Treatment Of Native Americans Essays - Cherokee Nation,

Treatment Of Native Americans After the American Revolution the new United States government hoped to maintain peace with the Indians on the frontier. But as settlers continued to migrate westward they made settlements on Indian lands and demanded and received protection by the Army. Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, organized several tribes to oppose further ceding of Indian lands. But they were defeated in 1811 by Gen. William Henry Harrison at the battle of Tippecanoe. During the War of 1812 many of the Indians again sided with the British. Afterward, with the victorious United States secure in its borders, federal policy turned to one of removal of the Indians west of the Mississippi River--to the so-called Great American Desert, where, supposedly, no white man would ever want to live. To implement this policy, the Indian Removal Act was signed into law on May 28, 1830. It gave President Andrew Jackson, a dedicated foe of the Indians, the power to exchange land west of the Mississippi for the southeastern territory of the Five Civilized Tribes--the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. The removal policy led to a clash between Jackson and the United States Supreme Court, which had ruled in favor of the right of the Cherokees to retain their lands in Georgia. Jackson refused to enforce the Court's decision, and in 1838 and 1839 the Cherokees, like the other tribes before them, were forced westward to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). Their bitter trek during the dead of winter has become known as the Trail of Tears. In 1832, Sauk and Fox Indians under Black Hawk in Wisconsin had been defeated after refusing to abandon their lands east of the Mississippi. In the 1830s and 1840s, Seminoles under Osceola unsuccessfully resisted removal from their homes in Florida. By the end of the 1840s, except for small segments of tribes who had fled to the wilderness, the Indian problem had ended in the East. 1835: Seminole Indian War. When white settlers tried to force the Seminole of the Florida Territory to relocate west of the Mississippi River, the tribe's warriors hid their families in the Everglades and launched a guerrilla war against U.S. forces under Gen. Thomas Jesup. Assisted by runaway slaves who had married into the tribe, the Seminoles fought determinedly until their chief Osceola was captured in 1837, after which their resistance gradually diminished. The war ended in 1842, and the Seminole agreed to move to lands west of the Mississippi soon thereafter. The Seminole War of 1835-42 cost the U.S. government more than 2,000 men and between 40 and 60 million dollars. TECUMSEH (1768? -1813). The most dramatic of the Indians' struggles to hold their lands against the white man was the one led by the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh. He was born on Mad River, near the present city of Springfield, Ohio, in about 1768. From his earliest childhood he saw suffering brought to his people by the whites. In 1808 Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, a religious leader called the Prophet, established a village in northern Indiana. They persuaded the Indians there to avoid liquor, to cultivate their land, and to return to traditional Indian ways of life. The village came to be known as Prophet's Town. Meanwhile Tecumseh was forming a defensive confederacy of Indian tribes, traveling throughout the East and Midwest. Our fathers, he said to the Indians, from their tombs, reproach us as slaves and cowards. He won the allegiance of many tribes. At that time William Henry Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory. He induced a number of individual tribes to give up great areas in the region that is now Indiana and Illinois. At a council in Vincennes in 1810, Tecumseh demanded that land be returned to the Indians. Since it belonged to all of them, he argued, individual chiefs did not have the right to barter it away. His demand was rejected. He then traveled to Canada to consult the British and afterward to the Southwest to enlist support of Indian tribes there. Governor Harrison undertook an expedition against Prophet's Town during Tecumseh's absence, in September 1811. On November 7, after a fierce battle, he destroyed the village. This defeat scattered the Indian