In the 1880s, the practice of rounding up Indians and herding them onto reservations lost momentum in favor of allotment — a new policy designed to encourage assimilation through farming and the ownership of private property. Americans vowing to avenge Custer urged the government to get tough with the Indians. Reservations, they argued, took up too much good land that white settlers could put to better use. At the same time, people sympathetic to the Indians were appalled at the desperate poverty on the reservations and feared for the Indians’ survival. Helen Hunt Jackson, in her classic work A Century of Dishonor (1881), convinced many readers that the Indians had been treated unfairly. “Our Indian policy,” the New York Times concluded, “is usually spoliation behind the mask of benevolence.”

The Indian Rights Association, a group of mainly white easterners formed in 1882, campaigned for the dismantling of the reservations, now viewed as obstacles to progress. To “cease to treat the Indian as a red man and treat him as a man” meant putting an end to tribal communalism and fostering individualism. “Selfishness,” declared Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, “is at the bottom of civilization.” Dawes called for “allotment in severalty” — the institution of private property.

In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Allotment Act, dividing up reservations and allotting parcels of land to individual Indians as private property.

The Dawes Act effectively reduced Indian land from 138 million acres to a scant 48 million. The legislation, in the words of one critic, worked “to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth.” By 1890, the United States controlled 97.5 percent of the territory formerly occupied by Native Americans.