American Reconstruction and Westward Expansion

The goal of the American Reconstruction was to rebuild the country after the Civil War and integrate the West into the country as a social and economic replica of the North.

One way the government attempted to integrate the West was through land redistribution, which formed the centerpiece of reform.

The winter of 1877 saw the culmination of the wars that had been raging on the Great Plains and elsewhere in the West since the end of the Civil War.

Following the American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn the previous fall, American soldiers drove the Lakota civil and spiritual leader Sitting Bull and his followers into Canada.

They forced the war leader Crazy Horse to surrender and later killed him while he was held prisoner. Sitting Bull would eventually return to the United States, but he died in 1890 at the hands of the Indian police during the Wounded Knee crisis.

The defeat of the Lakotas and the utterly unnecessary Nez Perce War of 1877 ended the long era of Indian wars.

There would be other small-scale conflicts in the West such as the Bannock War (1878) and the subjugation of the Apaches, but these were largely police actions.

The slaughter of Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890 did bring a major mobilization of American troops, but it was a kind of coda to the American conquest since the federal government had already effectively extended its power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.