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Episode Six: Fight No More Forever. By the 1870s, there were only a few pockets of resistance against the United States' push to conquer the West. On the Great Plains, Sitting Bull followed his mystical visions and urged his Lakota people to fight rather than surrender their sacred Black Hills and traditional way of life. On a hot summer day at the Little Bighorn, they would defeat another warrior equally sure of his own invincibility--George Armstrong Custer. But Custer's "Last Stand" would also become, in effect, the last stand of the Sioux as a free people. Chief Joseph. Nez Perce. Episode Seven: The Geography of Hope. By the late 1870s, the American conquest of the West was nearly complete. In one decade, with Native Americans effectively confined to reservations, some four-and-a-half million new settlers would arrive to stake their claim to the future. Homesteaders proudly built their homes of prairie sod, then battled drought and hard times to keep them. Sitting Bull. Chinese Exclusion Act. Theodore Roosevelt. Los Angeles. Polygamy. Indian boarding schools. Buffalo Bill Cody. | |