The Pros And Cons Of Native Americans

Native Americans are considered the indigenous settlers of America. The Natives nomadic ancestors came from Asia and settled in the region many thousands of year before Christopher Columbus has rediscovered this new territory. Nearly around ten million Native Americans inhabited North America before the Europeans arrived in the 15th century. The natives suffered severely from European diseases and the population precipitously declined. Violence over ethnic and cultural differences, social and political tension arise. As the United States started to develop more intricately, the government passed several policies in the 1830s to the 1930s. Starting with Andrew Jackson when he passed the Indian Removal leading to the Trail of Tears, then to the

Dawes Severalty Act and so forth. The Indians and whites had many conflicts and battles such as Sand Creek Massacre, Custer’s Last Standing, and Wounded Knee Massacre. The United States government was the overall destruction of these Native American settlers.
President Andrew Jackson, a popular war hero who took part in killing many Indians, was elected into office in 1828. Jackson believed that Native Americans were wild and were not capable of being self-governed. The greedy white land seekers desired to expand further and they believed the Indians were in the way. Thus, Andrew Jackson passed a policy to remove the Indians from the path of white settlement. This policy is known as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which promised to protect and guarantee the natives land out west. But, the treaties and promises were overlooked and broken like many other times in history. Many tribes were forced to move to give up their homelands and forced to move west of the Mississippi. The Black Hawk’s Sac, Fox and Seminole were some tribes that resisted removal and the U.S. Army suppressed the Indians. One tribe, the Cherokee, tried their best to adapt to the white ways, but the United States failed to accept the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee was denied the right to testify or sue in Georgia court. Some of the big cases that involved the Indians and the court were the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia. The Chief Justice John Marshall supported the Natives, while Andrew Jackson took Georgia’s side stating that an independent nation can not exist within the U.S. Although Jackson was for the common man, but that did not obtain to the Native Americans. He treated them poorly and saw them as an obstacle in the way of white men’s expansion and development. The U.S. Army quickly rounded up the Indians and herded them west to Oklahoma. Around 15,000 Indians was set out on the Trail of Tears died suffering from this long and dangerous path. The Native Americans endured many hardships produced by the American government. They were often push aside by the Americans and deemed inferior (Garraty 248-250, Nash 332-333).
The term Manifest Destiny originated in the mid-1940s by a newspaper editor named John O’ Sullivan. This sense of mission derived from rapid growth and progress of the nation. With each year, the national growth increased the power and confidence of the people to expand. The term was used to express the American’s drive to expand westward. This idea gained popular support. Many land hungry white men often came into conflict with the Native Americans. Whether it was the differences of culture, racism, and land disputes, they all piled up and would eventually explode into warfare. Another objective for Americans to travel west was the discovery of gold in California. The Native Americans suffered from the gold mining rushes. They encountered disasters such as the diseases that wiped out sixty percent of the Indians, the whites killing the natives and often collecting bounties, Indian women were raped and children were kidnapped. There were around 150,000 Indian in California in 1849, however, in twenty years the population decreased to less than 30,000 (Garraty 314-315, 326, Nash 365, 381). .
To further encourage the westward settlement, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862, which permitted 160 acres of land granted to any worthy Americans.

This land which the had been reserved for the Indians was now being distributed by the government. There were thousands of landless and hungry Indians due to the white taking over their land. The federal government never removed the illegal settlers, instead, they forced the Natives to sign a new treaty that surrendered more of the Native American’s land. Treaty after treaty the Americans pushed aside the Natives and did not fulfil their promise. The eagerness to enlarge the horizon of the United States and the invasion of white people due to the gold rush, troubled the Indians and sent them into a disastrous downward spiral (Garraty 405, Lecture-21

p338).
By the 1860s, the surviving Native Americans were settled on the Indian Territory, modern day Oklahoma, or California, Rockies, Kansas, Nebraska, and the High Plains.

The Plain tribes were unique because they possessed a uniform culture. They all depended on hunting buffalo for a source of food, clothing and shelter. As the migration to California and Oregon continued to grow, the native’s life and animal migration patterns were affected. They adopted many white technology and culture such as cloth, weapons, horses and many more. A man by the name of Thomas Fitzpatrick persuaded each tribe to have their limits to the hunting ground. This technique provided the government to negotiate treaties separately with each tribe. The U.S. did not honor these treaties and were often broken or altered. The gold rush in Colorado led to the demise of many Natives. Whites were sent to drive the Cheyenne and Arapaho from land that they were guaranteed. In 1884, a Colorado militia surprised attacked the Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek. This massacre was brutal, the Indians were butchered and around 450 Cheyenne died. The government tried to enforce another policy, the concentration policy stated that the Plain Indians would be confined into two small reservations. One was in Black Hills of Dakota Territory and another was located in Oklahoma. This policy was later upheld because when gold was found in the Black Hill in 1874, the whites came rushing in and taking over the territory. The

federal government demanded the Sioux to leave and sell them the Black Hills. The arrival of these people, affected the Plain Indians because not only did they take over the Indian’s land, they also hindered their food source by hunting the Buffalo to extinction. These conflicts lead to peak of the five years of Indian War (Garraty 456-458, Lecture-26 p27, Nash 501).