Yet such fragile achievements were hard to maintain in the face of white land hunger. Georgia’s population grew by more than half during the 1820s. That, plus the Southern cotton boom and the discovery of gold in the Cherokee Nation, put the Cherokees in a precarious position. In 1828 the state of Georgia declared the Cherokee constitution invalid and demanded the Cherokees’ land. President Andrew Jackson approved. An Indian nation “would not be countenanced,”6 he declared. The Cherokees must either submit to Georgia’s authority or head west, to the territories.
The Supreme Court declared Georgia’s actions unconstitutional. But high-court rulings meant little in the face of the squatter onslaught. Cherokee landowners watched with alarm as Georgia divided the Cherokee Nation into parcels and started distributing it to whites by lottery. In 1835 John Ross returned home to find a white man living in his house—Ross had to abandon his large estate for a one-room log cabin. Later that year, he was arrested on the trumped-up charge of inciting a slave rebellion. Other Cherokees faced similar harassment.
Much of this was plainly illegal, but the Cherokees had little recourse. The secretary of war advised them that the only solution was “removal beyond the Mississippi”7 to the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. There, he assured them, they would finally enjoy “protection and peace.”
Though Ross wanted to stay and fight, other Cherokees threw up their hands. “We can’t be a Nation here,”8 John Ridge announced despondently. Ridge was part of a faction that, bypassing the elected tribal government, signed a treaty with the federal government on behalf of the Cherokee Nation. Cherokees would exchange their homeland for new land west of the Mississippi.
At least that was the idea. Around two thousand left voluntarily, as per the agreement. But the rest, some sixteen thousand, refused. The government sent seven thousand militiamen and volunteers to round them up at bayonet point and imprison them. The incarcerated Cherokees were then forcibly relocated to present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokees called this journey Nunna daul Isunyi, the “trail where we cried.” The Trail of Tears, as it is known in English, was a bitter march, undertaken by some on foot. Starvation, cold, and disease killed thousands, including Ross’s wife.
The deaths continued. Disease, hunger, and violence ravaged the new Cherokee land for years. The population resurgence of the early nineteenth century was obliterated. By 1840, deaths on the march, deaths in the new territory, and accompanying nonbirths had knocked the Cherokee population down by a third or half of what it would have been had the nation remained in the East.9
*
The Trail of Tears was notorious, but it wasn’t anomalous. Thomas Jefferson had fantasized about dividing the entire country, with Native on one side and European on the other—hence his plan for the Louisiana Purchase. By reserving most of the new territory for Indians, he could free up land in the East for whites.
For the first few decades of the country’s history, this continental-scale apartheid had remained informal and incomplete. It was the population boom—particularly the crisis surrounding the lands of the Cherokees and neighboring tribes in the Southeast in the 1830s—that gave the issue a new urgency. To handle it, Andrew Jackson sought and won new legislation to allow him to aggressively negotiate east-for-west deals.
But making those deals plausible required having western land to offer. The Jackson administration thus sought to turn the West into something resembling an Indian colony. Forty-six percent of the United States—stretching from the top of present-day Texas to the Canadian border and from Michigan to the Rockies—would be officially designated Indian Country (known also as Indian Territory). It would be walled off from white settlement and commerce. If forced removal was the stick, this promise of a permanent territory, free of whites, was the carrot.
Jackson sweetened the pot. Within Indian Country, his administration proposed to designate a smaller-but-still-really-large area, somewhere between the size of California and Texas, as Western Territory. This would be an organized territory, governed by a confederacy of Indian polities and given a delegate in Congress. The goal, as the government’s representative explained, was that Western Territory would be “admitted as a state to become a member of the Union.”10
It was a striking proposal. The government had reserved plots of land for individual polities before, but it hadn’t created any Indian political units. Now the idea was to establish a permanent territory inhabited solely by Native Americans. Like Illinois or Arkansas, but bigger.
The cost, however, was that this would formally divide the country into unequal parts, a settler part and an Indian part. It was a starker and potentially more permanent partition than the existing state/territory division, and former president John Quincy Adams fretted about what it might do to the nation’s character. The idea, he warned, was “not republican at all.”11 It was something an empire would do, an act of “despotism.”
Adams’s Southern colleagues in Congress raised another concern. If Congress were to “add to our Union men of blood and color alien to the people of the United States,”12 the Virginia representative asked, “where was that right to stop? Why not introduce our brethren of Cuba and Hayti?” And then there was that business of Western Territory’s congressional delegate. “I am not prepared to receive the Indians into this hall,”13 declared Georgia’s representative with a huff.
In the end, the thought of a “full-blood savage”14 with a desk in the Capitol proved too much for the delicate sensibilities of the members of the 23rd Congress. They tabled the Western Territory proposal. Still, Indian Country remained. The federal government provided farming equipment and livestock,15 distributed food, sent blacksmiths and physicians, and set aside funds for the poor, in keeping with its treaty obligations.
Indian Country as designated in 1834. Western Territory, rejected by Congress, forms the southern part.
Such arrangements were temporary, though. The government’s true focus was on policing the borders: keeping Indians in and whites out. Without the representative government that Western Territory would have provided, Indian Country was, from the perspective of Washington, less a colony than a holding pen.
*
Indian Country rarely appeared on maps as such. It had been defined in law, yet there was something indistinct about it, at least in the minds of whites. In principle, it offered “effectual and complete protection”16 to Native Americans, as the Jackson administration had guaranteed. But the settler boom was far from over. Could the borders of this promised land hold against further white expansion?
If Indian Country looked tenuous from its start in the 1830s, it looked even more so in the 1840s, with the annexation of Texas, the conquest of much of Mexico, and the extinction of the British claims in Oregon. Suddenly Indian Country was no longer pressed up against the nation’s western border. It stood exposed in the middle, right between the bustling East and the burgeoning West.
Where gold had just been discovered.
“The Indian barrier must be removed,”17 demanded Senator Stephen Douglas, who longed to run a transcontinental railroad through Indian Country to California. William Henry Seward noted that eighteen tribes lived on the land that Douglas wanted. “Where will they go?” Seward asked. “Back across the Mississippi? … To the Himalayas?”
Who cared? Eager white settlers streamed in, and Congress obliged by carving Kansas and Nebraska out of the heart of Indian Country—two new territories open to white settlement. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which created those territories, is best known for inciting the Civil War, as the struggle over whether the territories would allow slavery led to bloody conflicts in Kansas. But that wasn’t the only violence in the area. Whites fought one another on land they had wrested from Indians in a complex process involving railroad companies, federal agents, armed squatters, the military, and a haze of dubious legal claims.
Readers of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie will be familiar with this dynamic, as it is the
hinge on which the novel turns. The titular house is three miles into Indian Country. Ma is a little shaky on the details:
She didn’t know whether this was Indian country or not.18 She didn’t know where the Kansas line was. But whether or no, the Indians would not be here long. Pa had word from a man in Washington that the Indian Territory would be open to settlement soon.
Pa demonstrates a slightly firmer grasp on the matter:
“When white settlers come into a country,19 the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, any time now. That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?”
“Yes, Pa,” Laura said. “But, Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won’t it make the Indians mad to have to—”
“No more questions, Laura,” Pa said, firmly. “Go to sleep.”
At the end of the book, Pa learns that federal troops are coming to evict him from his illegal settlement. “I’ll not stay here to be taken away by the soldiers like an outlaw!”20 he exclaims, and he packs the family up to head back to Wisconsin.
Little House was closely based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood. There was a little house, and it was in Indian Country. But Wilder’s family was never ousted by federal troops. In the 1990s an editor at The Washington Post, the Osage journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr., researched his family history and discovered that it wasn’t the whites who had been pushed off the land, but the Osages.21 Pa’s neighbors, and perhaps Pa himself, had driven them out by stealing their food, killing their livestock, burning their houses, robbing their graves, and murdering them outright.
“The question will suggest itself,”22 wrote an aghast federal agent who witnessed it all: “Which of these people are the savages?”
*
Pushed off their “permanent” lands, Native Americans moved yet again. Indian Country was successively whittled down until it had been reduced to its southern tip, present-day Oklahoma. The territory’s population, drawn from all over the map, spoke to the wrenching dislocations of the nineteenth century. By 1879, it contained Cherokees,23 Choctaws, Chickasaws, Quapaws, Seminoles, Senecas, Shawnees, Modocs, Odawas, Peorias, Miamis, Wyandots, Osages, Kaws, Nez Perces, Pawnees, Poncas, Sacs and Foxes, Kickapoos, Creeks, Potawatomis, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Wichitas, Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, Caddos, Delawares, Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches.
It was as if someone had depopulated most of Europe and shunted remnants from each country to an allotment in Romania.
And yet, even this compressed neutron star of Indian polities was vulnerable to incursions. There was talk of organizing it into a territory, as had been done with Kansas and Nebraska. And, as in those two territories, whites started pouring in illegally. “We are here with our axes and our plows,”24 one group announced defiantly in an 1885 petition to Congress. “Hundreds and thousands of our friends are on their way to join us from all States of the West. We are here to stay. We deny the right of any man, or mob of men, whether in uniform or plain clothes, to molest us.”
Pushing Indians off the land: Removals to a much-diminished Indian Country
Indians regarded these squatters with horror. “No matter how little is left the red man,25 such heartless wretches will never rest content or let the Government rest until the Indians are made landless and homeless,” warned The Cherokee Advocate. “It is beyond the power of words to express the character of such men—dead to all human feeling and knowing no law.”
Just as The Cherokee Advocate feared, the government acquiesced to the settlers’ demands, squeezing Native American land claims over to the territory’s eastern side via allotment and distributing the western side to whites. Some of that western land was parceled off by lottery. More was apportioned by race: at the firing of a federal official’s gun, settlers sprinted to stake their claims. It was, the Census Bureau declared, “the most rapid settlement of a territory in the history of the United States.”26
A delirious land rush: At the shot of a pistol in 1893, settlers scramble to claim land that was formerly Indian Country.
In the venerable U.S. tradition of naming places for the people who have been driven from them, the newly opened territory was called Oklahoma, a Choctaw word meaning “red people.”
That left the eastern part as the sole vestige of Indian Country. But squatters were streaming in there, too. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, leading tribes called a convention, open to all, Indian and non-Indian alike. They would apply for admission to the union as a state that would not be exclusively Indian, but would at least have a substantial Indian population. It would be called Sequoyah, after the silversmith who had designed the Cherokee syllabary.
Congress refused to consider the petition. Instead, it allowed the settler-dominated Territory of Oklahoma to absorb the would-be state of Sequoyah. Oklahoma was admitted as a state in 1907, with a population less than one-quarter Indian.27
The final extirpation of Indian Country was a profoundly important event for Native Americans. Two decades later, the Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs set out to tell the tale. Riggs conceived and wrote his play in Paris—he frequented the café Les Deux Magots, where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also scribbling away. But his mind was on his childhood home. The result, Green Grow the Lilacs, offered a wistful celebration of Indian Country on the cusp of change. It is a gentle, nostalgic play, though with a defiant ending. When, in the last act, a federal marshal appears on the scene, the characters refuse to cooperate with him, explaining that they are “jist plumb full of Indian blood”28 and that they regard the United States as a “furrin country.” With that uneasy confrontation, the curtain falls.
Riggs’s play was well received when it debuted in 1931. Today, however, it is remembered less on its own merits than as the basis for the musical Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “I kept most of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them,29 for the simple reason that they could not be improved upon—at least not by me,” Hammerstein told the press.
Yet there was one noticeable change. Though the musical concludes with a confrontation with a marshal (it ends happily), the characters in Oklahoma! say nothing about having “Indian blood.” Indeed, the word Indian is not uttered once in the production. Oklahoma! presents its characters as whites enchanted by available land and brought to spasms of ecstasy by the thought that they might soon “be livin’ in a brand-new state!” “We know we belong to the land,” they sing, “And the land we belong to is grand.”
It is the jubilant refrain of the white settler.
3
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GUANO BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
It is a little-noted feature of world history that in the past few decades, the map hasn’t changed much. Of course there have been trouble spots (Iraq/Kuwait, Russia/Ukraine, Sudan) and the dramatic dismantling of the Soviet Union. But there hasn’t been anything like the wrenching cartographic tumult of previous centuries: the invasions, revolutions, conquests, and annexations that turned Poland into a cursed accordion, madly expanding and contracting, and that wiped Indian Country off the map.
The tendency of today’s borders to stick in place can make the shapes of countries seem inevitable. The hexagon of France, the stilettoed boot of Italy, the impossibly thin needle of Chile (“a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica,”1 quipped Henry Kissinger)—though they were obviously the result of historical fortune, it’s difficult to imagine them taking forms other than the ones they did.
That’s one reason why it’s hard to remember the U.S. founders’ hesitations about westward expansion. Surely, we think, they must have seen how stunted, how unfinished their little stub of a country was. There’s something satisfying about following the story to its end, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The Louisiana Purchase, click, East and West Florida, click click, Texas, clic
k, Oregon, click, the war with Mexico, click, and the Gadsden Purchase, a sliver of land on the Mexican border that filled out the familiar logo-map profile of the United States. Click. Picture complete, destiny manifested.
Except that the puzzle wasn’t finished. The logo-map silhouette accurately captured the borders of the United States for only three years. Because in 1857, not long after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified (1854), the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them.
The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value. They tended to be remote, rocky, and rainless—poor places to grow things on. But that didn’t matter. They had the one thing that everyone in the nineteenth century badly wanted. They had “white gold,” known in less polite circles as bird shit.
*
To understand why anyone would care about bird droppings, it helps to know a little about preindustrial agriculture.
Farming in the nineteenth-century United States was not like it is today, acres of staggeringly prolific fields bristling with high-yield crops. It was a touch-and-go business. The reason Benjamin Franklin’s population numbers had alarmed Thomas Malthus was that Malthus couldn’t see where the food would come from to feed those multiplying generations. New farmland and virgin soil had given North Americans a margin of ease, he acknowledged, but that could only be temporary. In the end, he wrote, “the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,2 that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
How to Hide an Empire Page 5