The Iron Horse in Indian CountryThe Iron Horse in Indian Country

"The Iron Horse in Indian Country: Native Americans and Railroads in the U.S. West explores how Indigenous peoples across the trans-Mississippi West adapted to the "railroad revolution" of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Historians have long pondered the profound and far-reaching role of railroads in transforming the United States' economic, political, social, and physical landscapes. This book decenters and reframes this work by spotlighting how Native Americans incorporated railroads into their own socio-economic, political, and cultural networks. This Indigenous process of incorporation challenges deep-seated stereotypes of Indians as either violently resisting the juggernaut of the Iron Horse, or simply vanishing at the first blast of a locomotive's whistle. It begins with a study of Indigenous contributions to the Pacific Railway Surveys of the 1850s and extends through to the rise of two significant intertribal organizations: The Society of American Indians and the Native American Church. The work charts two key trends in railroad colonialism: the rise of eminent domain as the legal backing for Indigenous dispossession, and the role of railroad expansion in the decision to end treaty relations between Native nations and the federal government. And yet this book demonstrates that, even as railroad-driven settler colonialism brought disease, economic displacement, and dispossession to Indigenous communities, Native peoples eventually turned the railroad into a literal and figurative vehicle of survival, appropriating and repurposing this novel technology to establish themselves as decisive actors in a modern world"--