In July 1861, the US House Committee on Territories drafted the first Reconstruction bill to detail a procedure for readmitting Southern states into the Union. Expecting a quick end to the Civil War, the earliest framers of Reconstruction recommended that rebellious states be assigned into an unorganized status as territories. It was a pragmatic solution that placed the South firmly in the control of a Republican Congress; a plan that complemented the Committee on Territories’ simultaneous pursuit of territorial expansion in the trans-Mississippi West. Indeed, between 1861 and 1868 Congress incorporated seven Western territories to consolidate federal power in a growing domain. From the onset of the war, federal actors envisioned Reconstruction as a national process. Yet, the reality on the ground seldom matched their strategic plans. This dissertation analyzes Reconstruction from the vantage point of the Northwestern Great Plains. Using Montana Territory as a case study, I examine how relations between and among Native American nations, settlers, and government officials defined Reconstruction at both local and federal levels. The federal government had enduring political and economic interests in the Northwestern Plains prior to the outbreak of the war. Between 1828 and 1865, the region emerged as the last US stronghold of the global fur trade, cycled through several mining booms, and showed a promising future for homesteading and ranching. The Northwestern Plains were and are the homelands to a mosaic of Native American nations who asserted their rights to sovereignty by demanding federal recognition of their territorial, political, economic, and cultural autonomy. As these lands became contested under the pressure of US settlement, Native actors continued to press for visibility against local and federal modes of authority. The lived experiences of Native actors unveil some of the critical limitations of Reconstruction; that the expansion of citizenship, suffrage, and labor protections coincided with land dispossession, colonization, and erasure. By the time this study concludes in 1883, it becomes apparent that the dissolution of Reconstruction rested in the program’s failure to resolve the nation’s most fundamental questions over belonging, space, and power.I argue that Reconstruction was a process that experimented with federal and local forms of authority, settler colonialism, and state formation which came under stress after the onset of war in 1861. Republican governance throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction introduced new federal economic and political imperatives, destabilized local patterns of power among settlers, and opened new threats to Indigenous sovereignty. Using cartography, personal and mass communication, artwork, literature, and government records, this study portrays a version of Reconstruction that was fluid, chaotic, and often violent as western civil institutions either broke down or competed for primacy. By integrating the historiographies of Reconstruction, Western history, and Native American ethnohistory this study challenges the notion that federal state formation in the West (and state restoration in the South) were linear processes ushered by a collective of federal actors. Moreover, the existing literature on both Reconstruction and Western territorial expansion has overstated the ability of the federal government to produce communal order through efforts like military occupation, property laws, and multitiered administrative systems such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By essentializing the scale of local forces that stacked against federal administration in distant, contested spaces like Montana, the ambitious designs to restore and expand the Union ultimately produced a more exclusionary, unstable, and violent nation.
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