Why did American settlers feel it was necessary to remove Native Americans?
Since Indian tribes living there appeared to be the main obstacle to westward expansion, white settlers petitioned the federal government to remove them. Under this kind of pressure, Native American tribes—specifically the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—realized that they could not defeat the Americans in war.
When was America taken from the natives?
| Indian removal | |
|---|---|
| Location | United States |
| Date | 1830–1847 |
| Target | Native Americans in the eastern United States |
| Attack type | Population transfer, ethnic cleansing, genocide |
How did the US encroach on Native American lands?
The expansion of the United States that encroached upon Native American lands occurred faster than many policymakers had predicted, with events such as the Mexican-American War in 1848 placing new territories and tribes under federal jurisdiction.
Why did the settlers have a problem with the Indians?
Bad behavior happened on both sides. Settlers had a real problem with the vast amount of unused land (that the Indians felt should be untouched), when they considered the people starving to death for lack of land in Europe. How would you feel?
What did the Americans do to the Indians?
Americans aggressively pushed Indians to become virtually indistinguishable from themselves, or failing that, to relocate them from areas of American settlement altogether, a political development that came to characterize US relations in the 1800s with Indian nations westward all the way to the Pacific.
How did the US remove the Cherokees from their land?
In 1838, as the deadline for removal approached, thousands of federal soldiers and Georgia volunteers entered the territory and forcibly relocated the Cherokees, some hunting, imprisoning, assaulting, and murdering Cherokees during the process.