Native American History - HIST 372 Resource Guide

The Battle of the Little Bighorn took place on 25 June 1876. It resulted in the death of about 265 officers and troops of the 7th Cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer. The battle was the most serious defeat of the US army during the war for the Great Plains.

Conflict between the Sac and Fox and the United States in 1832

Begun as colonial muscling for control of the Ohio River valley, the French and Indian War (1754-1760) ignited the worldwide conflict between the British and French known as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and ended France’s North American empire.

More than forty major wars were fought from 1775 to 1891 between the United States and the Indians of America's “First Nations.” A total of 395 treaties were made after 1775 between the United States and Indian nations, and these remain in force as a part of the U.S. legal system. In addition, more than 200 other agreements and negotiations made with Indian nations are still factors in defining Indian legal rights today.

In American history, general term referring to the series of conflicts between Europeans and their descendants and the indigenous peoples of North America.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather guide
Series of conflicts between the Plains Indians and the US Army 1850-90, during the era of US westward expansion. The Great Plains had been promised to the American Indians forever under the Permanent Indian Frontier policy of 1830, but had been increasingly invaded from the 1840s and the Indians forced onto Indian reservations.

From Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century
The three Seminole Wars were induced by white lust for land, irreconcilable cultural differences, and slavery. In the early nineteenth century the Florida borders were in constant turmoil as slaves escaped from Georgia and Alabama and parties of slave catchers roved through Spanish North Florida.

Forced march of Indian tribes from the eastern United States to Oklahoma

Area reserved for occupation by American Indian people in northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and northwestern New Mexico

Site on the Oglala Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA, of a confrontation between the US Army and American Indians on 29 December 1890; the last ‘battle’ of the Plains Wars

Reservations were first created by seventeenth-century English colonizers and imposed on American Indian nations to remove them from the path of white settlement. Reservations also provided a place where missionaries could show Indians how to live, work, and worship like themselves. The United States took up this practice, employing military might, fraud, and deception to create hundreds of tribal reserves established by treaty, executive order, or congressional decree.

Indian Territory was never a territory in the strict political sense of the term. For the entire period of its existence, it was an unorganized territory, meaning that there was never a territorial government or a federally appointed territorial governor. The only governments were those of the resident tribes. Thus Indian Territory was defined not by what it was, but rather by what it was not: Indian Territory was the Indian-occupied region of the central United States that was not part of any state or organized territory.