What Role Did Manifest Destiny Play In American Culture

Manifest Destiny was the ideology, which held that the United States was destined to expand from coast to coast on the North American continent. Manifest Destiny was a substantial factor in the expansion of the United States and its conflicts with Native American’s over land. The advancement West was also propelled by the end of the Civil War, the Homestead Act, wagon trails, and the discovery of gold and other non-precious metals.
By the mid-1700s Native Americans leave their farms to lead a nomadic life roaming the Great Plains hunting buffalo on horseback. The buffalo played a major role in Native American way of life; they utilized them for meat and jerky, and to create teepees, clothes, shoes, blankets and more. In an effort to terminate the Native American’s way of life, Americans started killing buffalo, not just for

Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, was a Native American born and raised by other natives until his father’s death driving him to run away where a family of ranchers took him in where he worked well into adulthood. At around 30 he began to weave together various parts of Native American beliefs with Christianity ones to create the Ghost Dance religion that quickly began to spread through the Western Native American tribes of America. Furthermore, the Ghost Dance is sometimes viewed as an expression of Indian militancy and the desire to preserve traditional ways but controversially it taught Christianity beliefs, including pacifism so, just how passive or militant the Ghost Dance was varied from tribe-to-tribe and person-to-person. Additionally, Wovoka prophesied the dawning of a new age, in which whites would vanish, leaving Indians to live in a land. Tragically the massacre at Wounded Knee conveyed that whites weren’t going to vanish and thus brought about the rapid end of the young Ghost Dance