Westward expansion and the removal of Native peoples
The United States spreads to the Pacific, forcing Native nations from their homelands on the Trail of Tears and conquering the West, ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt (1993)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase from France doubled the size of the country. Americans poured west, and many came to believe it was their “Manifest Destiny” to spread from sea to sea. Texas was annexed in 1845, Oregon secured in 1846, and the war with Mexico of 1846–48 added California and the Southwest.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico — Amy S. Greenberg, Alfred A. Knopf (2012)
The Trail of Tears
The Native nations of the Southeast, among them the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole, held millions of acres of fertile land that settlers and cotton planters wanted. The Cherokee had their own written language, newspaper and constitution, and took their case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favour in 1832. President Andrew Jackson ignored it.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorised exchanging their land for territory west of the Mississippi. Over the following decade some 80,000 people were forced west. In 1838–39 the army rounded up the Cherokee into stockades and marched them to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma); thousands died of disease, cold and hunger along the way, with estimates commonly around 4,000 of some 16,000. The Cherokee call it Nunna daul Isunyi, “the trail where we cried”.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
War for the West
After the Civil War, railroads, miners, ranchers and homesteaders pushed onto the Plains and into the Rocky Mountains. The near-extermination of the buffalo, encouraged by the army, destroyed the economy of the Plains nations. A series of wars followed: Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors destroyed George Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn in 1876, but within a few years most nations had been forced onto reservations.
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt (1993)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
On 29 December 1890, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry killed some 250 or more Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, a massacre usually taken as the end of the “Indian Wars”. That same year the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed.
- The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull — Robert M. Utley, Henry Holt (1993)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Survival
The 1900 census counted about 237,000 Native Americans, a historic low. Federal policy then tried to break up reservations and assimilate children through boarding schools that banned Native languages. Native nations survived nonetheless; in the 2020 census, 9.7 million people identified as American Indian or Alaska Native alone or in combination with another race.
- American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 — Russell Thornton, University of Oklahoma Press (1987)
- Improved Race and Ethnicity Measures Reveal U.S. Population Is Much More Multiracial — U.S. Census Bureau (2021)
Pioneers tamed a wilderness through courage and hard work, spreading farms, towns and democracy across the continent: the nation's "Manifest Destiny", in the 1845 phrase of journalist John O'Sullivan.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Expansion was a deliberate dispossession, carried out through coerced treaties, forced removal and war, in which the US government repeatedly broke its own promises. Some scholars describe parts of it, such as the killings in California after 1848, as genocide.
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory — Claudio Saunt, W. W. Norton (2020)
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America — Pekka Hämäläinen, Liveright (2022)
Why it matters today
The frontier gave Americans enduring myths of self-reliance, open space and the cowboy. For Native Americans it meant losing most of their land, and reservation poverty, broken treaties and fights over sovereignty, water and sacred sites remain live issues. Native people are not only history: tribal nations are governments with their own courts and laws.