- • According to the law, no white persons would be permitted to trade in the Indian country without a license, and no white persons would be permitted to settle in Indian country. The military force would be employed in the apprehension of any white person who was found in violation of provisions of the act. However, before the laws could be put into effect, a new wave of white settlers swept westward and formed the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa. This made it necessary for the policy makers in Washington to shift the “permanent Indian Frontier” from the Mississippi River to the 95th meridian.
• The Cherokees’ removal to the West was planned to be in gradual stages, but discovery of Appalachian gold within their territory brought on a clamor for their immediate wholesale exodus. During the autumn of 1838, General Winfield Scott’s soldiers rounded them up and concentrated them into camps…..from the prison camps they were started westward to Indian Territory. On the long winter trek, one of every four Cherokees died from cold, hunger or disease. They called the march their “trail of tears.”
• Scarcely were the refugees settled behind the security of the “permanent Indian Frontier” when soldiers began marching westward through the Indian country. The white men of the United States -- who talked so much of peace but rarely seemed to practice it – where marching to war with white men who had conqureed the Indians of Mexico. When the war with Mexico ended in 1847, the United States took possession of a vast expansion of territory reaching form Texas to California, all of it was west of the “permanent Indian frontier.”
• In 1848 gold was discovered in California. Within a few months, fortune-seeking easterners by the thousands were crossing the Indian Territory…..to justify these breaches of the “permanent Indian frontier”, the policy maker in Washington invented Manifest Destiny, a term which lifted land hunger to a lofty plane. The Europeans and their descendants were ordained by destiny to rule all of America. They were the dominant race and therefore responsible for the Indians – along with their lands, their forests, and their mineral wealth. Only the New Englanders, who had destroyed or driven out all their Indians, spoke against Manifest Destiny.
WOA