Indian Removal

The Indian Removal Act

The Indian Removal Act was passed in May 1830; it empowered the president of the United States to move eastern Native Americans west of the Mississippi, to what was then "Indian Territory" (now essentially Oklahoma). Although it was supposed to be voluntary, removal became mandatory whenever the federal government felt it necessary. The memory of these brutal forced marches of Native Americans, sometimes in the dead of winter, remained vivid for years to come in the minds of those who survived. To many in the North, where support for the removal idea was at best tepid, the Indian Removal Act represented another outrage committed by slaveholding southerners. Removal would be another wedge separating the North from the South.

By mid-century, as it became clear that U.S. expansion was going to claim the trans-Mississippi West as well, the removal concept was further refined into the concept of "reservations." As wagon trains clattered west along the Oregon, Santa Fe, Mormon, and California trails, entering the American Great Plains, United States government officials concluded that the vast, unspecified tracts of "Indian Territory" would have to be more sharply defined as reservations. And when resident peoples sought to thwart that westward expansion, the same Washington officials decided that these peoples were to be rounded up by the U.S. Army and restricted to these reservations by force. That, in essence, was the point of the Plains Indian Wars, which raged during the last half of the 19th century, ending with the slaughter of Sioux men, women, and children, as well as the soldiers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.

(The Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act)

By 1890 Americans had migrated all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The frontier era had ended. Well before that date, however, it had become clear to many that a new policy had to be adopted toward Native Americans, whose dwindling numbers seemed to threaten extinction. Congress began moving in this direction in 1871, when it unilaterally decided to abandon the treaty process and legislate on the behalf of Native Americans. Whereas a century before they had functioned as sovereign nations, Native Americans were now wards of the United States government.

The new plan to rescue Native Americans from extinction called for an aggressive assault on tribalism by parceling out communally owned reservation land on a severalty (individual) basis. The plan, called the Dawes Act (or General Allotment Act), went into effect in 1887. Hundreds of thousands of acres remaining after the individual 160-acre allotments had been made were then sold at bargain prices to land-hungry or land-speculating whites.

This allotment, designed to absorb the Native Americans into the society of the United States, turned out to be a monumental disaster. In addition to losing their "surplus" tribal land, many Native Americans families lost their allotted land as well, despite the government's 25-year period of trusteeship. The poorest of the nation's poor—many of them now landless and the majority still resisting assimilation—Native Americans reached their lowest population numbers shortly after the turn of the 20th century. In June 1924 the U.S. Congress granted these original Americans United States citizenship.