English-Native American relations in the 17th and 18th centuries were marked by a series of particularly vicious wars won by the English. The English exercised the mandate of victory to insist that the Native Americans submit to English sovereignty and either confine their activities to strictly delimited tracts of land near areas of English settlement or move out beyond the frontier.

Wars and Enforced Migrations

"žh Disease was also a grim factor in the American colonies, where the majority of the Eastern Woodlands people lived as village farmers.

"žh Severely affected by smallpox and war and harassed by settlers, many of the peoples indigenous to the eastern coastal areas gathered together their remnants and sought refuge west of the Appalachians.

Relations with the United States

"žh One of the problems confronting the young United States was what to do with Native American peoples, particularly those in the Old Northwest (today called the Midwest) and South. The Treaty of Paris (1783), which formally ended the American Revolution, had made no mention of the country¡¦s indigenous peoples, reflecting Great Britain¡¦s ambiguous jurisdiction over them.

"žh The United States would have to chart its own course, which it did in Article I, Section 8, of its Constitution: ¡§The Congress shall have Power ¡K To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.¡¨ This was the law from which more than 200 years of federal legislation and programs would derive.

"žh In the closing years of the 18th century, many of these ¡§new¡¨ Americans were migrating in search of land across the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee¡Xareas where various Native American nations were still intact and strong.

"žh Once there, many of these migrants squatted on Native American land, with the predictable result: war.

"žh A series of battles culminated in 1794 in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwestern Ohio, won by the forces of American General Anthony Wayne; it was followed, a year later, by the forced Treaty of Greenville, establishing a definite boundary between what was designated ¡§Indian Territory¡¨ and white settlement.

The Trade and Intercourse Acts

"žh These were difficult years for the fledgling government of the United States.

"žh Dominated by easterners, who were far removed from the brutality and anxieties of the trans-Appalachian frontier, the Congress of the United States was interested in pursuing a just and humane policy toward Native Americans.

"žh This was the rationale behind the passage of the Trade and Intercourse Acts, a series of programs at the turn of the century aimed at reducing fraud and other abuses in commerce with Native Americans.

"žh Congress sought to extinguish Native American titles to lands through peaceful negotiation before white settlement. However, Washington policy makers and eastern humanitarians could not control the frontier.

"žh To many frontier dwellers in Kentucky or Ohio, the indigenous peoples needed to be exterminated.

"žh Providence, they believed, had ordained that Anglo-Saxon stock should push west until it could go no farther.

"žh It was ¡§progress¡¨ to dispossess the Native Americans of their land, which in the eyes of these new settlers had lain idle for millennia.

"žh The settlers would break the soil and use it.

"žh Native Americans were thus regarded as an anachronism¡Xirreclaimable ¡§children of the forest¡¨ by some, particularly those west of the Appalachians, and redeemable ¡§savages¡¨ by many eastern philanthropists and humanitarians.