7. The Concentration Policy: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 establishes separate territories for each tribe
At Fort Laramie in 1851, the government proposed creating separate territories for each tribe, thereby isolating them from each other, and allowing for white settlement on their ceded lands. However, many tribal leaders would not accept the idea of living on reservations and those who did agree did not fully represent much less control all of their people. Despite surrendering their lands to Euro-American settlers continual encroachment onto reservation land would lead to a series of wars which spanned from the early 1850s to the 1870s, collectively known as the Plains Wars. While the resolution of the first phase of the Plains Wars lay in the treaty-making process the Indian wars of the 1870s would be resolved entirely by military enforced confinement onto reservations. As General Sherman put it in 1868, the United States policy was “peace within their reservations and war without.”