Jackson was himself an old
frontier soldier, who never doubted that it was part of the natural
order of things that conflict between the two peoples should go on
until the weaker was dispossessed or exterminated. The era was one in
which the West guided public policy; and it was the West that was
chiefly interested in further circumscribing Indian lands, trade, and
influence. In Jackson's day, too, the people ruled; and it was the
adventurous, pushing, land-hungry common folk who decreed that the red
man had lingered long enough in the Middle West and must now move on.
The pressure of the white population upon the Indian lands was felt
both in the Northwest and in the Southwest; but the pressure was
unevenly applied in the two sections. North of the Ohio there was
simply one great glacier-like advance of the white settlers, driving
westward before it practically all of the natives who did not perish
in the successive attempts to roll back the wave of conquest upon the
Alleghanies. The redskins were pushed from Ohio into Indiana, from
Indiana into Illinois, from Illinois and Wisconsin into Iowa and
Minnesota; the few tribal fragments which by treaty arrangement
remained behind formed only insignificant "islands" in the midst of
the fast-growing flood of white population.
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