Standard: SS4H3c. Describe territorial expansion with emphasis on the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and
Clark expedition, and the acquisitions of Texas (the Alamo and independence), Oregon
(Oregon Trail), and California (Gold Rush and the development of mining towns).

Read the passage and answer the reading comprehension questions that follow: 

The Louisiana Purchase and the Forced Removal of Native Americans

In the early 1800s, the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, needed money to fight wars in Europe. France had colonized huge amounts of land west of the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Napoleon sold this land, known as the Louisiana Territory, to the United States in 1803. Of course, the French did not actually “own” all of this land. So what they actually sold the United States was the “authority” to claim the land for themselves—from the Native people who already lived there.

The Louisiana Purchase doubled the potential size of the United States. This decision was beneficial for the new American nation that wanted more land to live and farm on. It also harmful for the Native Americans who had lived in the Louisiana Territory for generations.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson approved an expedition to explore the huge region. When the Lewis and Clark expedition—as it came to be called—got under way, Captain Meriwether Lewis spoke to the Osage people in the Missouri Valley:

We are all now of one family, born in the same land, and bound to live as brothers; and the strangers from beyond the great water (the British Army) are gone from among us … Let us employ ourselves then in mutually accommodating each other.

In this quote, Lewis says that he wants to live in peace with Native American tribes. However, the treatment of Native Americans at the hand of the U.S. government was not at all peaceful.

Americans at this time mainly farmed or worked in growing U.S. cities. That is largely how they earned money to survive. Most of these early Americans were Christians. Most had homes they lived in all the time. Most believed land should and could be owned by individuals, and used in certain ways—such as to grow food or to develop towns and cities on.

Americans wanted to assimilate Native Americans into their culture. To achieve this, Americans wanted to move Native Americans onto land reserved, or set aside, for them. Of course, this meant that Native Americans would actually be isolated from European Americans and their way of life. But, regardless, the U.S. government adopted a policy of moving Native Americans to reservations across the Mississippi River. The U.S. government achieved this by pressuring Native American groups to sign treaties ceding their land. Often, the government would threaten removal by force if the tribe would not peacefully sign over their land. By 1860, a great majority of Native Americans were relocated and isolated. When Native Americans would not sign treaties that sent them to reservations, or when they signed treaties but would not move, the U.S. Army forced them to move.

One especially infamous example of forced removal was the removal of the Cherokee tribe from their ancestral homeland. In the 1830s, the Cherokee of the southeastern United States were viewed by Americans as an "assimilated" Native American tribe. They had created a written alphabet and published a newspaper. Cherokee ancestral land was especially suitable for cultivating cotton and other valuable crops. And there was gold in their mountains!

As a result, in 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee could keep their lands. But President Andrew Jackson ignored the Court’s ruling. The Cherokee were violently forced off of their ancestral land. Jackson sent the army to move the Cherokee far to the west, to what is now Oklahoma. In 1838, the government ordered nine thousand soldiers to build stockades and fill them with Cherokee and other Native Americans.

The army herded about fifteen thousand Cherokee into the stockades. The army then force-marched them on an eight-hundred-mile journey to Oklahoma. Hunger, summer heat, and winter cold killed about four thousand of them in the stockades or on the march. They could not even bury their dead. This tragedy is known in American history as the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee called it Nuna-da-ut-sun’y, “The Trail Where They Cried.”

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