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Native Americans In The 19th Century Essay

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In the early nineteenth century, as European empires and the fledgling United States jockeyed for position in the West, true power was still in the hands of Native peoples. They far outnumbered whites and controlled resources and routes of movement. Like the outsiders, Native Americans too were in rivalry with each other. This contested arena became even more unsettled as the US government removed most eastern Native groups beyond the Mississippi River.
On maps of the 1830s the westernmost part of the United States was labeled “Indian Country.” The western Sioux (Lakota) consolidated their hold on the central and northern plains and allied with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes to the south. In 1840 these three groups forged a peace with their longtime rivals on the southern plains, the Kiowas and Comanches. Now a wide corridor from Montana deep into Mexico was dominated by an interlocking alliance of horseback peoples. Elsewhere, the Apaches increased their influence in the far Southwest and northern Mexico, the Nez Perces in the Northwest, and the Blackfeet on the northern plains. The shifting currents of power sharpened conflict over land and such resources as bison ranges.
An increasingly vigorous trade connected these independent Native peoples to the world …show more content…

Defenders of the policy claimed eastern Native Americans were out-of-step with the white ways of life. However, while many did hold firm to traditional cultures, others had become English-speaking Christians who practiced white methods of agriculture and, in the South, owned slaves. Ironically, they helped carry into the West the mores and institutions of the very people who expelled them as cultural aliens. Their removal beyond the Mississippi added to the turmoil of a turbulent West. New arrivals fought with Native Americans already there, and divisions among displaced groups led to bloody reprisals and intertribal

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