A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 4: Ulysses S. Grant (II)

GRANT’SMAJOR ISSUES

Immigration and the nativist backlashConflicts with the Lakota Sioux

THECOMSTOCK LODE

• In 1859, eleven years after gold was discovered in California,a massive deposit of silver ore was discovered in present-day Nevada, which was part of the Utah Territory at the time.

• This deposit became known as the Comstock Lode after Henry Comstock, the man who first filed a claim for the surrounding land.

THE IRON HORSE

In 1862, two railroad companies, Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad, received Congressional contracts to connect the Mississippi River with the West Coast.

Their instructions were to build two railway lines, one moving eastward from San Francisco and one moving westward from Omaha, and have them meet up in the middle.

THETEXAS-INDIAN WARS

After Texas was admitted into the Union in 1846, the United States federal government assumed control over an ongoing war between Texas and the Comanche Indians whose territory had been lost to settlers. The war became especially bloody after 1858, as settlement activities increased.

TRANSPORT, TREASURE, AND TRIBAL CONFLICTS

• On May 10, 1869, two months after Grant took the oath of office, the ‘golden spike’ was driven into the railway lines at Promontory, Utah, to connect the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific and create the transcontinental railroad.

• With transport infrastructure connecting the two coasts of North America, and with abundant gold and silver mining opportunities in the West, settlers who hoped to ‘strike it rich’ were flocking to the middle of the country.

• Their settlement efforts and their greed for land repeatedly brought them into conflict with the Indian tribes of the central plains throughout the 1870s.

GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

• Union Army soldier who fought at the First Battle of Bull Run and served under Grant during the Appomattox Campaign at the end of the Civil War.

• Took charge of the Seventh Cavalry in 1867, moving Westward to engage in military actions against the Cheyenne Indians of the Kansas area.

• In July 1874, led an expedition from North Dakota into the Black Hills of South Dakota in order to find suitable locations for military forts.

A GOLD RUSH IN SOUTH DAKOTA

• Custer’s Black Hills Expedition discovered gold near present-day Custer, South Dakota. The discovery sparked a gold rush during which vast deposits of gold were unearthed in the area of Deadwood, South Dakota.

• Thousands of settlers and would-be miners flocked to South Dakota to claim a share of what was possibly the last gold deposit in North America.

• This flood of people antagonized the Lakota Sioux, the native inhabitants of the Black Hills and the surrounding plains.

GRANT’S INDIAN POLICY

• Grant made stronger efforts than any other President to maintain peaceful relations with Indians by avoiding the use of the military for purposes of removal to the Indian Territory.

• He also appointed a Seneca man, Ely Parker, as his Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

• Grant’s approach to Indian relations was largely successful, with a rise in the signing of peace treaties and a reduction in the severity of conflicts.

THE LAKOTA SIOUX

• Unfortunately for Grant, settlement efforts in South Dakota resulted in the excessive slaughter of buffalo,a major resource of the Lakota Sioux, as well as incursions onto Sioux land by gold prospectors.

• In response to these antagonisms, the Lakota Sioux began launching raids on settlers’ encampments.

• In response to these raids, the United States Army, and particularly Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, assumed responsibility for protecting the settlers.

• This forced the United States into a military conflict with the Lakota Sioux and their allies, the Cheyenne. The war between these parties lasted from 1876 to 1877 and is known as the Black Hills War.

• The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and the military strategist Crazy Horse led the charge against Custer’s cavalry.

THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

• On June 25, 1876, Custer and his seven hundred men encountered a party of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors near the Little Bighorn river in present-day Montana.

• They were essentially hunting for the war party, expecting it to be made up of Sitting Bull’s usual force of about eight hundred warriors.

• In fact, Sitting Bull had as many as 2,500 warriors in the area.

THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

• The result was the massacre of the Seventh Cavalry in an advance into Sioux territory known as ‘Custer’s Last Stand.’

• Custer himself and almost three hundred men were slaughtered, either shot to death with arrows or hacked with tomahawks.

• When the first of his men saw the size of the Lakota Sioux war party, they broke ranks and scattered, and this made them easier targets for the Indians.

THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

• News of Custer’s defeat and death reached the east coast on July 4, 1876, amidst the nation’s bicentennial celebrations.

• Custer was immediately mythologized as a romantic hero, the brave victim of uncivilized brutes who would not be tamed.

• In a ‘Death-Sonnet for Custer’ published in national newspapers, the poet Walt Whitman bemoaned “The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,” and mourned “The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism...”

GRANT RESPONDS TO CUSTER’S DEATH

• In effect, the mythologized Custer came to represent all the white victims of Indian warfare. His death stirred white nativist outrage at the refusal of Native Americans to submit to the settlement of their lands after more than two centuries of war.

• Although Grant blamed the Battle of the Little Bighorn on Custer’s poor military tactics, he was forced to abandon much of his peaceful approach to Indian relations when the Congress set aside funds for 2,500 more troops to be sent Westward and the Army began the construction of new forts in the Dakota Territory.

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 3: Reconstruction and UrbanizationPart 4: Ulysses S. Grant (II)