Indian Removal

The removal of Native Americans from the region east of the Mississippi was both a necessary evil and sad inevitability. The suppression of expansion west and cultivation of the fertile land in the new frontier was stifling the growing nation. The native population at the time was still a predominantly primitive people when compared to the Anglo American settler and would find difficulty dealing with the changes brought on with cultivation and civilizing of the land. With no real way for the native Americans to firmly stake ownership to a piece of land, the territories were seen as open to the white settler to cultivate and therefore call his own. “There is no reason to believe, that vegetable productions were ever cultivated to any considerable extent by the Indians, or formed an important part of their food.” (The North American Review, Volume 30, Issue 66, January 1830, pp 62-121) The Native American tribes were mainly comprised of relatively small hunter gatherer societies, which were not taking full advantage of the territories they occupied. A frontiersman or a settler could come in and cultivate the land and produce much more and support a far greater population from the same area and benefit the growing nation much more. Mean while the Native tribe could easily move west of the Mississippi and continue a hunter gatherer life style with relative ease. Even if the Native Americans were too stay in the territory and were able to assimilate into the white Anglo American way of life, it is likely that they would not have had an easy go of it. With the common perception of Natives being a savage people and the prominent prejudiced views of them, they would have found it difficult to compete with the Europeans in the area. This would in turn lead to some if not most of the newly assimilated natives essentially becoming a people without a home. Unable to return to the way of life they turned their back on and unable to survive in the new world they found themselves in, criminal activity and vice would soon be a viable and much easier alternative for them. The nomadic lifestyle of the native population made it hard for them to be able to make a claim of ownership to the land. Tribes would follow the game and come and go with the seasons. They did not lead sedentary lives; rather they tended to roam throughout a territory with no concrete boundaries. Therefore it cannot be seen as taking something that was never really theirs to begin with. When a settler comes to new land and toils in the soil cultivating it, spending many hours of labor on it making it livable, and treating it as a permanent home: does he not have more of a claim to the land than those who would just stay there till the resources have all been used up then move on? “One nation must perish to make room for another…” (Francis J. Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social and Political Relations (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1837), pp.225-228) Through war or peaceful diplomacy the end state would have been the same, the native population had to be removed. Neither the Native Americans nor the Americans were ready or able to co-exist. To try and force that issue would have been reckless. With the removal of the native population to west of the Mississippi however, a growing nation was able to expand its boundaries west while the native’s were given the opportunity to continue their way or life in a land free from the laws and restrictions of American government.