Throughout the 1800s, the unending stream of White people and goods moving westward took a terrible toll on Native American ecosystems and lifeways. The transcontinental railroads and settlements that sprang up alongside them disrupted traditional Native migration routes. Railroads also played a role in destroying the bison herds that were central to the Western Plains peoples’ diet and culture. Mining operations, cattle grazing, and large-scale farming took over land and diminished resources. By 1890, the keeper of the United States Census declared that the country’s frontier no longer existed. Even the more remote areas of the West contained pockets of Euro-American settlement.
West of the Mississippi River, thousands of Indigenous people succumbed to disease, hunger, and violence as a result of government-sanctioned policies of removal in the aftermath of military conflicts. Many were removed from their once vast homelands and forced into barren reservation communities, dependent on government rations. Native children living on reservations were forced to attend boarding schools, where they were compelled to change their language, dress, and religion, and were often abused. Yet, many Native people in the Midwest and West found other ways of surviving off the reservation, including work in the forestry, farming, and fishing industries, and military service.
East of the Mississippi, there were few tribal reservations. Northeastern Native American people persisted, sometimes in urban settings, and often in rural enclaves. During the early 1900s, Indigenous people found work in a wide variety of occupations, including, in the Northeast, constructing skyscrapers and bridges. New England town historians insisted that Indians had somehow disappeared, and census takers often coded them as “White” or “Colored,” but Native people were still here. Many families did not look like stereotypical “Indians.” They wore Euro-American clothing and spoke English, in effect “hiding in plain sight” alongside their White neighbors. Yet, there were dangers to being publicly identified, in Vermont and in other states where the eugenics movement aimed to sterilize Native and other people it deemed intellectually inferior or racially undesirable.
Some Native families continued their habits of seasonal hunting, fishing, and traveling through their traditional homelands. Others made a living by marketing Native handicrafts or hiring out as farm help, maids, or cooks in White homes and businesses. This 1889 photograph shows a group of Tuscarora females in Euro-American dress at Niagara Falls, New York, selling their beadwork and baskets to tourists.
