravure plates and narrative, Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifeways of eighty Indian tribes. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html - broken link
Library of Congress
History of the American West
Photographs 1860-1920
Over 30,000 photographs, drawn from the holding of the Western History and Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library, illuminate many aspects of the history of the American West.
Most of the photographs were taken between 1860 and 1920.
They illustrate Colorado towns and landscape, document the place of mining in the history of Colorado and the West, and show the lives of Native Americans from more than forty tribes living west of the Mississippi River.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/
Library of Congress
Pictorial Americana > Selected Images
Western Life and Indian fighting
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html
American Indians of the Pacific Northwest
This digital collection integrates over 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to the American Indians in two cultural areas of the Pacific Northwest, the Northwest Coast and Plateau.
https://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/
1779
The American Revolution and Native Americans
Narratives of atrocity were themselves weapons of war, and “both sides recognized the power of print media,” Hoock points out.
The Patriots’ near monopoly on American printing presses meant that reports of British and Hessian cruelty spread and survived disproportionately.
But Patriots, too, engaged in decidedly irregular warfare, especially with Britain’s native allies.
Hoock narrates the brutal “campaign of terror” Gen. John Sullivan waged in Iroquoia during the summer of 1779, a scorched-earth march involving one-third of the total Continental fighting force.
George Washington himself planned the campaign, telling Sullivan to pursue “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.
It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more,” wrote the Patriots’ supreme commander, whom the Seneca nicknamed Town Destroyer.
Sullivan followed Washington’s orders;
his men put at least 41 Indian towns to the torch.
They desecrated native graves, raped native women and mutilated native bodies for profit and for sport.
One lieutenant, William Barton, sent a party of his men “to look for some dead Indians.”
The soldiers returned to camp having skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs: a pair for Barton’s commander and “the other for myself,” he wrote in his official journal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/
1763
Conestoga Massacre in Pennsylvania
The Conestoga Massacre took place in Pennsylvania in December of 1763, when a band of around 50 white settlers rode 40 miles from Paxton Township to Conestoga Indian Town, (at the time, made up of 20 people.)
The white settlers, later dubbed the Paxton Boys, killed and mutilated six Conestoga in their homes, and then did the same for the remaining 14, who were sheltering in a workhouse nearby.
In the course of an afternoon, Conestoga Indian Town was no more.
In addition to wiping out the Conestoga, the massacre ignited long-simmering tensions between Scots-Irish frontiersman, which included the Paxton boys, and the Quaker elite, who were perceived to be running the Pennsylvania government.
People in the frontier believed that the Quakers gave resources to Native people at the expense of white settlers.
Over the course of the next few weeks, those tensions escalated, and in early 1764, white frontiersmen numbering in the hundreds marched east toward Philadelphia with the thinly-masked intention of wiping out even more Native people.
But before they arrived in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was able to deescalate the mob.
He convinced folks to put down their weapons and, instead, print their grievances for the local government to read.
What resulted was America's first "pamphlet war."
In more than 60 pamphlets and ten political cartoons, the settlers put their claims in writing.
According to Ghost River, "At stake was much more than the conduct of the Paxton murderers. Pamphleteers staked claims about westward settlement, representation, and white supremacy in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania."
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/02/26/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/02/26/
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Native Americans / American Indians
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