The Pros And Cons Of The Dawes Act

Before we delve into the Dawes Act, let us take a look back at the long list of ways we Americans tried to contain or change the Native Americans to fit our standards and needs. From the time explorers arrived in America, white men and natives were in a constant state of fighting and white men were in a constant state of greediness. Americans took the natives as slaves, used them for our own gain only to throw them to the wolves, or rather wilderness, with hardly anything to call their own, forced them onto smaller and smaller pieces of land, and fought countless battles with them. Americans have made Native Americans lives consistently harder, and the Dawes Act is no exception. I have no doubt that some supporters of the Dawes Act had good intentions, but the main intention of the Act was not to quell the fighting and try to include the Natives, it was to attain their land and use it as they saw fit. I do not think that the government was warranted in putting into action the Dawes Act and forcing the Indians off of their reservations regardless of the supposed reasoning. We were not warranted in doing almost anything we had previously done to the Natives; the Dawes Act included. The Dawes Act was created by Republican Senator Henry Dawes and it was a land allotment bill that sought to …show more content…
The railroad companies were pushing to build more and more lines going to wherever needed. If these helpless reservations were in the way, do you think the companies would spend the time, money, and resources to go around the reservations or find some legal way to disrupt the reservations and go straight through? Clearly they would go straight through, and honestly by whatever means necessary. Americans tried numerous times to exterminate the Indians and one of the most recent was by killing their main food and goods source: