Mineral price shocks and Native American conflict

Abstract

This study exploits exogenous changes in the world price of gold and silver together with a new geocoded dataset of military engagements to investigate the extent to which Native American conflicts were caused by mining discoveries after the American Civil War. We find that mineral price shocks have a large and significant effect on the incidence of conflict. Our results are robust to various sensitivity checks and are consistent with the narrative evidence from historical reports from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. This is the first paper to establish a causal relationship between mining discoveries and Native American conflict.