Question

1. Discuss how the differences between white Americans’ ideas of manifest destiny and Indigenous Americans’ idea that the land could not be owned by individuals led to violent confrontations between the two. What were Indigenous Americans fighting for? How did this interfere with what mainstream western pioneers wanted? Discuss the various governmental implementations that led to the usurpation of Native lands. Discuss Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.

Answer 1

Indian removal and the reservation system

From the earliest days of European colonization of the New World, relations between white Europeans and Native Americans were plagued by violent competition for land and natural resources. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the forced removal of numerous Indian tribes from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to what was designated “Indian territory” west of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee nation was subject to a brutal mass migration that came to be known as the Trail of Tears.^11start superscript, 1, end superscript

Some tribes fiercely resisted the forced relocations, and Native Americans and the US Army fought many battles in the East. The Seminoles of Florida, for instance, refused to leave their lands, resulting in the Second Seminole War, which lasted from 1835 to 1842 and has been described as “the longest and most costly of the Indian conflicts of the United States.”^22squared Despite some major Indian victories in battle, the US Army ultimately succeeded in crushing this resistance, massacring or forcing into hiding those Indians who refused to march westward.

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 established Indian reservations in the territory that would become the states of Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas. The US federal government envisioned the reservation system as a method of keeping Native American tribes off of the lands that white Americans wished to settle.^33cubed Many tribes resisted the imposition of the reservation system, sparking a series of bloody battles that ultimately led to the forced relocation of most Native Americans onto the reservations.

The Indian Wars of the West

Inspired by the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which held that European Americans were divinely ordained to settle the whole of the North American continent, white settlers pushed ever further westward towards the Pacific. As they did so, they increasingly came into violent conflict with Native American Indians over land and natural resources, especially after the discovery of gold in western territories sparked the Gold Rush. Prospective gold-diggers flooded into the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, clashing—sometimes violently—with the Native Americans they encountered there.