The Westward Expansion In The 19th Century

The Westward Expansion Impact As the 19th century progresses, more and more settlers arrived in the US and the yearn for open space and freedom had grown tremendously. The US had decided to push westwards due to this.Thousands of settlers began to pour into the new land. Through the exciting and promising land acquisitions, there was a dark history behind the westward expansion that was never fully acknowledged. Although America had enforced westwards expansion, it did not acknowledge the Native Americans who had settled on the land decades before the white settlers had arrived. From as early as the original 13 colonies in 1776, white settlers had fought and removed the Native Americans from their home territory. Large land grants such as the Louisiana purchase of 1803 and the Treaty of Paris of 1783, had affected the Native Americans the most as that meant that more tribes on these land claims would be removed. From the early news of untouched land from Lewis and Clark, the American spirit had been invoked. With each additional land purchase, Indians had been removed onto reservations or onto neighboring territories. With all the news of expansion and land, there was something dark that lurks under all these utopian claims.
As the
white settlers begin to move onto the land, bloodshed and violence fell upon the Indians. The Native Americans were falsely promised by the Northwest Ordinance that they would be allowed their freedoms and most importantly: the rights to their own land.
It was a short-lived treaty as the flood of migrants came into the newly bought land grants. The Americans had not only betrayed the Indians, but they had also decided to ruin them through uncivilized violence. In Ohio, Native Americans formed a confederate to fight against the settlers since their pleas were muted by the US government. The Battle of Fallen Timbers pursued and Native Americans were forced off their land. At the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, the US army shot and killed 300 (mostly unarmed) Indians as they had wanted to take away their guns on the reservation. With each battle, more Indians have fallen and more land is taken from
them.
Perhaps the most reckless thing that the US had inflicted upon the Native Americans was the loss of their own culture and traditions on their home territories. Cherokees, for example, believed that coexisting with whites was the only solution for peace. Through this, they began to adopt the ways of the whites: Christian religion, an American-like government, tax collection, etc. Despite their adoptions of white culture, they were eventually forced to move away to the west on the Trail of Tears. Countless Native American tribes, like the Cherokee, were treated indifferently as they had to move for the sake of westward expansion. Major figures of Indian resistance such as Tenskwatawa urged for embracing of Native American culture in order to unite against the whites and this proved useless in the end as the Indians were forced to move regardless. The whites had stripped the Indians of their identity and homeland for their own greedy desires.
The westward expansion was based on the manifest destiny which claimed that God had meant for the Americans to take all the land they could. This idea was highly biased and favored the Americans more than it did the Native Americans. It used religion as its reason to take what was not theirs and was unjustifiable. The Native Americans had been forcibly removed from their home territories through the series of US territorial acquisitions. In the process, war and carnage had established itself amongst the whites and the Indians. The Native Americans had lost their homes and most importantly, their culture and identity. America needs to apologize to the Indians and negotiate with them in order to compensate them with their stolen land, as well as supplies and proper respect for the Native Americans.