Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal

Abstract

In U.S. history textbooks, Indian removal often comes across as an episode in southern rather than national history. Authors focus on the expanding cotton economy, Andrew Jackson's Indian hatred, the doomed resistance of the Five “Civilized” Tribes (Cherokees in particular), and the long, slow bleed of the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). In his new study of removal in the Old Northwest, John P. Bowes argues that this southern focus distorts our view of American history. Indian removals occurred in nearly every region of North America, and they took place not during a narrow period but throughout the entire first century of American independence. Removals of one kind or another occupied the agendas of most of the first twenty U.S. presidents. Indian emigrants sometimes moved voluntarily, which led American officials to conclude they could “persuade” others to emigrate with minimal coercion. And removal did not always result in ethnic clean sweeps; Native American families found ways to remain in their old homelands, in many cases to the present day.