Chapter 2 | Section 3
The Doctrine of Discovery
The newly acquired 828,000 square miles of territory cost the United States $18 per square mile. And the purchase of the land came with a clear understanding of who would benefit most from this arrangement. The purchase gave the United States two important things. First, it meant that the United States, and no other colonial power, had claim to the land. Second, it meant that the United States had the “right” to the land already occupied by Indigenous people. This right could be enforced through varied means, including conquest, pacification, absorption, or extinction. Ideas about how land is discovered, explored, and claimed by intruding nations, even as Indigenous people have lived there for centuries, can be traced to the Doctrine of Discovery.
By the late fifteenth century, it was clear that multiple European powers wanted to explore and claim North American lands that were previously unknown to them. This presented a problem. They needed to make sure that if one country claimed new lands, their claims would be respected by other countries. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the Bull Inter Caetera, more commonly known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This document was initially meant to justify Spain’s claim to much of the land in the so-called New World. It later became a basis for agreement between other Christian European countries to respect claims to new land.
But there was more to the Doctrine of Discovery. It also explained how European countries could claim Indigenous land, legally and morally. According to the doctrine, land that was occupied by non-Christians would be considered discoverable and conquerable. This meant that if the Spanish or French, for example, explored land that today is part of Oklahoma, they could lay claim to it if it was not already claimed by another Christian power. We can trace the dispossession of Indigenous land over the next several hundred years back to ideas set forth in the Doctrine of Discovery.
Three important Supreme Court rulings (sometimes called the Marshall Trilogy) shaped the legal standing of Native nations. In 1823, the US Supreme Court drew on the Doctrine of Discovery in the first of the three cases, Johnson v. McIntosh. In writing the Court’s opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that “the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” Indigenous people had the right to occupy the land, but not to own it. And that right to live on the land was ever changing over the course of the nineteenth century. When the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory twenty years before the McIntosh decision, Jefferson and Congress had understood the purchase in the context of the Doctrine of Discovery. The 1831 Supreme Court ruling in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia further limited the status of Native nations. The court described them as “domestic dependent nations,” and as “wards” rather than as independent, or fully sovereign, nations. The Supreme Court did recognize the role of tribal sovereignty to a greater extent in its 1832 ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (discussed more in chapter 3), but the federal government used the first two of the Marshall Trilogy rulings in the years ahead to justify greater land dispossession and to decrease the rights of Native nations to challenge this dispossession.
The expansion of the US empire through the Louisiana Purchase changed everything. President Jefferson intended to continue the forced migration of Native Americans already in progress. He planned to formally relocate all eastern Native nations into the “new” territory. Around this same time, Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory and lands farther west. The explorers formed the “Corps of Discovery” and set forth on their journey up the Missouri from St. Louis. They relied on the Chouteau family for provisions.
In 1804, Big Axe, Big Horse, and six other leaders from the Otoe and Missouria nations camped with members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition for three days along the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark presented leaders from both nations with Jefferson peace medals.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Jefferson used the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–6) to exercise discovery rights over Native nations whose homelands stretched from the Mississippi River to the Columbia River.
The Chouteau family had long traded with the Osages at Three Forks and established a successful trading post there. The first official United States visit to Three Forks took place in November 1806. This visit occurred when Lieutenant James Biddle Wilkinson of the Zebulon Pike expedition encountered Osage hunters in the area.
Fort Gibson
In 1824 Fort Gibson became the first US military post in Indian Territory. The fort was also the headquarters for a commission created by Congress in 1832 to carry out the removal of Native nations from the Southeast to Indian Territory. Today Fort Gibson Historic Site is a national historic landmark managed by the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
In 1824, soldiers from Fort Smith in Arkansas Territory established Fort Gibson, the first US military post in Indian Territory (what would become Oklahoma) on the east side of the Neosho River about three miles from its mouth. River navigation was important at Fort Gibson, but so was road travel. Located on the Texas Road, a route that connected Missouri in the United States to Mexico, Fort Gibson was established to protect the nation’s southwestern border complete with a stockade and barracks. Treaty councils, where the United States and Native nations came together to make formal agreements, met at Fort Gibson.
A. P. Chouteau traded with the soldiers at Fort Gibson for provisions and building materials. By the 1820s, the Chouteaus expanded their small trading post on the Verdigris River into one of the largest trading centers on the western frontier. They employed men of diverse races to work in their fur business, and they built the boats on which they shipped furs to either New Orleans or St. Louis. They hired skilled river men to navigate the Mississippi River. Upon reaching their destination, the river men would sell the furs and the wood used to build the boats. Then they would load boats with supplies, such as casks of nails and barrels of liquor, and return to Three Forks.
Jennifer Frazee became director of the Fort Gibson Historic Site in 2021.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.