P
by presenting the Cherokee as “civilized” Indians
willing to adopt white customs. The newspaper will
continue publication until 1911, when the United
States sells the printing office following the dissolu-
tion of the Cherokee Nation.
Milly Francis receives the Congressional
Medal of Honor.
In 1817, a Creek teenager named Milly Francis
pled for the life of Georgia captain Duncan Mc-
Krimmon, saving him from execution by a Creek
war party. Twenty-four years later, she is found
living in desperate poverty in Indian Territory by
Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who is investigat-
ing charges of ill-treatment of the Creek and other
southeastern tribes during their Removal to western
lands (see entry for 1841). Due to Hitchcock’s lob-
bying, Congress awards Francis the Congressional
Medal of Honor and an annual pension of $96. She
will die four years later of tuberculosis without hav-
ing received the medal or any pension money.
George Henry forms an Indian
acting troupe.
George Henry, an Ojibway also known as Maung-
wudaus, creates a show featuring “wild Indians.”
His players spend the next two years touring the
United States, England, France, and Belgium. The
first acting troupe of Indians organized and man-
aged by an Indian, Henry’s actors are criticized for
promoting negative stereotypes by his half-brother
Peter Jones, an important Ojibway leader and a
Methodist minister.
1845“Manifest Destiny” becomes the
justification for the seizure of Indian land.
In The United States Magazine and Democratic Re-
view, New York journalist John O’Sullivan writes
that it is the United States’s “manifest destiny to
overspread and to possess the whole of the continent
which Providence has given us for the development
of the great experiment of liberty and federated
self-government entrusted to us.” The term Mani-
fest Destiny comes to be popularly used to describe
the belief that God intends for the United States
to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
Politicians immediately use this concept to gar-
ner popular support for the Mexican-American
War (1846–48). Throughout the rest of the 19th
century, Manifest Destiny will also provide the jus-
tification for ignoring western Indians’ rights and
claims to their land.1846Historian Francis Parkman travels west to
study Indians.
Beginning his career as one of the United States’s fore-
most historians, Francis Parkman begins a six-month
journey along the Oregon Trail to learn about Indi-
ans, whom he regards as the “living representatives
of the ‘stone age.’” Parkman emerges from his trav-
els convinced that all Indians are childlike creatures
ruled entirely by emotions and an “utter intolerance
of restraint.” This attitude toward Indian people will
later inform his studies of the early conflicts between
France and England in North America.“An impassable gulf lies be-
tween... [the white man] and
his red brethren. Nay, so alien to
himself do they appear, that, after
breathing the air of the prairie
for a few months or weeks, he
begins to look upon them as a
troublesome and dangerous
species of wild beasts.”
—historian Francis Parkman
on his impression of
western Indians