As the US pushed its borders westward over the course of the 19th century, in pursuit of what the newspaper columnist John O’Sullivan in 1845 termed “our manifest destiny,” the fledgling nation came into conflict not only with Mexico—itself newly broken free from the Spanish Empire—but also with the many Indigenous groups that had lived on the land since long before the first Europeans arrived.

Relations between white settlers and the Indigenous peoples of the West were largely peaceful in the early decades of the 19th century. Fur trappers established trade relations with Indigenous groups, and those traveling westward on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails were protected by treaties that recognized tribal sovereignty while granting safe passage to settlers moving through tribal lands. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie forms a capstone to this peaceful era, and the fact that the US government broke the treaty almost as soon as it had been ratified signals the era’s end. The treaty allowed the US to build roads through tribal lands in the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, but it also stipulated that these lands belonged to the tribes and that the US did not

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