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The history of the American West between 1835 and 1895 is the story of how a vast, sparsely populated region was transformed in the space of a single human lifetime. In 1835 the United States ended at the Mississippi River in most practical senses; the Great Plains were understood by white Americans as the "Great American Desert" — a buffer that would never be settled. By 1895, railroads crossed the continent, cities had risen on the Plains, the buffalo had been driven to the edge of extinction, and the Plains Indian nations had been forced onto reservations. Understanding how and why this change happened — and at what cost — is the core task of this Edexcel Paper 2 Period Study.
This first lesson gives you the geography of the West, the idea of Manifest Destiny that drove settlers into it, and a grounded introduction to the Plains Indian nations whose homelands these were.
The West in Edexcel's specification is not a single landscape. It is three very different zones stacked against each other from east to west.
| Zone | Terrain | Significance 1835–95 |
|---|---|---|
| Eastern Plains | Tall-grass prairie, wooded river valleys | First ploughed by homesteaders; border with settled United States |
| Great Plains | Short-grass, semi-arid, treeless | Buffalo range, Plains Indian homelands; last settled |
| Rocky Mountains and beyond | High mountains, deserts, Pacific coast | Mining frontiers; destination of Oregon and California trails |
The Great Plains are the region that matters most for this course. They stretch roughly from the 98th meridian west to the foothills of the Rockies, and from Texas in the south up to the Canadian border. The climate is harsh: hot summers, bitter winters, little rainfall, strong winds, no trees for building, and soil held together by a thick mat of grass roots (sod) that broke ordinary ploughs. These features shaped every human society that tried to live there.
To white Americans looking west in the 1830s, the Plains looked useless. An 1820 expedition by Stephen Long had labelled the area the "Great American Desert" on its maps. That label would stick until the 1860s, when new technologies and new political pressures made the Plains suddenly attractive. For the Plains Indians, however, the same land was rich: rich in buffalo, rich in spiritual meaning, rich in the freedom that nomadic life required.
Manifest Destiny is the belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The phrase was coined in 1845 by the journalist John O'Sullivan, but the idea was older and outlasted the phrase.
Three strands made up Manifest Destiny:
flowchart TD
A[Manifest Destiny] --> B[Religious duty to spread civilisation]
A --> C[Political spread of republican government]
A --> D[Racial ideas of white superiority]
B --> E[Settler migration 1840s-60s]
C --> E
D --> E
E --> F[Oregon Trail and Gold Rush]
E --> G[Pressure on Plains Indian lands]
Manifest Destiny is not just background. It is causally central. Every major event in this course — the Oregon Trail, the Homestead Act, the conflict with the Plains Indians, the Dawes Act — was justified in its own time by appeal to Manifest Destiny. When you explain why something happened, this ideology is often part of the answer.
Before white settlement, the Great Plains were home to around thirty Indigenous nations. Edexcel expects you to know the main groups by name and their general locations. For this course, the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho are the most important because they are the peoples most involved in the conflicts you will study in later lessons.
The Lakota Sioux (sometimes called the Teton Sioux) were the dominant nation on the northern Plains by the mid-nineteenth century. They were themselves a confederation of seven related bands, including the Oglala (led later by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse) and the Hunkpapa (led by Sitting Bull). By 1835 the Lakota had pushed west from the Minnesota woodlands, adopted the horse, and built a powerful buffalo-hunting culture across the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana. Their sacred lands included the Black Hills of Dakota, which would become a flashpoint later in the century.
The Cheyenne lived to the south of the Lakota, on the central Plains of Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska. They split into a Northern and Southern branch in the mid-century as US settlement pressed between them. The Cheyenne were close military allies of the Lakota, and their leaders, such as Black Kettle, tried repeatedly to hold peace with the US government — often at terrible cost.
The Arapaho lived alongside the Cheyenne and were closely allied with them. They, too, split into northern and southern groups. The Arapaho are particularly important because, together with the Cheyenne, they were the main victims of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.
You should also recognise by name the Comanche (southern Plains, dominant horsemen), the Kiowa (southern Plains, allied to the Comanche), the Crow (northern Plains, often hostile to the Lakota), and the Pawnee (central Plains). The Crow and Pawnee frequently worked as scouts for the US Army — a reminder that the Plains nations were not a single bloc and had their own histories of conflict and alliance long before white settlers arrived.
| Nation | Region | Key figures in this course |
|---|---|---|
| Lakota Sioux | Northern Plains, Dakotas | Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse |
| Cheyenne | Central Plains | Black Kettle |
| Arapaho | Central Plains | Little Raven |
| Comanche | Southern Plains | — |
| Crow | Upper Missouri | US Army scouts |
You cannot understand Plains Indian society — or its destruction — without understanding the buffalo (more accurately, the American bison). Historians estimate that around 30 million buffalo roamed the Plains in 1800. The animal provided Plains peoples with food (meat, dried pemmican), shelter (tipi hides), clothing (robes, moccasins), tools (bone awls, horn cups), fuel (dried dung), and ceremonial meaning. A Plains family required roughly six buffalo a year; a large band of 200 might take several hundred.
The buffalo is therefore not a side-note. Its fate, in the 1870s and 1880s, will become the fate of Plains Indian independence itself. The deliberate near-extermination of the buffalo, which you will study in Lesson 7, was the single most devastating blow to Plains Indian society — because it struck at every system at once: food, shelter, trade, and spiritual life.
The Plains Indian societies you will study did not exist in their 1835 form for ever. The horse arrived on the Plains only after Spanish settlement in the south-west; Plains nations acquired horses through trade and capture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1835 the horse had revolutionised Plains life:
This matters for the exam because it tells you that "Plains Indian traditional society" was itself quite recent — a flexible culture that had adapted dramatically within the previous 150 years. When US settlers characterised Plains peoples as "unchanging", they were wrong both morally and historically.
A quick note before you go. Paper 2 Section A is the Period Study paper. The American West is one option; Superpower Relations and the Cold War is another. You have about 50 minutes for this section and will answer three questions worth a total of 32 marks.
| Question | Marks | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 Explain two consequences of… | 8 | AO1 knowledge + AO2 consequences |
| Q2 Write a narrative account of… | 8 | AO1 + AO2 causal sequencing |
| Q3 Explain the importance of two of the following three… | 16 | AO1 + AO2 significance, choice |
Every lesson in this course is built to feed those three question types. You will not just collect facts — you will build the analytical moves the exam rewards.
This content is aligned with the Edexcel GCSE History (1HI0) Paper 2 Period Study specification.