Chapter 26

The Plains Indians — including the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche — had built a way of life around the vast buffalo herds of the Great Plains, but the westward push of railroads, miners, and settlers after the Civil War brought relentless pressure on their land and livelihood. Commercial hunters nearly exterminated the buffalo herds by the 1880s, gutting the Plains tribes' economic and spiritual foundation.

Armed resistance flared repeatedly, most famously at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors annihilated Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's Seventh Cavalry. The victory proved short-lived, as the U.S. Army poured reinforcements into the region and gradually forced Native nations onto reservations.

Federal policy increasingly favored breaking up tribal identity altogether. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 dissolved communal tribal landholding in favor of individual allotments meant to encourage assimilation and farming, while "surplus" land was opened to white settlers — a policy that stripped Native nations of tens of millions of acres.

In the late 1880s the spiritual Ghost Dance movement, promising the buffalo's return and the disappearance of white settlers, spread fear among federal authorities. In December 1890, U.S. troops killed roughly 150 to 300 Lakota Sioux, many unarmed, at the Wounded Knee Massacre, effectively ending armed Native resistance on the Plains.

Discoveries like Nevada's Comstock Lode touched off a series of mining rushes across the Mountain West, drawing prospectors to boomtowns that often busted as quickly as they boomed once the easy ore ran dry. The same railroads that carried ore east also opened new markets for Texas cattle.

Cowboys drove enormous herds north on the Long Drive to railhead towns in Kansas, feeding a brief golden age of the open range. The invention of cheap barbed wire in the 1870s, combined with brutally harsh winters in the mid-1880s, fenced in the range and ended the era of the free-roaming cattle drive.

The Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres of free public land to settlers who lived on and improved it, luring hundreds of thousands onto the semi-arid Great Plains. Lacking timber, many built sod houses ("soddies") from blocks of prairie turf, battling drought, grasshopper plagues, and brutal isolation.

Mechanization — steel plows, seed drills, and threshers — let farm families work ever-larger tracts, but falling crop prices, driven by overproduction and global competition, often left them deeper in debt even as their harvests grew. Many farmers came to see the railroads, banks, and grain elevators that handled their crops as exploitative middlemen squeezing their livelihoods.

In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau announced that a continuous frontier line could no longer be identified on its population maps. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner seized on this milestone in his influential 1893 essay proposing the frontier thesis: that the ever-available frontier had shaped a distinctly American spirit of democracy, self-reliance, and individualism.

Turner's thesis, though later criticized for largely ignoring Native Americans, women, and non-white settlers, captured a widespread sense that a defining chapter of American development — and the seemingly endless supply of "free" western land — had come to a close.

Squeezed by debt, falling prices, and high railroad rates, farmers organized through the Grange (Patrons of Husbandry) and later the Farmers' Alliance, building cooperatives and pushing state "Granger Laws" to regulate railroads. By 1892 this agrarian discontent had crystallized into the Populist (People's) Party, which demanded free silver, a graduated income tax, and government ownership of railroads.

At the heart of the Populists' program was the demand for free silver — unlimited coinage of silver alongside gold — which farmers believed would inflate the currency and ease their crushing debts, pitting indebted agrarian interests against the era's creditor and banking classes who favored a strict gold standard.

The money question exploded at the 1896 Democratic convention, where young Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan electrified delegates with his "Cross of Gold" speech, declaring that mankind should not be crucified "upon a cross of gold." Bryan won both the Democratic and Populist nominations, uniting agrarian reformers behind a single ticket.

Republican William McKinley, backed by industrialist campaign chief Mark Hanna and huge sums from business interests, ultimately defeated Bryan by appealing to urban workers and defending the gold standard and protective tariffs. The election marked both the climax and the decline of agrarian Populism as a major independent political force.