Dawes Severalty Act (1887) Commentary by G. Mehera Gerardo, Youngstown State University

Context

Following the Civil War, Americans had a reinvigorated interest in western migration. Transnational railroads made western migration safer and faster than it had been in the past. At the same time, rapid population growth resulting largely from immigration contributed to overcrowding of urban areas and competition for jobs. Many saw the Jeffersonian hope for a nation of independent homesteaders as less and less realistic. Nevertheless, many Americans resisted “wage slavery,” determined to pursue the dream of homesteading. The federal government aided potential homesteaders by passing the Homestead Act in 1862, providing land grants to hundreds of thousands of Americans.

White American migration into the West did not occur without opposition, however. The trans-Mississippi West was home to both American Indians native to that region and tribes that had been forcibly migrated from the eastern United States in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These groups...