The Advancing Frontier

The Advancing Frontier. . , In the mid-1800s, the United States had a growing appetite for land and natural resources. Wanting to expand across the continent, Congress passed the Donation Land Claim Act in 1850, offering free land to encourage settlement in the Oregon Territory., Soon, thousands of settlers, miners, and hunters were swarming across lands that belonged to the tribes of the northern Great Plains. As the influx of newcomers grew, so did their impact on Native American land. Hunters began killing buffalo by the thousands, and large wagon trains consumed or destroyed grass, game, and timber., "The white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm." , , Chief Little Crow, Santee Dakota, August 18, 1862, The map above is from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. The treaty established the traditional territories of several northern Great Plains tribes. The Indians allowed safe passage for settlers on the Oregon Trail in return for food and supplies for 50 years., Tatanka Iyotaka (Sitting Bull), a Hunkpapa Sioux leader and medicine man, refused to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty., "Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us." , , John Louis O'Sullivan, New York Morning News, December 27, 1845 American Progress, by John Gast, 1872.