Sprawling in expanse, the Great West was a rough square that measured about 1,000 miles on each side. Embracing mountains, plateaus, deserts, and plains, it was the habitat of the Indian, the buffalo, the wild horse, the prairie dog, and the coyote. Twenty-five years later the entire domain had been carved into states and the four territories of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and the "Indian Territory," or Oklahoma. Pioneers flung themselves greedily on this enormous prize, as if to ravish it. Never before in human experience, probably, had so huge an area been transformed so rapidly.

Native Americans numbered about 360,000 in 1860, most of them still ranging freely over the vast, vacant trans-Mississippi East. But to their misfortune, the Indians stood in the pat

The Indian wars in the West were often savage clashes. Aggressive whites sometimes shot peaceful Indians on sight, just to make sure they would give no trouble. At Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, Colonel J. M. Chivington's militia massacred in cold blood some four hundred Indians who apparently thought they had been promised immunity. In 1866 a Sioux war party attempting to block construction of the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields ambushed Captain William J. Fetterman's command of eighty-one soldiers and civilians in Wyoming's Big Horn Moungresquely mutilated the corpses. The Fetterman massacre led to one of the few- though short-lived- Indian triumphs in the plains wars. In another Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, the government abandoned the Bozeman Trail. The sprawling "Great Sioux reservation" was guaranteed to the Sioux tribes. Then in 1874, Colonel Custer led a "scientific" expidition into the Black Hills of South Dakota and announced that he had discovered gold. Hordes of greedy gold-seekers rushed to the Dakota Territory. The aggrieved Sioux, their lands invaded despite treaty guarantees, took to the warpath. Colonel Custer's Seventh Cavalry, nearly half of whose troopers were foreign-born immigrants, set out to suppress the Indians and to return them to the reservation. The Nez Perce Indians of Idaho were also goaded into warfare in 1877, when gold discoveries on their reservation prompted the federal government to shrink its size by 90 percent.

h of the advancing white American settlers. Like the blades of mighty scissors, two lines of onward-moving pioneers were closing simultaneously- one from the Pacific coast, the other from the trans-Mississippi East. An inevitable clash loomed between an acquisitive civilization and a traditional culture as the march of modernity crushed under its feet the hunting grounds, and hence th

Some common words found in the essay are:
Civil War, Native American, Native Americans, Indian Territory, Kansas Pacific, Fort Atkinson, Southwest Sprawling, Indians Humanitarians, Sioux Minnesota, Colonel Chivington's, civil war, federal government, native american culture, plains tribes, fort laramie, federal troops, native american, hunting grounds, dakota territory, indian territory, repeating rifles,
Approximate Word count = 1264
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)