The American Yawp — Chapter Sixteen: Geographies of Empire
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

After the Civil War, the United States pushed across the continent and then overseas. Believing in Manifest Destiny—the idea that Americans were destined to expand—settlers poured into the West, the army destroyed Native sovereignty, and by 1900 America had become a global empire.

The 1862 Homestead Act promised cheap land, and railroads carried settlers west in record numbers. Hunters nearly wiped out the bison—from over ten million to a few hundred—destroying the Plains Indians' way of life. The army forced Native peoples onto reservations. On the southern Plains, the Comanche and Kiowa fought the Red River War but were defeated and moved to a reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. When gold was found in the Black Hills in 1874, miners flooded Sioux land. In June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and 268 of his men were killed at the Little Bighorn. In the Northwest, Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce on a thousand-mile flight toward Canada before surrendering: "I will fight no more forever." In 1886 the Apache leader Geronimo surrendered in Arizona. Native children were sent to boarding schools like Carlisle, where the superintendent promised to "kill the Indian and save the man"—to assimilate them into white culture.

Railroads made the West. The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. The Pacific Railroad Act gave companies bonds and more than 175 million acres of land—a government subsidy larger than Texas. Railroad mileage grew from 9,000 miles in 1850 to 190,000 in 1900. Cattle drives moved Texas cattle north along trails like the Chisholm Trail to rail towns in Kansas.

In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Act, which broke reservations into individual family farms of 160 acres and sold the remaining "surplus" land to white settlers. The act destroyed tribal landholding. In 1889 the Paiute prophet Wovoka promised that the Ghost Dance would bring back the buffalo and make whites disappear. Frightened officials sent troops; on December 29, 1890, soldiers carried out a massacre of between 150 and 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Even as Native power fell, Americans romanticized the West. Dime novels, rodeos, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show (1883) sold a myth of cowboys and Indians. In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier had shaped American democracy—though the Census Bureau had declared the frontier closed in 1890.

America also reached overseas. In 1899 Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open Door Policy, demanding equal trade access in China, and the United States was ready to intervene abroad to protect its interests. The United States voted to annex Hawaii in 1898. In Cuba, a Spanish colony, the brutal reconcentration policy—forcing civilians into guarded camps—horrified Americans, and reports of each new atrocity spread outrage. When the battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in February 1898, "yellow journals" demanded war. Congress declared war on Spain in April. Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila, and Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders charged San Juan Hill. The Treaty of Paris gave the U.S. Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Filipinos under Emilio Aguinaldo, who had fought Spain, now fought American occupation in a bloody guerrilla insurrection from 1899 to 1902. Critics like Mark Twain formed the Anti-Imperialist League, and debates over imperialism divided the nation.

President Theodore Roosevelt made America a world power. "Speak softly and carry a big stick," he said. He sent the Great White Fleet around the world (1907–1909), added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904—claiming U.S. police power in Latin America—and helped Panama break from Colombia to build the Panama Canal. For mediating peace between Russia and Japan, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.