The Claim

In the seven decades following the 1783 Treaty of Paris the United States doubled and tripled in size to span the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 the United States had grown from sixteen states (in 1800) to thirty-four. The rapid expansion brought problems, not least the troubling question of whether the new states were to be admitted to the union as free states or ’slave states’. A constitutional balancing act began with the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1821 and the counterbalancing admission of Maine as a free state. In the following decades the rift between free and slave states grew wider, exacerbated by political tensions arising from economic and cultural differences between the agrarian southern states and the industrial northern states. A popular abolitionist movement further contributed to the resentment growing on both sides of the divide.Matters came to a head with the election of the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. Before his inauguration, seven southern states seceded from the Union. Within weeks of Lincoln’s swearing-in, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in 1861 and the Civil War had begun. By the time Book Three: The Claim opens, the bloody and defining battle of Gettysburg (1863) is underway. The Post-Civil War United States was characterised by Reconstruction: the effort to reintegrate the defeated Southern States and their populations back into the Union. The country underwent profound change as it struggled to redress the political and economic legacy of the war and the inequities of slavery. In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act granting families 160 acres of land upon payment of a small registration fee. The Act lured tens of thousands of settlers westwards into Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas. By the turn of the century more than 80 million acres had been claimed by a total of 600,000 homestead farmers.1 Despite its distant location in the Upper Midwest, the Dakota Territory proved attractive to homesteaders as the railway companies campaigned to entice settlers. The Missouri River formed an artery for transporting settlers to the high grass plains of the Territory where they took possession of land formerly claimed by the Sioux and other tribes. The combined effects of the railway and the mass influx of homesteaders had devastating consequences for Native American tribes and the vast herds of buffalo that grazed the Northern and Central Great Plains. Hunters armed with new, large-calibre rifles flocked to take advantage of the booming demand for buffalo robes transported by the railways to eastern markets. It is estimated that up to 200,000 buffalo a year were slaughtered for their robes, the carcasses left to rot in the prairie grass. TFrom a population estimated at 20-30 million at the turn of the century, the enormous buffalo herds were reduced to approximately 300 survivors by 1883, perhaps the greatest mass slaughter of a species in human history. After a long and bitter struggle against the US Army and deprived of their major food source, the remaining Native American tribes were forced onto reservations. Thus, a subsistence lifestyle that had endured for a thousand years was all but wiped out in little more than the span of a single lifetime.