Analyzing Indian treaties in the early republic presents a number of difficulties, especially when they involve the enigmatic third president. Thomas Jefferson wanted to preserve native peoples, but not native cultures. He wanted to treat Indians with justice. Justice, however, always proved secondary to the desire for America's constantly expanding Empire for Liberty. Jefferson rationalized mightily, deciding that Indians would be healthier and happier as small yeoman farmers, and systematically ignored all evidence to the contrary. In this way, Jefferson convinced himself that Indian land sales provided a scenario where all parties benefited. Although Jefferson publicly insisted that he would only purchase lands that Indians willingly sold, he showed little hesitation in squeezing tribal leaders until they ceded their territory.1 In Jefferson and the Indians, Anthony F. C. Wallace asserts that President Jefferson served as the architect for American territorial expansion and the Indian Removal period. For Wallace, Jefferson's controlling personality proved the driving force behind America's settlement and Indian policy in the early nineteenth century. Though Jefferson touted himself as a beacon of liberty, a malevolent element in his personality showed through in his determination to acquire Indian lands by any means necessary. On the other side of the issue, Bernard Sheehan's Seeds of Extinction and Francis Paul Prucha's The Great Father argue that though Jefferson's Indian policy did treat Indians poorly on many occasions, it emanated from a philanthropic, if confused, set of motives.2 Although not always in agreement, both camps offer compelling insights into Jefferson's abstract motives regarding America's territorial expansion. That they tend to express surprise and regret at the victory of Jeffersonian land hunger over Jeffersonian benevolence, however, reveals that they have privileged the president's seductive prose over the crucial role played by his lieutenants on the frontier. A detailed analysis of the actions of one such lieutenant offers another perspective. William Henry Harrison's career as governor of Indiana Territory demonstrates that Jefferson's lofty ideals for civilization and justice were routinely trumped by his consistent support of ardent expansionists on the ground. The land cession treaties Harrison negotiated in Indiana Territory from 1803 to 1809 provide an excellent case study of how Jefferson's policy, formed in Washington, worked in practice on the frontier. Created in 1800, when Harrison was just twenty-seven years old, Indiana Territory originally comprised the future states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. During Harrison's twelve-year tenure Congress continually pared this territory down to essentially the present-day boundaries of the state of Indiana. Appointed by the president rather than elected by local citizens, a territorial governor wielded considerable power. Harrison also was appointed the superintendent of Indian affairs in the territory, and the U. S. commissioner plenipotentiary for concluding treaties with the Indians north of the Ohio River.3 Thus, as long as he maintained the confidence of the president, Harrison could place his own stamp on Indian policy in the Northwest. Had Indians in the early nineteenth-century Northwest been fully adapted to American concepts of law, authority, and land ownership, they still would have been at a disadvantage because of the unique history of the region. The Iroquois Wars of the seventeenth century depopulated the Ohio Valley, and it was only slowly reinhabited. Northwest Indians simply could not point to centuries-long habitation in one area (though some groups, such as the Shawnees, can trace their pre-Columbian roots there through modern archaeology). Also, villages in this region tended to be conglomerations of Indians from different nations, rather than purely Delaware or Miami. Finally, Indians faced the problem of an American government that arbitrarily accepted one tribe's land claims as legitimate over another's when it proved advantageous for a treaty cession. …