Roosevelt and Indian Policy

A President Who Had Seen the West

Theodore Roosevelt came to the White House in 1901 knowing the northern Plains firsthand. He had ranched in the Dakota Badlands in the 1880s, about 150 miles from the Standing Rock Agency, in the same years the Lakota and their neighbors were losing the buffalo and being confined to reservations.

He also knew the Indian Service from the inside. As a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, he toured Indian agencies and schools in South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas in 1892 and argued that the people who ran them should be chosen for ability, not party loyalty. (See Civil Service Commission.)

As President he set out to make Indian policy honest and efficient. He did not question its goal. Like most reformers of his day, he believed Native people should give up tribal life and own land as individual farmers, and that tribal land held in common should be broken up. That conviction shaped nearly every decision on this page.

The Record, Year by Year

• 1901. In his First Annual Message to Congress, on December 3, Roosevelt endorsed allotment in his own words: “The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.”
• 1903. In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, decided January 5, the Supreme Court rejected the Kiowa leader Lone Wolf’s challenge to the sale of Kiowa, Comanche and Apache lands and held that Congress could override treaty terms on its own.
• 1904. Roosevelt proclaimed the opening of part of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. More than 100,000 registrations were filed for the land lottery.
• 1905. Six Native leaders, including Geronimo and Quanah Parker, rode in his inaugural parade. Days later Geronimo asked to return home to Arizona, and Roosevelt refused. In April he joined a hunting party on the Comanche reserve in Oklahoma, with Quanah Parker riding along. Francis Leupp took office as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Roosevelt proclaimed the opening of the Uintah Reservation in Utah.
• 1906. He signed the Burke Act on May 8, delaying citizenship for allottees and letting the Secretary of the Interior issue early deeds, which made the land taxable and saleable. He proclaimed openings of ceded Crow lands in Montana and Wind River lands in Wyoming, signed the Antiquities Act and named Devils Tower, a site sacred to many Plains nations, the first national monument.
• 1908. He proclaimed a second Rosebud opening and signed the act of May 29 that opened parts of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock reservations; those lands were opened under his successor in 1909.
• 1909. Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on February 17. Roosevelt left office two weeks later.