Chapter 3 | Overview Exploration, Removal, and Civil War
Print ChapterKey Terms
Jump to a term…
- Self-Determination
- Adams-Onís Treaty
- Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
- Great American Desert
- Traditionalists
- Matrilineal
- Animism
- Indian Removal Act
- Trail of Tears
- Treaty of New Echota
- Treaty of Doaksville
- Worcester v. Georgia
- Trail of Blood on Ice
- Battle of Honey Springs
- First Kansas Colored Volunteers
Chapter Objectives
Learning Outcomes:
The learner will be able to…
- Compare and contrast the impact of European and American explorations in Oklahoma.
- Describe the unique cultural and political organization of the Five Tribes in the southeastern United States.
- Discuss how the southeastern Native nations prepared for and resisted removal prior to the Indian Removal Act.
- Explain the motivations for the forced removal of American Indians and the passage of the Indian Removal Act.
- Summarize the impact that the Civil War had on tribal control of lands in Indian Territory.
Compelling Question:
- How have voluntary and involuntary migrations shaped Oklahoma’s history?
Chapter Overview
Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, US expeditions into what would become Oklahoma resulted in a federal presence and federal vision about land use. The US government forcibly removed the Five Tribes from their ancestral homelands in the southeast United States to Indian Territory. After relocation, the Five Tribes rebuilt their homes and communities while also navigating tense relationships with other Tribal nations. As learners will read, by the 1860s, the Civil War forced tribes to choose sides between the Union and the Confederacy.
Principal Chief John Ross served the Cherokee Nation for nearly forty years. Ross was against removal to Indian Territory. He wanted his people to remain in their homelands in the Southeast. In addition, Ross wanted the US government to uphold treaties that guaranteed their tribal lands. When removal did come, Ross led Cherokee citizens from their homelands to Cherokee lands in present-day northeastern Oklahoma.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
“We are overwhelmed. Our hearts are sickened,” wrote Principal Chief John Ross of the Cherokee Nation to the US Congress in 1836. “We are deprived of membership in the human family!” Ross feared that new government policies would leave his nation with “neither land, nor home, nor resting place.” He tried without success to appeal to the sense of “justice, the magnanimity, the compassion” of Congress.
While Ross wrote this letter to protest the removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral homelands in Georgia and Alabama, it could just as easily have been written thirty years later following another loss of Cherokee land in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) after the Civil War. His letter illustrates the devastating impact of US policies on Cherokees and other Native nations. The Louisiana Purchase, removal of tribes, and the American Civil War each in their own way directly led to the loss of tribal land and attacks on tribal sovereignty and self-determination (the right to govern oneself).
In the early 1800s, competing ideas about land led to significant changes. The Louisiana Purchase opened the door to exploration and excitement about “new” land that could be offered to settlers and mined for its natural resources. At the same time, the Louisiana Purchase gave the US federal government the opportunity to use some of that land for the forced removal of Indigenous people living in the Southeast. This chapter examines the period following the Louisiana Purchase and how that transaction shaped the formation of Oklahoma. It explores the voluntary and forced nature of exploration, relocation, and adaptation to present-day Oklahoma. It shows the implications of these developments on Indigenous people and nations, including the southeastern tribes, commonly referred to as the Five Tribes before and after removal. Finally, it describes the impact of the American Civil War on Indian Territory.