Early Government Policy and the Permanent Indian Frontier

Removal Before the Plains

By the time of our period, US policy towards Native nations already had a hard edge. President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act authorised the federal government to move the so-called Five Civilised Tribes — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole — off their lands in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. Pressure from white cotton planters and the discovery of gold on Cherokee land made the policy bipartisan in the South. Between 1830 and 1839 around 60,000 people were forced to walk to Indian Territory in modern Oklahoma. Roughly 4,000 Cherokee died on the 1838–39 march that became known as the Trail of Tears. Removal set the legal and cultural template for Plains policy: Native nations could be moved by act of Congress, treaties could be rewritten, and the federal government would back settler demands.

The Permanent Indian Frontier (1834)

Where would the removed peoples go? In 1834 Congress passed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, drawing what became known as the Permanent Indian Frontier. A line was drawn from the Red River in the south to the Missouri River in the north. Everything west of that line would, in theory, be ‘Indian country’ for ever, with white traders requiring licences and white settlers excluded. The army built a chain of forts (Smith, Gibson, Leavenworth) along the line to enforce it. The vision was simple: removed Eastern peoples and the Plains nations would all live west of the line; white America would be content with the eastern half of the continent.

Why Permanent Was Not Permanent

The line lasted barely fifteen years. The 1840s brought four hammer blows. First, missionary reports began to draw farmers towards Oregon: the first big wagon train left Independence in 1841 and the trail crossed straight through ‘Indian country’. Second, Manifest Destiny made it politically easy to argue that the Plains belonged to a wider American future. Third, the 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the United States title to vast new lands — the Pacific Northwest and the Mexican Cession — lying beyond the supposedly permanent frontier. The Plains were now a corridor between the eastern United States and its new western territory, not a buffer protecting Native land.

Fourth, gold. The 1848 California discovery sent perhaps a quarter of a million migrants overland in five years. The trails carved deep ruts across the Platte River country, killed buffalo for meat, frightened the herds away from traditional hunting grounds, and spread cholera into Plains camps. Trespass on ‘Indian country’ was no longer a rare crime; it was the basis of national life. Federal officials had a choice: enforce the Permanent Frontier and stop the migration, or quietly abandon the policy. They chose the second.

From Separation to Concentration

By the early 1850s policy had a new name: concentration. Instead of separating whites and Plains nations entirely (which the Permanent Frontier had tried), Washington would now push the Plains nations onto smaller, defined areas, leaving wide corridors for white travel and settlement. The first big test was the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty (covered in Lesson 6), which assigned named territories to the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow and Shoshone. In return, the United States promised an annual annuity of $50,000 in goods for fifty years.

Concentration was, on paper, more honest than the Permanent Frontier had been. It accepted that white migration would not stop. But it was not, in any deep sense, a peace policy: it stripped vast tracts away from people who had not lost a war, and it created the rule that Plains nations should now live in places defined by Washington. Within twenty years concentration would harden into the reservation system, and within forty into the Dawes Act’s break-up of communal land. Each step shrank the territory available; none was reversed.