refused to abandon American lands completely, the
Washington administration was hesitant to expend
any more of its meager resources on fighting long-
term and costly Indian wars. Instead, it sought to
extinguish Indian land claims through treaties. To-
ward the same end, the government also launched
an effort to end collective Indian resistance by as-
similating individual Indians into American society.
Its so-called civilization programs focused on creating
Indian schools and encouraging Indians to adopt the
settled way of life of the non-Indian farmer. Except
for among some large southeastern tribes, these pro-
grams were largely unsuccessful. Just as Indians did
not want to relinquish their lands, they had little in-
terest in giving up their own cultures in exchange for
“civilization.”
In the Jeffersonian era, an alternative solution
to end Indian resistance to white encroachment
emerged. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson pur-
chased from France the Louisiana Territory—an
828,000-square-mile tract stretching from the
Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. One
of Jefferson’s reasons for making the purchase was
to provide an area to which tribes living east of the
Mississippi could be relocated. In his mind, tribes
pressured by increasing white settlement would
voluntarily elect to leave their homelands for new
territory to the west. Soon, however, Americans
eager for Indian land would insist that tribes be ex-
pelled from the East by force.
Fear of forced relocation and anger at the gov-
ernment’s misguided assimilation efforts rekindled
the spirit of rebellion in the Northwest Territory.
There, among the Shawnee, a spiritual leader named
Tenskwatawa drew a devoted following by preach-
ing that Americans were evil. He told the faithful
that they should preserve their traditional ways and
shun any contact with whites.
As Tenskwatawa’s influence spread, his
brother Tecumseh began to transform the religious
movement into a political alliance dedicated to
preserving the Indians’ control over their remain-
ing lands. Tecumseh traveled throughout the East
for three years, garnering increasing support for
his Indian confederacy. His dream faded, however,
after Tenskwatawa initiated an ill-fated attack on
American forces sent out to subdue his supporters.
The defeat of Tenskwatawa’s warriors disillusioned
many of the prophet’s followers, irrevocably
dampening enthusiasm for a united Indian front.
By 1813, when Tecumseh was killed by American
troops, his vision of an Indian confederacy was
also dead.
Tecumseh’s influence was still felt, however,
among a faction of the Creek Indians known as the
Upper Creeks of the Red Sticks, who were particu-
larly inspired by the Shawnee leader’s message. They
launched a year-long military campaign against the
Americans in their midst, but in the 1814 Battle of
Horseshoe Bend their warriors were crushed by a
much larger force of American soldiers led by An-
drew Jackson.
Jackson’s victory over the Red Sticks had rami-
fications not only in Creek territory but throughout
Indian country. Now revered as an intrepid Indian
fighter, Jackson began to draw broad political sup-
port from land-hungry settlers impatient with the
federal government’s attempts to eliminate Indian
presence in the East by peaceful means. In the light
of Tecumseh’s demise, these whites believed that the
era of armed Indian resistance had come to an end.
Rallying behind Jackson, they would demand that
eastern Indians—weakened and demoralized by
war, disease, and their ever-shrinking territory—be
banished once and for all from the lands the settlers
had come to see as their own.1776 to 1829