Westward Expansion
After reading the Background Materials and the passage below, discuss the following questions. Use additional resources to support your ideas and to strengthen your argument.
The excerpt is from a book entitled Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. In her book, Sandoz recalls stories she had heard as a child growing up in “Crazy Horse country” in the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota. This is an account of how many Native Americans, including Crazy Horse, reacted to the arrival of “the white man.”
1. Who was Crazy Horse? Define what you think his role was:
a) from the Native American viewpoint and
b) from a historical viewpoint.
2. Present two of Crazy Horse’s observations about the arrival of white settlers. Do you think his observations were correct, why or why not?
3. How did westward expansion affect Native American culture and land? Do you think the Native Americans could have stopped the westward migration? Why or why not?
“So the trail had started, with just a little stream of white men coming through, and the Indian lifted his hand in welcome and went out to smoke and watch this lengthening village of the whites that moved past him day after day all summer, always headed in the same direction. He wondered that he never saw them come back, yet they must be the same ones each year, for there could not be that many people on all the earth. At first he wondered at the women and children too, for he had long thought of the whites as only men, although he had heard stories of the families that had been seen, the women with the pale, sick skins, and the break-in-two bodies, the young ones pale too, with light hair and soft as the flying seed of the cottonwood that tickles the nose in the summer.
Even when there were quite a few on the trail the Indians had let the whites use his trader town while he sat with his pipe and blanket looking on as they bought perhaps a handful of gunpowder or the last cup of flour for a sick woman, or had their footsore oxen shod at three dollars a shoe. Often they left more wagons behind with the many already standing dead as old bones around the fort because the animals that were to pull them over the far mountains had been worn out.
Puffing on his long-stemmed pipe of stone the Indian had watched all these things and found them very strange and new. But soon the little stream of whites grew into a great river, wider than a gun could shoot across, and the grass and the buffalo got so used up that the Indian ponies were poor far into sundance time and the hunters had to travel many days, sometimes clear to the Crow country, for a kettle of fresh meat. There was uneasiness about this, and much talk at the councils. The younger chiefs and warriors from up on the Cheyenne River or down in the Smoky Hill country and other places back from the white man’s road were angry at the things they saw happening. And when the trader chiefs like Conquering Bear and Bull Tail and old Smoke made strong talk for continued peace with the people on the trail, the others called them Loaf About the Forts and said they had sold their tongues to the white man for his sugar and coffee and whisky.
