The End of the Plains Indian Way of Life

Between 1876 and 1890 the Plains Indian way of life — the nomadic, buffalo-based, band-organised society you studied in Lesson 2 — was systematically dismantled. This lesson covers the instruments of that destruction: the deliberate near-extermination of the buffalo, the expansion of the reservation system, the Dawes Act, the assimilation policies of the 1880s, and the closing events of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee. Edexcel expects you to frame this story analytically. Plains peoples were not simply defeated; their entire economic, social and spiritual base was targeted.

The Destruction of the Buffalo

You already know from Lesson 2 that the buffalo underpinned every aspect of Plains Indian society — food, shelter, tools, trade, ceremony. You also know from Lesson 4 that the transcontinental railroad cut through buffalo migration routes from 1869 onwards. Between 1870 and 1883 the buffalo population collapsed from an estimated 10–15 million to fewer than 1,000 wild animals on the Plains.

The mechanics of the collapse

Cause	Effect
Commercial hide hunting 1870–83	New tanning process enabled mass use of buffalo leather for industrial belts
Railroad access	Hunters could move in, hides could move out
Army encouragement	US commanders such as General Sheridan supported hide hunting to undermine Plains resistance
Rifle technology	Long-range rifles enabled "stands" where a single hunter killed hundreds of animals in an afternoon

This was not an accidental environmental tragedy. General Philip Sheridan, commanding the Plains Army, openly argued in 1875 that buffalo hunters were doing more to "settle the vexed Indian question" than the army itself, and urged Congress not to pass laws restricting the slaughter. The destruction of the buffalo was, in Edexcel's framing, a deliberate tool of US Indian policy.

Consequences for Plains society

• Starvation on the unceded hunting grounds; bands became dependent on federal rations.
• Loss of the material base of tipis, clothing, tools — replacing them required store-bought goods, and money for goods required accepting reservation life.
• Spiritual crisis. Buffalo were not just food but the centre of ceremonies such as the Sun Dance. Their disappearance was understood as a break in the spiritual fabric of Plains life.

For Q3 importance questions, the destruction of the buffalo is a very strong choice. It is a single event (or rather, sustained process) that operated simultaneously on economic, social and spiritual levels.

The Reservation System

By the early 1880s almost every Plains Indian nation had been confined to a reservation — a federally defined area, much smaller than the territory the nation had previously used. The Lakota reservations in Dakota, the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), and the Comanche and Kiowa reservation to the south, were the main examples.

Life on the Reservation

Reservation life was structured to break the old patterns.

• Geography: Bands confined to defined boundaries; movement controlled by US Indian agents.
• Economy: Rations issued weekly in exchange for "good behaviour"; subsistence hunting almost impossible once the buffalo were gone.
• Governance: US-appointed agents held day-to-day power, often selecting compliant chiefs ("agency chiefs") and bypassing traditional councils.
• Work: Agents pushed farming on semi-arid land that often could not support it; failed crops then became evidence of "Indian idleness".

Reservations were administered under a policy explicitly aimed at assimilation — replacing Plains culture with a white-American settler model.

The Dawes Act 1887

The Dawes General Allotment Act (named after Senator Henry Dawes) was signed into law on 8 February 1887. It ended the legal fiction of collectively held tribal reservations and replaced it with individual allotment.

Provision	Meaning
160 acres to each head of household	Match to the Homestead Act model
80 acres to each single adult	Fragmenting tribal territory
Surplus reservation land sold	Enormous lands opened to white settlement
US citizenship granted to allottees	On condition of accepting allotment
25-year trust period	Land could not be sold during trust but could be lost afterwards

Effects

• Direct land loss: Plains Indian land holdings fell from roughly 138 million acres in 1887 to around 48 million by 1934 — a ~65% reduction.
• Erosion of communal life: Allotment imposed individual farming on peoples whose economic and social life had been communal.
• Poverty deepened: Small, often arid allotments could not support families, and land was frequently lost to tax default once the 25-year trust ended.

The Dawes Act is one of the most examinable events in this course because it is a single, dateable federal law with sweeping cultural and material consequences. For Q3 it pairs naturally with the destruction of the buffalo as a joint argument about the dismantling of Plains life.

Assimilation: Schools, Hair, Language

Alongside land policy ran a systematic assimilation programme aimed at Indigenous children. Its instruments included: