Wars and Enforced Migrations
h Disease was also a grim factor in the American colonies, where the majority of the Eastern Woodlands people lived as village farmers.
h Severely affected by smallpox and war and harassed by settlers, many of the peoples indigenous to the eastern coastal areas gathered together their remnants and sought refuge west of the Appalachians.
Relations with the United States
h One of the problems confronting the young United States was what to do with Native American peoples, particularly those in the Old Northwest (today called the Midwest) and South. The Treaty of Paris (1783), which formally ended the American Revolution, had made no mention of the country¡¦s indigenous peoples, reflecting Great Britain¡¦s ambiguous jurisdiction over them.
h The United States would have to chart its own course, which it did in Article I, Section 8, of its Constitution: ¡§The Congress shall have Power ¡K To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.¡¨ This was the law from which more than 200 years of federal legislation and programs would derive.
h In the closing years of the 18th century, many of these ¡§new¡¨ Americans were migrating in search of land across the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee¡Xareas where various Native American nations were still intact and strong.
h Once there, many of these migrants squatted on Native American land, with the predictable result: war.
h A series of battles culminated in 1794 in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwestern