The Paraguay expedition (1858–1859) was an American diplomatic mission ordered by President James Buchanan to South America in response to alleged wrongs committed by Paraguay, including the firing upon a United States naval vessel. The expedition was sent without adequate investigation of the facts, including Paraguay's defensive capabilities. Most modern scholars have considered Buchanan's complaints were probably unjustified, with the real cause of misunderstandings stemming from neither country employing a competent diplomatic service. Buchanan may have had ulterior motives, such as distracting public opinion from domestic concerns afflicting his presidency, though possibly he meant to emulate the success of the earlier Perry Expedition, which had opened up an isolated Japan.
The expedition consisted of a nineteen-ship squadron, which at the time was the largest naval squadron ever sent from the United States. It was ordered to demand reparation from Paraguay or seize its capital Asunción if reparation was refused. The mission has been described as "an incident so grotesque and dangerous" that escalated from "a series of minor misunderstandings."
The Paraguay expedition caused a great impression at the time. The episode represented a significant moment in American foreign policy and military projection, demonstrating both the nation's growing naval capability and the potential for diplomatic miscalculation to escalate into serious international incidents.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
Multiple engagements; total ~80 Cheyenne killed
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