130 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The American Southeast had long been inhabited by
Native Americans when Europeans began to settle
its shores in the seventeenth century. Among the
largest of these tribes was the Cherokee Nation,
which extended from northern Georgia into eastern
Tennessee and the Carolinas. But the territorial
domain of the Cherokee rapidly contracted during
the eighteenth century, and by the Revolutionary
War they had surrendered half of their land to
the colonists.
When gold was discovered within the boundaries
of the Cherokee Nation in the late 1820s, the state
of Georgia claimed jurisdiction over the land. By
this time, the Cherokee had established a system
of education and courts, which prompted the
federal government to identify them as one of the
five “civilized tribes” of the Southeast, along with
the Chickasaw, Creek, Chocktaw, and Seminole.
Georgia’s presumption of sovereignty was
immediately challenged by the Cherokee, leading the
matter into the political and judicial arena. President
Andrew Jackson sided with the state of Georgia, and
even proposed a bill to remove the tribes. Jackson
argued that the removal of the Cherokee was part of
a long American tradition: just as tribes further north
had either been removed or eliminated “to make
room for the whites,” so too should southeastern
tribes be relocated to the western frontier.
Several southeastern tribes resisted removal,
and the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia had no
jurisdiction over Cherokee land. In a rather stunning
act, Jackson simply ignored the Court’s decision and
moved forward with removal. He even framed this as
a benevolent and generous policy that would protect
tribes from aggressive land seekers. Moreover,
Jackson argued, removal would enable these Indians
to pursue “happiness in their own way” while also
making space for white settlement. Though most
tribes acquiesced, the Cherokee leader, John Ross,
continued to resist, pleading with Congress and the
president to respect Indian sovereignty.
In 1835 military representatives negotiated with
several other tribal leaders to accept this “voluntary”
removal. John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s successor,
opposed the policy, but even his leadership was no
THE ENEMY WITHIN
Charles Gratiot, “Map Illustrating the
Plan of the Defences of the Western &
North-Western Frontier,” 1837
match for land-hungry settlers in Georgia and
more general anti-Indian sentiment throughout
America. In 1838 the army forced the remaining
16,000 Cherokee on an arduous trek to the Indian
Territory. One quarter of the tribe perished during
this westward journey.
“The Trail of Tears” ended the presence of Native
Americans east of the Mississippi. But forcibly
moving this population west created a new challenge
of defining—and securing—the nation’s western
border. The task of establishing a defensive frontier
fell to the engineer Charles Gratiot, the son of a
French trader in Spanish St. Louis who was among
the first graduates of West Point. Gratiot and his
colleagues in the War Department proposed a
network of forts and garrisons to accomplish three
related goals. The first was to protect these emigrant
tribes from more powerful and aggressive tribes in
the region, such as the Comanche. The second was
to keep the peace between the many emigrant tribes
that had been forcibly relocated to this new territory.
The third was to separate the emigrant tribes from
their white neighbors in Arkansas and Missouri.
Here Gratiot mapped out a new defensive frontier
that would stretch from the Missouri River to the
northern edge of Texas. Within that corridor, about
200 miles wide, he identified a network of forts and
depots that the military could reach within days either
by roads (marked in red) or by waterways (marked
in blue). Leavenworth, which had been established
a decade earlier as a stop on the Santa Fe Trail, now
became Fort Leavenworth, a base from which the
military could arbitrate disputes between tribes or
between tribes and white settlers. Dozens of other
fortifications formed a militarized frontier both to
protect emigrant tribes and to segregate them from
white settlers to the east.
The very fact that the War Department proposed
such a complex plan underscores the fraught history
between European settlers and Native Americans
in North America. After independence, the United
States had pursued several different Indian policies,
some of which were more cooperative than others.
Jackson forcefully implemented a vision of separation
by creating an altogether new territory for the tribes
of the Southeast. Though designed to be a perpetual
home for the emigrant tribes, much of this “Indian
Territory” would be appropriated for white settlement
in the Oklahoma land rush in 1890. This was just one
example of a pattern that characterized the entire
history of America: permanent Indian territory was
anything but permanent.