The Civil War badly divided the Cherokee, with most eventually siding with the Union, though it had been slower than the Confederacy in seeking their support. The Choctaw and the Chickasaw sided with the South, while the Seminole and the Creeks like the Cherokee were divided in their loyalties. “Over the course of the war these factions, in concert with Union and Confederate troops, savagely fought each other, devastating the Five Tribes,” David La Vere points out.118
After the Civil War the United States cited partial indigenous support for the Confederacy as a pretext for taking additional land away from Indians. With the crisis of the Union resolved, American settler colonialism was back on course.
6
“They Promised to Take Our Land and They Took It”: Settler Colonialism in the American West
At mid-century the overland trails, the seizure of vast new lands from Mexico, and the gold rush sent settlers streaming across the continent. The population of the American West soared from about 1 million in 1815 to 15 million by 1860. Before federal Indian agents could negotiate treaties, which Congress often declined to ratify in any case, American settlers and territorial governments often took the “Indian problem” into their own hands. In Texas, across the Great Basin, and in Arizona, California, and the Oregon Territory, Americans perpetrated massacres as they drove indigenous people out of colonial space. Many Americans openly advocated genocide.
The US military sometimes condemned unprovoked settler violence yet the Army also perpetrated massacres and its leaders shared the settlers’ contempt for Indians as well as the desire to eliminate them. The Army went on the offensive in the post–Civil War era and fought countless battles and skirmishes with indigenous bands. The Civil War militarized the nation and empowered a generation of army officers and enlisted men who would wage an uncompromising style of warfare against the indigenes. Technological innovation and industrialization, especially the trans-continental railroad, made Indians and their cultures appear that much more primitive and destined to “vanish.”
Americans sought total security, as they meant to put a stop to Indian raiding, slave trading, and other vestiges of what they perceived as the wild and savage Indian way of life. Following on the heels of Manifest Destiny, visions of a powerful, modernizing continental empire left no cultural space and only the assigned physical spaces of reservations for Indians.1
The legendary “Wild West” has cast such a powerful spell over American history and popular culture that scholars have been anxious to debunk it.2 “The history of ‘the West’ was in fact the history of the entire nation,” they point out. “We can best know the history of the American West if we read it as a chapter in the much larger history of European colonialism.”3 All of this is true, and yet the West was wild in that explosive settlement occurred so rapidly that it often preceded the arrival of military or civilian authority, thus leaving outnumbered bands of indigenes vulnerable to often-indiscriminate settler aggression.
As most Americans viewed the indigenes as “an obstruction to national self-interest and commercial expansion,” the tribes had either to be removed from the desired land or to be exterminated.4 The United States thus implemented a policy of “enforced sedentarism.” This policy, typical in other settler colonial situations (Bantustans, Occupied Territories, etc.), entailed driving Indians onto reservations.5 If they resisted, the Army and settlers claimed justification to wage exterminatory warfare.
Indigenous Americans thus faced unprecedented pressures in this final, often manic, phase of continental ethnic cleansing. Ambivalences proliferated, to be sure, as Indians allied with the Americans against other tribes to pursue their self-interests or merely to survive. As Americans violated treaties and pushed Indians out of “Indian country,” they forced these refugees to encroach on the land of other Indians thus promoting interethnic conflict. As in the past the extreme pressures of colonialism divided Indians within their own tribes, often generationally as young warriors waged violent resistance against the settlers while older leaders futilely strove for accommodation in the face of the uncompromising settler advance.
Reformers mostly in the East loudly advocated justice for Indians. They expressed the putatively humanitarian desires to civilize and Christianize the indigenes, “reforms” that ultimately led to the movement for Indian assimilation. Yet even these humanitarians pursued a genocidal agenda of destroying Indian communities and cultures, notably by removing indigenous children from their families.6 In addition to assaulting the Indian way of life, the assimilationist Dawes Act (1887) enabled the seizure of millions more acres of colonial space for settlers. In the continuous pattern of Euro-American history, the drives of settler colonialism ultimately trumped colonial ambivalence.
Indian Removal from “Indian Country”
As with the “Old Northwest,” settler colonialism in the midsection of the continent has been marginalized in American History. Both the southeastern Indian Removal, with its infamous “Trail of Tears,” and the subsequent “Wild West” phase have overshadowed removal from what became the American heartland. Indians in this region, however, faced not only a flood of settlers but also the arrival of other indigenous tribes as Americans pushed them off lands to the east. The impact of colonialism thus radiated out across the Mississippi, spurring inter-indigenous violence in addition to the violence associated with dispossession carried out by the Americans.
In the confluence area where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers conjoined marking the “gateway to the West,” a tradition of inclusiveness and ambivalence dated back to the French style of colonialism in “upper Louisiana.” As Indians and Europeans worked the exchange economy, the different peoples interacted and coexisted in the region, though not always seamlessly. Sexual liaisons and intermarriage were common, forging kinship ties between Indians and Europeans.
As Americans flooded into the lower Missouri, the region transitioned “from ethnic mixing to ethnic cleansing.”7 Following the War of 1812, as growing numbers of Americans migrated in with their captive slaves, Missouri entered the Union as a slave state in 1820. The American immigrants encountered Shawnee and Delaware Indians who had been made refugees from the US takeover of the Ohio Valley. They would now be forced out once again. “Scornful of Indian holdings,” American settler colonials “squatted where they pleased, that is, on any lands they deemed vacant.” They demanded that indigenous people be removed to “some more remote part … better suited to Indian pursuits.”8
During more than 30 years as governor of the Missouri Territory, William Clark of Corps of Discovery fame secured treaties removing tens of thousands of Indians from the lower Missouri Valley. The initial treaties merely provided for peace and friendship but in years following the War of 1812, as American power grew and the Indians’ ability to resist dissipated, Clark “negotiated” removal of the tribes to the west. In actuality, as in the southeast, the terms of removal began to be “dictated, rather than negotiated.” The indigenes lacked the numbers and weaponry to put up a fight against the masses of settlers pouring into Missouri.9
Clark’s willingness even to conduct diplomacy with Indians did not sit well with the settler-driven Missouri territorial assembly, which in 1820 voted him out of office for being “too good to Indians.” Thomas Hart Benton, the most powerful Missouri politician and a champion of Western settlement, labeled Indians “a palpable evil.” He called for their prompt removal from the land to “make room for the spread of slaves.” A huge forced cession of Osage land soon followed. “Reduced to its essence,” Stephen Aron explains, “the problem was simple: more white people wanted more land, which required Indians to be displaced.” Hence the US government backed the local population in carrying out the “ethnic cleansing of Missouri.”10
The Indians most affected in both the Missouri and Arkansas River valleys were the Osage, who had been the power brokers of the region. The Osages long conducted trade with the relatively small numbers of Spanish, French, and English
who did not appear to pose a threat to their power. The Osages kept the focus of their aggression on the neighboring Quapaw, a traditional rival, as well as incoming Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and other Indians who had been driven off land to the east. The Osages and the Cherokee clashed violently on several occasions. Having viewed other indigenous groups as the more serious threat to their hegemony, the Osages were slow to react to the Americans until it was soon too late to respond effectively.11
West of Missouri the US Congress established a vast and putatively permanent “Indian country.” Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States had shrouded the cleansing campaign behind the pledge to “forever secure and guarantee” the new Indian lands. In 1834 congressional legislation formally created the new Indian country, a huge swath of colonial space stretching from Oklahoma across the Great Plains to modern-day Montana. The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 also established regulations governing non-Indian entry, trade, land sales, and the sale of weapons and alcohol.
The substantive legislation establishing the new Indian country reflected ambivalence by advancing the settler colonial project while ostensibly providing for humane treatment of the Indian. Many Americans rationalized their support for Indian removal on the humanitarian grounds that the indigenes would be “better off” once they were provided with land and opportunity further west. In urging Indians to exchange their land east of the Mississippi, Lewis Cass, the Michigan Democrat who served as Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, offered the “solemn promise” that the new lands would be “reserved for the red people; it will be yours as long as the sun shines and the rain falls.”12
Such promises came up empty, as the putative Indian country proved “ineffectual and a failure from the beginning.” Americans were already trickling west on the Santa Fe Trail, but the trickle soon became a flood on the Oregon Trail, which cut through the heart of the Indian country. As belief in the existence of a “great American desert” gave way to the more accurate perception of the Plains as a bountiful heartland, Americans would seize the land from the “semi-barbarous nomads,” the “solemn promises” such as those made by Cass notwithstanding. The Mexican War followed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) ended all doubts that Indians would once again be removed. As Senator Stephen A. Douglas, architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, explained, the “Indian barrier … filled with hostile savages” must give way to farmers, railroads, commerce, and American destiny to conquer all the land from sea to sea.13
American Indian Removal thus remained a structurally ensconced, continuous project, as settler colonialism now drove the paradoxical removal of Indians from Indian country. The approach to the indigenes living in the middle of the continent was the same one Americans had pursued on the other side of the Mississippi: they would be resettled further west to make room for American migrants. The policy undertaken in Indian country thus “was a revival of the government’s removal program in a manner not widely publicized or understood.”14
Rather than a vast, unbroken land in which indigenous cultures could thrive or at least survive, Indian country inexorably shrank into isolated and often depressed Indian Bantustans. Indians found themselves increasingly outnumbered by the American influx as they continued to be ravaged by epidemic diseases, notably smallpox. The plight of the Nebraska Indians proved fairly typical. In 1800 some 14,000 Indians—Pawnee, Omaha, Ponca, and Otoe-Missouria—held some 30 million acres in eastern Nebraska. Following a “century of dispossession,” only about 10 percent, overwhelmingly the Omaha, remained.15
The dispossession began in earnest in the 1840s as officials called for removal of the four Nebraska tribes to facilitate settler colonialism. Indians had to be cleansed from the land “so as to leave an ample outlet for our white population to spread and pass towards and beyond the Rocky Mountains.” Indians were not fooled by the pale-face promises that they would be removed to good land. “If it is such a good country that you offer,” a member of the Potawatomi delegation inquired in 1842, “why does not our Great Father send his white children there?”16
Indigenous logic fell on deaf ears; moreover, few settlers showed concern for the Nebraska Indian and thus opposed the expenditure of government revenues on behalf of indigenous refugees. “When it came to Indians in territorial Nebraska,” David Wishart points out, “sympathy and understanding were as scarce as good timber.” Even Americans who expressed an ambivalent desire to see Indians “domesticated, improved, and elevated” at the same time had their eyes on the “large surplus” of “fine agricultural lands” that would be freed up for sale. The tribes were forced to sell their land “for much less than its fair market value.”17
Although weakened by dispossession and disease—as well as regular onslaughts from the predatory Sioux tribes to their north—the Nebraska Indians sometimes fought back against the settler colonial invasion. Inevitably, Indian homeland defense boomeranged back against the bands in the form of a militant settler backlash. “If the Government will not protect the inhabitants of Nebraska against these red rascals,” vowed The Nebraskian from Omaha City, “then we are in favor of calling out the militia and scalping the tribe.” A minority who empathized with the plight of the Indians was invariably marginalized. A prominent land surveyor condemned the “lackadaisical sympathy” expressed on behalf of Indians, declaring that he would prefer “to exterminate the last mother’s son of them from the face of the earth.” After being forced onto reservations, where they endured “season after season of grinding poverty and steadily declining population,” most of the Nebraska Indians were eventually driven out of the territory entirely. While Indians at other times and places were able to rebuild and reconfigure their identities, “Life only got worse” for the Nebraska tribes.18
Removed to the Oklahoma Territory the “civilized tribes” of the Southeast rebuilt their lives, but clashed with the indigenes already living in the region. American settler colonialism thus forced Indians to “invade” other Indian lands. Whereas to most Americans “Indians” were (and to a considerable extent still are) perceived as a unified entity, the tribes forced into close contact differed profoundly from one another. In many cases town-dwelling, agriculturally oriented “civilized tribes” came into contact with the more mobile equestrian, bison-hunting tribes of the Plains states. These indigenous groups had different histories and lifestyles and little more in common than many of them had with Americans.
Well before the Indian Removal of the 1830s Cherokee, Creeks, Kickapoo, Sauk and Fox, Potawatomi, Shawnees, and Delaware had migrated toward the Plains. The Pawnees, Osages, Omaha, Caddo, Wichita and to a lesser extent the Comanche and Kiowa—were among the tribes threatened by this influx. Some bands, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apaches suffered a significant blow from a smallpox epidemic perhaps ushered in by the newly arrived tribes in the late 1830s. The Plains bands raided the settlements of the incoming Indians, who fought back, but accommodation and cultural borrowing also occurred.19
As they settled into their new homes in the Oklahoma Territory, the Five Tribes “created an amazing renaissance. They re-created their national governments, reestablished their newspapers, and rebuilt their schools and churches.”20 Because they were civilized—a term they freely used to describe themselves—the Five Tribes viewed themselves as superior to Plains Indians. Adopting the classic colonialist binary, they viewed the equestrian, bison hunting, and raiding cultures of the southern Plains as “savage” peoples. But the tribes, who had long considered the southern Plains their homelands and hunting grounds, viewed the Ohio Valley and the Southeastern tribes as encroaching upon their territory.
The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole embraced the politics of racial separation that had created Indian country. They proclaimed their territories a “red man’s country” as they strove to keep whites out and, true to their Deep South roots, they sought to control the lives of black people living in Indian country. “Nation-building in Indian Territo
ry meant racial separation, notions of ‘blood purity,’ and the power of race in the making of space,” as James Ronda puts it.21 As they had done in the South, the Cherokee and other tribes built prosperous farms and communities, recovered from the wreckage of the Civil War, and then weathered the assimilation movement. In the late nineteenth century Congress opened up the Oklahoma Territory for a land rush of settlers, squeezing the indigenes off their land and into internal Bantustans, yet they persevered and some thrived.
Conflict between the “progressive” civilized tribes and the “traditional” Plains Indians produced diplomacy and ambivalent relations as well as raids and violent clashes. The Shawnees, Delaware, and Kickapoo gradually came to terms with the Wichita and Caddo. The Creeks called councils with the Southern Plains tribes and strove to establish kinship ties, sometimes bringing in the Seminole as well; however, the Choctaw and Chickasaw “saw their western neighbors as savage inferiors, trespassers, and raiders and wanted as little to do with them as possible.” The Cherokee tried to keep their distance from the “savage” Plains tribes as well.22
The “Great Triumvirate” and Forced Removal to Reservations
The Civil War strengthened the federal government, militarized the nation, propelled unprecedented numbers of settlers and soldiers into the West, and thus dramatically advanced the settler colonial project west of the Mississippi River. In 1862 alone the Union Congress passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the Morrill Land Grant Act—all of which spurred settler migration. “More in fact was done during the Civil War to incorporate the West than in any comparable period,” Elliott West notes.23
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 21