In the 1880s, the practice of rounding up and herding Indians 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’s defeat urged the government to get tough with the Indians. Reservations, they argued, took up too much good land that white settlers coveted and forced Americans to support “lazy” reservation Indians. 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, which divided up reservations and allotted parcels of land to individual Indians as private property. Each unmarried Indian man and woman as well as married men and children (married women were excluded) became eligible to receive 160 acres of land from reservation property. Indians who took allotments earned U.S. citizenship. This fostering of individualism through land distribution ultimately dealt a crippling blow to traditional tribal culture.

To protect Indians from land speculators, the government held most of the allotted land in trust—Indians could not sell it for twenty-five years. Since Indian land far surpassed the acreage needed for allotments, the government reserved the right to sell the “surplus” to white settlers. Many Indians sold their allotments and moved to urban areas where they lost touch with tribal ways.

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.