Both the pioneering move into the lands of the West and the urbanizing move back into the cities of the upper Midwest and the East yielded stories in life as well as in fiction. To gauge the force of these contrasting lines of development, which were social, economic, and political as well as cultural, we need to keep three facts before us: first, that Henry Adams (1838–1918) and Henry James (1843–1916) were younger contemporaries of the great Sioux leader Sitting Bull (1834–90) and Buffalo Bill Cody (1846–1917), as well as older contemporaries of Isabel Archer, Ántonia Shimerda, Jim Burden, and Carrie Meeber; second, that the same Congress that devised Radical Reconstruction in order to secure the rights of black people of the South also enacted and funded a policy of radical subjugation and segregation of the original inhabitants of the West in order to conquer and dispossess them; and third, that the same group of Eastern industrial and banking interests that underwrote the cultural achievements of the Northeast became the chief beneficiaries of these policies as well as of the Homestead Act, which was rationalized as a reading and implementation of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream.

In the summer of 1868, three years and a few months after the Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, on which Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met in Appomattox to sign the agreement that ended the Civil War, the federal government launched a relentless campaign against Native Americans and appointed General William T. Sherman, one of the deliverers of the black slaves of the South, to head it.