unded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.This doctrine was embodied in the act of August 7, 1789, as one of the first declarations of the US Congress under the Constitution.The final shaping of the legal and political rights of the Indian tribes is found in the opinions of Chief Justice John Marshall, notably in decision in the case of Worcester v. Georgia: The Indian nations had always been considered as distinct, independent, political communities, retaining their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the land, from time immemorial. . . . The settled doctrine of the law of nations is, that a weaker power does not surrender its independence - its right to self-government - By associating with a stronger, and taking its protection. A weak state, in order to provide for its safety, may place itself under the protection of one more powerful, without stripping itself of the right of government, and ceasing to be a state.The first major departure from the policy of respecting Indian rights came with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. For the first time the United States resorted to coercion, particularly in the cases of the Cherokee and Seminole tribes, as a means of securing compliance. The Removal Act was not in itself coercive, since it authorized the president only to negotiate with tribes east of the Mississippi on a basis of payment for their lands; it called for improvements in the east and a grant of land west of the river, to which perpetual title would be attached. In carrying out the law, however, resistance was met with military force. In the decade following, almost the entire population of perhaps 100,000 Indians was moved westward. The episode moved Alexis de Tocqueville to remark in 1831: The Europeans continued to surround [The Indians] on every side, and to confine them within narrower limits. . . and the Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of sustaining. They were isolated in their own country, and their race only constituted a little colony of troublesome strangers in the midst of a numerous and dominant people. p> The territory west of the Mississippi, it turned out, was not so remote as had been supposed. The discovery of gold in California (1848) started a new sequence of treaties, designed to extinguish Indian title to lands lying in the path of the overland routes to the Pacific. The sudden surge of thousands of wagon trains through the last of the Indian country and the consequent slaughtering of prairie and mountain game that provided subsistence for the Indians brought on the most serious Indian wars the country had experienced. For three decades, beginning in the 1850s, raids and sporadic pitched fighting took place up and down the western Plains, highlighted by such incidents as the Custer massacre by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians (1876), the N...
