The Indian Removal (2540)

After 1783 more and more people moved to lands north of the Ohio River. Amerindians who already lived on these lands saw the settlers as thieves who had come to steal their hunting grounds. They made fierce attacks on the newcomers' farms and settlements. The settlers struck back, sometimes destroying entire Amerindian villages.

The government of the USA tried at first to keep the peace by making treaties with the Amerindians. A law of 1787 called the Northwest Ordinance said that the Amerindians' "lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent."

But the American government soon changed its ideas. By 1817 President James Monroe was writing that their hunting way of life "requires a greater extent of territory than is compatible with the progress of civilized life and must yield to it. If the Indian tribes do not abandon that state and become civilized they will decline and become extinct."

Monroe believed that there was only one way for the Amerindians to survive. They would have to be moved from lands that white settlers wanted to other lands, further west. There they would be free either to continue their old ways of life or to adopt those of white Americans.

In 1830 the United States government passed a law called the Indian Removal Act to put this policy into practice. The law said that all Indians living east of the Mississippi River would be moved vest to a place called Indian Territory. This was an area beyond the Mississippi that was thought to be unsuitable for white farmers. Some people claimed that the Indian Removal Act was a way of saving the Amerindians. But most saw it simply as a way to get rid of them and seize their land.

The Cherokees were an Amerindian people who suffered greatly from the Indian Removal policy. Their lands lay between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River. By the early nineteenth century the Cherokees had changed themselves from a Stone Age tribe into a civilized community.

Many owned large farms and lived in European-style houses built of brick. They had become Christians and attended church and sent their children to school. Their towns had stores, sawmills and blacksmiths' shops. They had a written language and published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English. They even wrote a Constitution modelled on that of the United States.

None of this saved the Cherokees. In the 1830s Congress declared that their lands belonged to the state of Georgia and they were divided up for sale to white settlers. The Cherokees were driven from their homes and forced to march hundreds of miles overland to what is now the state of Oklahoma.

The worst year was 1838. In bitterly cold winter weather, American soldiers gathered thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children, and drove them west. The nightmare journey lasted almost five months. By the time it was over, 4,000 of the Amerindians – a quarter of the whole Cherokee nation – were dead. This episode is still remembered with shame by modern Americans. It came to be called "The Trail of Tears."

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