Chapter 26 - The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution I. The Clash of Cultures on the Plains After the Civil War, the Great West was still relatively untamed, wild, full of Indians, bison, and wildlife, and sparsely populated by a few Mormons and Mexicans. As the White settlers began to populate the Great West, the Indians, caught in the middle, increasingly turned against each other, were infected with White man?s diseases, and stuck battling to hunt the few remaining bison that were still ranging around. The Sioux, displaced by Chippewas from the their ancestral lands at the headwaters of the Mississippi in the late 1700s, expanded at the expense of the Crows, Kiowas, and Pawnees, and justified their actions by reasoning that White men had done the same thing to them.