The Civil War (1861-1865) impacted Native Americans in several ways. Westward expansion was delayed by the hostilities, and some tribes were punished for having allied themselves with the Confederacy. With the war's end came the completion of the Transcontinental Railroads and increased pressure on the Plains Indians. White encroachment and the direct threat to the Native way of life on the Plains resulted in several decades of hostilities, and a government policy aimed at solving the "Indian problem" by breaking up the reservation. The Indian Wars on the Great Plains culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.
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Ever since Sitting Bull's surrender in 1881, every American generation has recreated the historic conflict with the Plains Indians dramatically; in photographs, Wild West Shows, Victorian Adversing, dime novels, paintings, early cinema, pulps, literature, comic books, movies, radio, and on television. That the Western genre of entertainment still thrives reflects the dominant culture's need to dramatize its history and to believe in the righteousness of that history's outcome. This section emphasizes the critical time period from 1881-1913, when the mythic American West became firmly entrenched in the popular imagination and the Indian became firmly stuck in time. Discussed here are the series of published photographs of Sitting Bull's surrender, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and the Indian as advertisement in the Victorian era. [enter]