This captivating video narrates the true story of the American frontier's expansion after the British defeat, highlighting the vast, diverse, and existing indigenous presence across North America. It traces back to discoveries and evidences like the footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, proving long-standing human occupation, and emphasizes the varied lifestyles, cultures, and languages of around 600 federally recognized tribes inhabiting the continent long before European settlers. A significant portion of this narrative focuses on the detrimental impact that European conquest and colonization had on these native populations, leading to a catastrophic decline due to introduced diseases, displacement, and blatant land grabs by settlers keen to exploit so-called virgin lands for their gain.

The video explores the complex dynamics between indigenous tribes themselves and their interactions with colonial powers. It highlights how trade relations played a pivotal role among tribes, with alliances sometimes shifting due to European influences. The narrative delves into the aggressive expansion of European settlers, the resistance of various tribes, and critical historical moments like the implementation of the Indian Removal Act and Andrew Jackson's presidency, which forcibly relocated thousands of indigenous people, causing immense suffering and loss, epitomized by events such as the Trail of Tears. The Seminole resistance in Florida underscores the fierce defense some tribes put up against these incursions.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. homesteaders [ˈhəʊmˌstɛdərz] - (n.) - People who acquire or settle on land with the intention to farm and live on it. - Synonyms: (settlers, pioneers, colonists)

allowing traders and homesteaders to push west.

2. colonization [ˌkɒlənaɪˈzeɪʃən] - (n.) - The act of setting up a colony away from one's place of origin. - Synonyms: (settlement, occupation, annexation)

Part of the European right of conquest and colonization rested on the idea that the continent was empty.

3. immunities [ɪˈmjuːnɪtiz] - (n.) - The ability of an organism to resist a particular infection or toxin. - Synonyms: (resistance, protection, defense)

Any disease that came with them killed the native people because they had no immunities for those things.

4. congruent [ˈkɒŋɡruənt] - (n.) - Essentially identical in some strict view. - Synonyms: (consistent, compatible, corresponding)

And there seems to be great consensus among archaeologists that these footprints represent the oldest evidence of human occupation anywhere in North America.

5. sedentary [ˈsɛdəntəri] - (adj.) - Tending to spend much time seated, relatively inactive or settled, not migratory. - Synonyms: (inactive, immobile, settled)

They were semi sedentary.

6. matriarchal [ˌmeɪtriˈɑːrkəl] - (adj.) - Relating to a social organization where a woman is the head. - Synonyms: (matronly, female-dominated, woman-led)

Some are matrilineal, some are patrilineal, and some are even both.

7. covert [ˈkoʊvərt] - (adj.) - Not openly acknowledged or displayed. - Synonyms: (secret, hidden, clandestine)

the newly formed government begin moving west, making deals and signing treaties with amenable tribes in order to accelerate their covert land grab.

8. deportations [ˌdiːpɔːrˈteɪʃənz] - (n.) - The act of expelling a person from a place or country judicially or administratively. - Synonyms: (expulsion, banishment, exile)

The Indian Removal act was one of the first mass forced deportations in human history.

9. demographic [ˌdem.əˈɡræf.ɪk] - (adj.) - Relating to the structure of populations. - Synonyms: (statistical, population-based, census-related)

That is a demographic catastrophe without parallel in human history.

10. ethnic cleansing [ˈɛθnɪk ˈklɛnzɪŋ] - (n.) - The mass expulsion or killing of members of an ethnic or religious group in a society. - Synonyms: (genocide, purging, racial extermination)

We might, and I think historians now more commonly do, apply the phrase ethnic cleansing to what happens in terms of the expulsion.

America's Wild West - A Catastrophic Frontier (Full Episode) - What Really Happened

This is the true story of the frontier of the Wild west and the founding of America. The British are defeated in a bloody war for independence, allowing traders and homesteaders to push west.

Part of the European right of conquest and colonization rested on the idea that the continent was empty, venturing out across 828,000 square miles of wilderness. Some roads into Mississippi actually disintegrated under the traffic, bringing with them new technology, livestock, and disease. Any disease that came with them killed the native people because they had no immunities for those things.

But much of this terrain was already inhabited. This wasn't virgin land. This was a widowed land. This is the true story of an indigenous people who refused to be defeated or destroyed. They lost their homes, and obviously they left a lot of their hearts. Of a hostile commander in chief willing to take land by law or by force, and an enduring campaign to finally conquer the frontier.

So they found a set of footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. And through pollen analysis and various other forms of archaeological analysis, they've established. And there seems to be great consensus among archaeologists that these footprints represent the oldest evidence of human occupation anywhere in North America. Can date them around 20, 21, 22,000 years ago. So we're talking millennia and millennia and millennia and millennia of human occupation before European origin.

People, whether they were Spanish or whether they were British or whether they were Dutch or whether they were French, ended up in what is today North America. From the very beginning, I knew that I was Native or an Apache, as my parents brought me up to know the hunting and the gathering ways. We've been assigned a lot of names, just like anybody else. You have a preference? You know, some people say, well, I want to be called a Native American. You know, I want to be called First Nations. You know, I want to be called. I want to be called an American Indian. I grew up being called an Indian. I refer to myself as Native American Indian. Indigenous people of America are people who really have their own kind of worldview, how that they see the world, a set of values and beliefs, and how that they understand everything in their own way. Everything had a purpose, and they respected everything. And everything was used by the Indians because that's what we were given.

You know, Native people have always been curious, great observers watching nature because nature can teach you a lot. And by looking at nature, you can learn the cycles of how that things happen. And that adds to a kind of a collection of wisdom. And so this is to be passed on to each group. There's also sacred knowledge that is collected then used for certain ceremonies. We believe that sacred knowledge can be powerful and actually can hurt you.

The most important thing for us is the land and the water. Without those two things, you don't have life. And we try to live by that. Before the arrival of Columbus to the so called New World, the population has been estimated of Native people living here anywhere between about 5 million to 10 million, to as high as about 25 million people. American Indians or Native Americans, we're not all the same. There's almost 600 different federally recognized tribes. The term indigenous or Native American or American Indian, all these terms really arise in the aftermath of white colonization and conquest.

And so that prior to this intrusion, there's no sense of a single indigenous identity. In that way. Native people who lived in the Pacific Northwest were very different from the Native Indians of the Southeast. Indians of the eastern Great Lakes were very different from the Indians of California or the Southwest Indians of the Plains. As many as 24 tribes, you know, live on the Plains and the prairies. You can also divide that into High Plains, Central Plains and Southern Plains. The Indians of the west, particularly of the Plains, were less inclined to ally themselves with one another, more inclined to see one another's enemies. They were essentially hunter gatherers and they were competing over the same land. You look east in Mississippi, these tribes, they were semi sedentary.

They lived in fixed villages. The tribes of the American South, Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw and the Creek, they had villages, towns that existed from one generation to the next. They understood the borders between their nations and generally respected those native groups across the entire continent, Always in kind of constant movement. And one of the biggest factors that enabled that was trade relations. You had tribes that made alliances with one another.

So initially you, the Plains people spoke their language, their tribal language, and then their, their allies, the person that they became allied with, like the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, they learned to speak Cheyenne and Arapaho, and then they aligned with the Sioux. So you had those three big tribes that they could pretty much talk to one another. If you had enough corn, then you might trade it to somebody else for some kind of metal wear that they might have to offer, metal vessels or something like that to carry water or pottery.

So trade relations was really, really important. When you take this great diversity of native people, then certainly they speak different languages, they have different worldviews, they have different political differences. Some are matrilineal, some are patrilineal, and some are even both. Some have clans, others have bands. You have Algonquian speaking people, which is one of the two major language stocks that populated the eastern woodlands.

And on the western half, you have Athabascan people. So when you look at the Baskan person, as opposed to an Algonquin person, then they look different, their physical features are different. And that's literally because they came to the so called New World at different times. And then you have people who are from Eskimo background actually coming a little bit later. And a lot of people think they were the first ones. No, they were one of the last ones. And so you have these three different kind of major groups, millions of Native American people scattered across this land all the way into Central America. And they traversed back and forth. They went all the way down to Central America and they talked about seeing alligators and coming back and telling people right away.

We have to sort of figure into any equation to explain conquest and colonialism. It starts with germs. In the 16th century, settlers seeking a fresh start shipped their entire lives across the Atlantic from France, Spain and Britain. Their strange, exotic imports include new plants, new animals, new technology, and deadly new parasites. They were hardy, tough people, but millions of people died from things like the flu, a cold. Any disease that came with them killed the native people because they had no immunities for those things. In the four centuries after 1492, indigenous populations of the Americas declined by 95 or more percent. That is a demographic catastrophe without parallel in human history. I think you can't understand anything that happens in the colonial era and its aftermath without really first grappling with that horror.

Millions of them died from 1492 to the 20th century, when there was less than a million people. Smallpox, tears along the veins of America, an epidemic flowing through river systems used as native trade routes. The phrase that most attaches in US History is that this was virgin land. Given what we now know about disease and decimation of Indian populations, this wasn't virgin land. This was a widowed land. Horses galloped onto the shores of America in the late 16th century, introduced by the Spanish conquistadors. Transient indigenous tribes moving south across the plains soon came into contact with these powerful animals. And by the 1800s, horses were firmly established in the Native American way of life.

So in the area we understand now as North America, cattle and horses did not exist before the invasion of Spaniards. And in that way, Native Americans hunted buffalo on foot, in groups, with bows and arrows, spears and techniques to push them over cliffs, with Native people learning what to do with the horse they saw. You know, the Spanish riding on Horses. And they realized what the possibilities could be done with a horse. Well, it changed everything. So the buffalo was the main source of protein for the Plains Indians. It was enormously important. It was sort of the bedrock of their livelihood. It was very difficult to hunt the buffalo on foot. But all of a sudden, once you have access to the horse, that becomes a really rich territory. And so the Native population on the Great Plains really booms.

During this time period, the major powers on the Great Plains were the Comanches and the Sioux. The Sioux, and primarily the Lakota Sioux came to power by using traders, European traders, to get exactly what they needed. So the Sioux gained horses from Spanish traders. They gained guns from European traders. They even gained a smallpox vaccine, which saved them from a massive die off that otherwise afflicted so many Native people. So the Sioux were actually able to use traders to their own advantage. They were able to play them against their indigenous rivals and to exert control over a huge swath of the North American continent.

In the northern Great Plains, Native clans traversed the land, often mixing, merging with, or forcibly displacing other groups. Their presence was expanding, making them a target for the various colonial powers who forever sought more. The settlement of British North America is founded on a settler colonial model. The government doesn't necessarily need to use its own resources or the army in order to remove Native Americans from territories that they wish to settle. They open up these areas to settlement by individuals. So individuals, we can call them squatters, will move in and occupy that land and hassle, kill, disrupt the livelihood of Native residents.

Settler colonialism looks to ordinary settlers to remove Native occupants of land that the government hopes to colonize. Europeans had an interest in diminishing the size of the Native population because, after all, part of the European right of conquest and colonization, as they put it forward, rested on the idea that the continent was empty. One of the things that gave the impetus for creating a stronger federal government after the American Revolution was the fact that to battle Indigenous peoples for land, you actually need a strong federal government. It can't just be a collection of a bunch of little colonies. And so that in that respect, the formation of the federal government is really a direct response to the presence of Indigenous peoples and the resistance that Indigenous peoples are are positing to the effort of white settlers to spread west.

The United States leaders mark out any unexplored territory as their land. Representatives of the newly formed government begin moving west, making deals and signing treaties with amenable tribes in order to accelerate their covert land grab. There's actually a confederacy that's formed between various Native nations. And the purpose of this confederacy is to make sure that they negotiate with the new United States collectively. They realize that what the United States was trying to do was make a treaty with one little tribe and then claim a bunch of land because they could sort of manipulate one tribe and intimidate one tribe. These various Native nations bind themselves together in this confederacy and try to negotiate collectively with the United States.

The United States is very threatened by this. And some of the earliest Native wars are really this effort to crush this cooperative effort that's being raised by indigenous peoples. It was obviously in the interests of Euro Americans to pretend that it was an empty continent, that it was open land just there for the taking. Present Indians as just hunters, who really weren't improving the land, weren't cultivating the land, weren't doing what's necessary to lay claim to it as property.

That's not true. Most of the Indians that Europeans are encountering in the eastern half of what is North America are farming peoples. And so they've already sort of created a fiction. They've created a fiction upon a fiction, both by reducing the numbers and pretending that they're not settled peoples. Andrew Jackson and how he was involved with American Indians is really intriguing because he was such an individual that seemed to be kind of destined for maybe not greatness, but for difficulty. His father died when he was young, ran off to join the Revolutionary War. A lot of people refer to him as the populist president, the most democratic president, sort of a backwoodsman, so to speak, and a frontiersman himself.

Andrew Jackson really leaned hard into his image as an American frontiersman, as this rugged individual who was able to carve out chunks of territory in the American west in the name of the United States. Riding high on the success of his military career, Andrew Jackson succeeds John Quincy Adams as seventh president of the United States. Jackson traded on this image as a man of the people, somehow more relatable than some of the wealthier, more refined, perhaps better educated politicians who were coming out of Virginia and Massachusetts at the time. He becomes president in part because he's so adamant that the Indians of the Southeast need to give way, in his words, to white residents, that all of that land belongs to white people, and that as soon as Indians can be removed and pushed west of the Mississippi, the better. This is a big part of his appeal.

Andrew Jackson came to prominence as a war hero, as the commanding general who oversaw a violent expulsion of native people in the American Southeast. So he had really cut his teeth as an American commander and as an Indian killer. Jackson's notoriety had been cemented during the War of 1812. As conflict erupts between the colonists and the British. There's fighting in the Southeast. Muskogee tribespeople pick sides. A deluge of northern warriors join the British forces. Jackson, serving as major general for the United States, triumphs over King George's men at the Battle of New Orleans. His status as a national hero is secured, eventually allowing him the power to steal Muscogee land.

He was able to negotiate a land session from the Muscogee people which surrendered a lot of their land. The main payoff, from the perspective a lot of white Americans of the War of 1812, was the seizure of vast amounts of Native land in the American Southeast. And that seizure was overseen primarily by Andrew Jackson. Then he takes that kind of idea into his administration while he's President of the United States. In fact, Andrew Jackson becomes president in part on the promise to remove the five civilized Tribes from what is now the Southeast.

Not everyone agreed with the former soldiers aggressive approach to controlling Native people. Chief Justice John Marshall, leading the Supreme Court, rules that individual tribes must be treated properly as nations, their rights respected, their culture protected. It's a polarizing decision with the president now caught in firm disagreement with his government. Andrew Jackson refuses to enforce the decisions of the Marshall court. And he famously says, john Marshall has made his decision. Let him enforce it. So Andrew Jackson is the first president who's willing to openly defy the Supreme Court in order to get what he wants. And what he wants in this case is Indians gone.

For a long time, Andrew Jackson was seen as the champion of the common man because he opened up more lands for ordinary people, for ordinary white men. What perhaps only recently have historians moved to the center of that discussion, however, is that Jackson's political economy, that is opening up lands in the west for white farmers, required the dispossession of Indian peoples from those lands. We might, and I think historians now more commonly do, apply the phrase ethnic cleansing to what happens in terms of the expulsion, the eviction of Indian peoples from their lands and their forced migration to the west.

Land becomes incredibly valuable, particularly in the south, where groups like the Cherokee and the Chickasaw and the Choctaws are located because this is also very good land for cotton production. And so there's a real desire to have that land. Jackson presents Congress with a controversial proposal, the Indian Removal Act. This devastating piece of law would allow the president to snatch a huge body of land from Native people in order to sell it on to white settlers whilst legalizing the Army's enforced brutal removal of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw Creek and Seminole tribes from Georgia and its neighboring states. The Indian the Indian Removal act meant that Native people would agree to be removed with treaties negotiated with them.

Andrew Jackson, who's himself a slave owner and a plantation owner, so very much coming at this from the Southern plantation owner's perspective. There's a lot of opposition to Indian removal among residents of New England and the Mid Atlantic states. Even Davy Crockett, the known Indian fighter, writes a letter to Congress saying this is the wrong thing to do. And so you have people who believe that Indian removal is wrong, but you have other people like Andrew Jackson, one of the leading proponents that Indian removal is justified and it's the best thing for Native people to be removed.

May 26, 1830. Having considered Jackson's proposal, the House of Representatives cast their votes on the removal act. 97 reject the controversial new legislation. But 101 men pushed the act into being. Two days later, Jackson signed his new law into existence. Jefferson famously says that you can kind of blend in with us. Potentially indigenous people could become citizens of the United States. Groups like the Cherokee and more or less take the US at its word, or at least they do begin to adopt aspects of United States culture. I think there'd always been this sense from my reading of the evidence, that it was going to be a long, slow process for them to become assimilated in like white people.

And removal just basically said that process is so long and slow that we're just going to just push you out of here because it's just not going to happen within any number of lifetimes. The Indian Removal act was one of the first mass forced deportations in human history. It was a program that removed somewhere around 60,000 native people from their homelands and shuffled them onto much smaller tracts of land in Indian territory. And this was done primarily to unlock that land for white settlers. The US government spent the equivalent of a trillion dollars in today's currency to forcibly remove these tens of thousands of Native people. They recouped those losses by selling this appropriated Native American land in the American south, primarily to slaveholding cotton growers.

Whilst the government had already begun forcibly relocating Native people, it was now legal to shift any tribe wherever they liked, whenever they liked, and in any way they deemed necessary. The Removal act was very traumatizing for Indian people. They were herded around, they were forced to go somewhere they didn't want to leave their homeland. The US government selected Indian Territory, what today is more or less Oklahoma, because it was deemed less agriculturally valuable land. It's the US Government's attempt to corral native people to a piece of land that they didn't think white American settlers would particularly want. Far less valuable, far less agriculturally rich than the lands that a lot of these people were forcibly moved from. Places like Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Indian Territory effectively created a new frontier, but a frontier of native people.

Perhaps the greatest large scale tragedy to befall American Indians were the so called Trails of Tears. It was a removal done at gunpoint. It was overseen by the US military. Now the removal itself was just tremendous in a way. It meant much great suffering, much tragedy. Less than a year after the Indian Removal act comes into law, the Choctaw are the first nation forced to travel by foot to a far flung territory. Their cruel displacement provides a model for the many removals which follow. These would come to be known as the trail of tears. 60,000 people making up the five civilized tribes, once allied with Jackson in an attempt to assimilate to his new America, pushed west into what would become Oklahoma.

One group is not always moved in wants, but rather in parties. The groups that are most willing to be removed first, like the Chaco, accepted that and thought, we know what's going to happen so with settlers coming into Mississippi, into our homeland, so we'll just go ahead and move. And so they were the first ones. And these were not small tribes, these were, these were the Creek, for instance, when they exposed their own forest removal, they numbered over 20,000, which is a large number of people for an Indian tribe. Some of them stayed, some of them hid in the mountains and wouldn't leave.

But those that were forced to be moved here had to walk and carry, carry all of their belongings. A lot of the children and old people couldn't make it. It was too hard. You know, it was in the wintertime. They suffered. If they fell back, they were killed. If they couldn't make it, they fell back. Rather than picking them up and putting them on a wagon, they just killed them. So it was a. They come down with dysentery, cholera in particular, all kind of le flu, measles. That adds to the march of almost a thousand miles going to the west. Cherokees, I think it took them six months to walk from their land. This perilous journey and forced at bayonet point becomes a grueling 1200 mile trek across inhospitable land with a displaced facing exposure, disease and starvation.

It's just a very sad vision of a lot of old people and women with children, non combatant type people being physically forced from their homes by men with guns. They lost their homes and obviously they left a lot of their hearts back in their land because they were relocated. The damage was enormous, especially to the five tribes of the American Southeast. Thousands of lives. These people had been forcibly uprooted and forced to create new livelihoods and new communities in Indian territory. Of course they did, they succeeded in that regard. But they were forever deprived of lands they once regarded as their ancestral home homelands. That idea and the phrase Trail of Tears. It's symbolic of all the forced removal of all the tribes and not just of the south but of the Ohio country.

Some tribes are moved sometimes two or three times. The Delawares were removed nine times. If you look at the first census figures after the displacement, number of Creeks dropped by nearly 40%. And these are the deaths that occurred along the routes into modern day Oklahoma, plus people who died after early arrival. The US government in fact was in the practice of trying to effect this removal as cheaply and efficiently as they could. Their objective was not necessarily to preserve native lives as they moved them west into Indian territory. Their purpose was to clear land and to do it on the cheap.

A number of tribes voluntarily agree to move west and some don't. The remaining Indians who are still there, they don't have the will or resources to fight back. The major exception of this of course is the Seminole in Florida. Pushed deep into the murky wetlands of the Florida Everglades, the Seminoles isolationist tribe begins to grow. Made up of the Creek and other native peoples, but also slaves, absconders of the southern plantations. The Seminoles really many of them decide to stay and fight and they're in certain respects they have the landscaping ecology on their side because they're in the Everglades. In Florida, it's very inaccessible to white American soldiers. An attempt to reclaim the Everglades rapidly escalates into a long and ferocious war.

It's an incredibly brutal war. So brutal that many of the US officers, something on the order of one third of them end up quitting because they just can't deal with the resistance that the Seminole are putting up. The United States does all sorts of things that it likes to imagine it wouldn't so that it has a flag of truce, a white flag flying so that they can negotiate with some of the Seminole leaders in Osceola. When they go up to negotiate, then the U.S. government, the Army Seizes them. It doesn't honor the flag of truce which it itself was putting forward. The Seminoles appear to have been the most sensitive and the most accepting of Africans.

Africans actually could be incorporated as full members in Seminoles, white Americans. Worst nightmare is that you have an alliance, as it were, between enslaved peoples and indigenous peoples trying to resist American empire. Many Africans sided with the Seminoles in their wars against settlers. That's not something that anybody else talks about relative to other members of five nations groups. And so I think that's why they spent a tremendous amount of money in many, many years trying to crush the Seminoles. Because of the tremendous threat that they pose to this project of expansion for the United States.

Years into the conflict and with no end in site, the Union abandoned their war on the Seminole. No peace treaty or armistice is ever declared. Lands that these native people were guaranteed imper potential perpetuity in Oklahoma. Well, perpetuity had a. Had a time horizon. Treaties, pledges and promises had been broken. The United States government pushing over 100,000 Native Americans west of the Mississippi Survival in this strange new land required displaced tribes to rebuild communities and find ways to coexist with other nations forced to settle there.

Trying to put us on reservations and holding places and ground where nothing would grow. So that was our punishment for being Indian. When these people arrived in what is now Oklahoma, they had territories. The Cherokees had the Cherokee Nation, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks and the Seminoles. So you're moving from a different ecosystem where a lot of, say, the plants that you would use for ceremonial purposes are no longer found on the Great Plains. So you're having to give, you know, surrender a lot of very important aspects of your culture. It's not an easily transformed thing. Oklahoma has 39 tribes and most of them have. Are from somewhere else.

This then creates all sorts of conflict that then develops between the Cherokees and some of these other groups on the Great Plains. Because there's frankly, there's just a limited amount of, you know, resources. They would clash on the battlefield. They would attack each other, raid each other. They weren't allowed to leave. Once they were there, they were not allowed to leave that reservation. You know, they had to have special permission. They couldn't even go back and visit somebody or their whole homeland removal dislocated people. It was designed to destroy their culture. This is a new frontier that's created between Native people and that indigenous people are. They knew this, of course, all along. They're not all the same. They have Wildly different political traditions and ways of working.

To a lot of white Americans, of course, Native people are all the same. One of the things that is striking in a sense, is that the United States signs hundreds of treaties with Indian nations. And yet, you know, from the point of view of a larger world history, I think it is still worth asking, well, why the United States felt the need to sign a treaty at all. That there were plenty of conquering powers in world history that conquered simply on the basis of might makes right as opposed to presuming or pretending or creating some legal nicety around the conquest. American mass migration really accelerated in the wake of Indian removal. Sometimes American settlers barely waited for these indigenous people to be deported before they moved in.

Some roads into Mississippi actually disintegrated under the traffic of these white settlers coming in with their African American slaves to seize the land that had once been owned by native people. So the transformation from Indian country to slave country in the 1830s was almost immediate. The Indian Removal act marked the beginning of the permanent colonization of America, normalizing the subjugation of Native American people, the brutalization of an entire race. I know some Cherokees and some Choctaws that will not even carry a $20 bill in their pocket because it has Andrew Jackson's picture on it. And he was the one that forced him to leave so that they could take their land.

It is very clear to anyone who has really thought about the experience of indigenous peoples that they were othered from day one and they were forced to experience genocide, dislocation, dispossession, all kinds of terrible things whose legacy is still with us. With their nation established fertile, inexpensive territories theirs for the taking, white settlers make the perilous journey even further west, into Texas and Oregon. But life on the trail proves tough. Fraught with disease, natural disasters and deadly accidents, their grapple for land and a better life is far from over.

HISTORY, COLONIALISM, INDIGENOUS TRIBES, POLITICS, EDUCATION, CULTURE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC