Patterns of Plunder: Corruption and the Failure of the Indian Reservation System, 1851–1887

Between the reservation system’s creation in 1851 and its partial dismantling in the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, the Office (now Bureau) of Indian Affairs tasked Indian agents with administering a complicated mixture of goods and services known as “annuities,” which were designed to make reservations viable and survivable for Native people. This article demonstrates that Indian agents instead systematically swindled Native people of their promised payments, intensifying crippling poverty at a crucial moment in Native history and deepening a climate of distrust and acrimony across much of the American West. Rather than strengthening Native communities, federal expenditures enriched the settler communities that surrounded them, becoming in effect a backdoor subsidy for westward expansion and a key source of economic power in frontier communities. Meanwhile, the supposed failure of reservations to become economically viable in these early decades provided justification for reformers who sought to impose more coercive forms of control and assimilation on Native people, such as boarding schools and land allotment. By focusing on the financial workings of the underexamined early reservation period, this article demonstrates how corruption in the Office of Indian Affairs shaped both Native American and western history in profound and irreversible ways.