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I. Westward Expansion

Teaching Idea Gold Rush and the ’49ers

Students may enjoy hearing excerpts
In January 1848, John Sutter hired James Marshall to build a sawmill on the
from letters and autobiographies of
American River, which ran through Sutter’s property near Sacramento, California.
people who participated in the gold
As he worked, Marshall noticed in the riverbed shiny flakes that looked golden in
rush of 1849. One well-known set of
the light. When he examined them more closely, he saw they were gold. Though
documents is a series of letters by
the two men tried to hide Marshall’s discovery, word got out and the rush to find
William Swain written to his wife
gold was soon on. 52
Sabrina Swain and his brother George
Californians took to the rivers and streams looking for gold. Much of it was
Swain. Another interesting document is
easily found in streams and riverbeds by panning. Miners literally used pans with
the memoirs of Luzena Stanley Wilson.
small holes poked through their bottoms. They let the water flow through the
Excerpts from both the Swain and the
holes, and the heavy gold sank to the bottom of the pans.
Wilson materials can be found online.
(See More Resources.) By the following summer, 100,000 people arrived in California—not just
from the east coast of the United States but from Europe and much of the Pacific
Basin, especially China, as well. Most came overland by horse and wagon train,
but many came by boat. Some sailed around Cape Horn at the tip of South
Cross-curricular America and up the coast, while others sailed to Panama, trekked overland, and
Teaching Idea took a ship again from the west coast of Central America.
Have students do research on the The ’49ers, as the miners were called, were an enterprising group of men and
California gold rush or another factor women. Most miners were young men who expected to make their fortune and
that influenced westward expansion. then return home. Some family men brought their wives and children along,
Suggest that they use online and print expecting to stay. Single women, hoping to find gold or to earn money cooking
resources. Their final products could or doing laundry for the miners, traveled to California as well. Some free blacks
take the form of written or oral reports came, as well as some southerners who brought their slaves to mine for them.
with accompanying artwork illustrating Even though few miners found a substantial amount of gold, many stayed for the
something learned from the research. climate and the rich farmland.
Have students submit a bibliography
(formal or informal) of the material they
Native American Resistance
consulted to create their project and From the beginning, the new United States’ dealings with Native Americans
written report. resulted in a string of conflicts, misunderstandings, epidemics, skirmishes, wars,
broken treaties, and unfulfilled promises. At first, the federal government recog-
nized Native Americans as sovereign nations and negotiated treaties with them
for their land. Sometimes these treaties were freely negotiated, and other times
Teaching Idea they were the result of wars. The Treaty of Greenville (1795) is an example of a
Tell students that many sports teams’ treaty that was forced on the Native Americans as a result of war. The treaty, by
names are based on historical events. which the native peoples of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin,
Find out the names of professional Michigan) gave up most of their lands, was an outcome of the Battle of Fallen
sports teams and see how many relate Timbers (1794). The Treaty deprived Natives of claims to roughly two-thirds of
to history of the area (e.g., the San the land of modern-day Ohio. Federal troops under General Anthony Wayne
Francisco ’49ers’ name comes from the defeated a force of Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Fox, and Sauk
gold rush of ’49). near what is today Toledo, Ohio. Later, the War of 1812 would break the back of
Native resistance in the rest of the region.
As more settlers pushed the frontier back by moving west and south from the
original thirteen states, they came in contact with more Native Americans. Many
European Americans considered the Native Americans uncivilized, and saw them
as obstacles standing in the way of settlers’ ambitions. The settlers continued to
push the Native Americans westward. Sometimes the army tried to prevent set-
tlers from encroaching on Native American lands, but at other times the army
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fought against the Native Americans. The conflict over land in the Southeast is an
example.
The Native American nations of the southeastern United States—the
Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—became known as the
“Five Civilized Tribes” due to their adoption of constitutions, laws, and other
aspects of culture deemed to be “civilized.” The Cherokee in particular adopted
European American ways by becoming farmers and converting to Christianity.
However, as the frontier moved south and west, settlers covered the tribal lands
in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson supported passage of the Indian
Removal Act, which gave him the power to force the Native Americans of the
Southeast to move to what was known as the Indian Territory, now part of the
state of Oklahoma. The Choctaw left first, followed by the Creek and the
Chickasaw. The last to leave were the Seminole after the Second Seminole War
(1835–1842). 48
The Cherokee chose legal means rather than warfare to resist removal. In two
lawsuits that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Cherokee rights to their
lands were upheld. But President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored both
decisions, and seeing the inevitable, some 2,000 Cherokee agreed to move. By
1838, some 14,000 still remained in the Southeast. Jackson was no longer presi-
dent, but his successor, Martin Van Buren, decided to enforce the move. The
Cherokees’ forced march to the Indian Territory became known as the “Trail of
Tears.” The four-month trek took place in winter and it is estimated that about
4,000 men, women, and children died along the way. The cost of the removal was
subtracted from the money to be paid to the Cherokee for their lands, so they
were left with $3 million.
The Cherokee and the other nations removed to Indian Territory were prom-
ised that this land would remain theirs forever. “Forever” lasted a generation.
First, they lost part of their land to other Native American peoples whom the fed-
eral government resettled in the Territory in 1866. As the West filled up, there was
pressure on the government to open Native American lands. In 1889, the Creek
and the Seminole sold 50,000 acres to the United States for white settlement. By
1907, there were more whites than Native Americans in the Territory, and in that
year, it was made part of the new state of Oklahoma.

Tecumseh and the Battle of Tippecanoe

In the first decade of the 1800s, the states and territories bordering the fron-
tier believed that the British in Canada were aiding Native Americans who were
attacking frontier settlements. Beginning around 1811, Tecumseh, a Shawnee
chief, and his brother Tenskwatawa, tried to unite native peoples east of the
Mississippi in a giant confederacy. The two men believed that if the Native
American nations banded together and refused to sell land to Americans, they
could hold back American settlement.
Tenskwatawa was known as the Prophet because he claimed to have entered
the spirit world, communicated with the “Master of Life,” and returned to Earth
with knowledge of how Native Americans should live. He said they had to
renounce dependence on American trade goods and return to their traditional
ways of living and hunting. Here are some of the things he told his people:

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I. Westward Expansion

. . . But now those things of the white men have corrupted us, and made
us weak and needful. Our men forgot how to hunt without noisy guns.
Our women don’t want to make fire without steel, or cook without iron,
or sew without metal awls and needles, or fish without steel hooks. Some
look in those mirrors all the time, and no longer teach their daughters to
make leather or render bear oil. We learned to need the white men’s goods,
and so now a People who never had to beg for anything must beg for
everything! . . . Many of us now crave liquor. . . . There are drunkards in
almost every family. . . . We were fools to take all these things that weak-
ened us. We did not need them then, but we believe we need them now.
We turned our backs on the old ways. Instead of thanking the Great Spirit
for all we used to have, we turned to the white men and asked them for
more. So now we depend upon the very people who destroy us! This is our
weakness! . . . And that is why Our Creator purified me and sent me down
to you full of the shinning [sic] power, to make you what you were before!
. . . Do not eat any food that is raised or cooked by a white person. It is not
good for us. Eat not their bread made of wheat, for Our Creator gave us
corn for our bread. Eat not the meat of their filthy swine, nor of their
chicken fowls, nor the beef of their cattle, which are tame and thus have
no spirit in them. Their foods will seem to fill your empty belly, but this
deceives you for food without spirit does not nourish you. . . . There are
two kinds of white men. There are the Americans, and there are the oth-
ers. You may give your hand in friendship to the French, or the Spaniards,
or the British. But the Americans are not like those. The Americans come
from the slime of the sea, with mud and weeds in their claws, and they are
a kind of crayfish serpent whose claws grab in our earth and take it from
us. . . . That is what the Creator instructed me to tell you.
General William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, was con-
cerned about the growing influence of Tecumseh and the Prophet. In 1811,
Harrison led 1,000 soldiers to the Shawnee village on Tippecanoe Creek, near
what is now Lafayette, Indiana. Tecumseh was not there, but Tenskwatawa was.
Although Tecumseh had warned of the dangers of engaging the military in fight-
ing, Tenskwatawa still attacked Harrison’s force at night. Before attacking,
Tenskwatawa gave an impassioned speech in which he promised his troops that
the white man’s bullets could not hurt them. Fighting was fierce and neither side
won a decisive victory, although Harrison burned the Native American village and
declared that the Americans had won.
Harrison also claimed that his men had found British weapons in the Native
American camp. This sent shockwaves around the country. For many years settlers
who lived near the frontier had claimed that the British were arming the Native
Americans from bases in Canada and encouraging the native peoples to attack
American settlers. Now Harrison had given them a “smoking gun” that seemed to
prove what they had long suspected. The “war hawks” used Harrison’s claim to
press for a war with Great Britain. This was one of the reasons for the War of 1812.
Tenskwatawa lost most of his supporters after the Battle of Tippecanoe, but
Tecumseh continued the struggle. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh allied with
the British. When he died while fighting in Canada, so did his dream of a Native
American alliance.

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Tecumseh’s significance in the struggle of Native Americans against land-

hungry American settlers can be seen in the following statement:
I am a Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. Their son is a warrior.
From them I take only my existence, from my tribe I take nothing. I am
the maker of my own fortune, and Oh! that I could make that of my Red
people, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when
I think of the Spirit that rules the universe. I would not them come to
Governor Harrison to ask him to tear up the treaty [of 1809], and to oblit-
erate the landmark, but I would say to him: "Sir, you have liberty to return
to your own country."
The Being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor
until lately, there was no Whiteman on this continent, that it then all
belonged to the Great Spirit that made them to keep it, to traverse it, to Tecumseh
enjoy its productions, and to fill it with the same race, once a happy race;
since made miserable by the White people, who are never contented but
always encroaching.
The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the
Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it
was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all
for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other,
much less to strangers—those who want all and will not do with less. The
White people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because
they had it first, it is theirs. . . there cannot be two occupations in the
same place. The first excludes all others. It is not so in hunting or travel-
ing, for there is same ground will serve many. . . but the camp is station-
ary. . . . It belongs to the first who sits down on his blanket or skins, which Teaching Idea
he has thrown upon the ground, and till he leaves it, no other has a right. Discuss with students why the nation
William Henry Harrison went from his “victory” at Tippecanoe to fight in the might elect military officers as presi-
War of 1812. He was made a brigadier general and later promoted to major gener- dents. Our first presidents, George
al. After the war, he ran for and was elected to the Ohio legislature and later to Washington, was a general, as was
Congress. He also served as United States minister to Colombia. A popular military Andrew Jackson. As they will also
figure, even more than 20 years later, he won the Whig nomination for President in learn, General Zachary Taylor, hero of
1840. He and his Vice Presidential running mate, John Tyler, campaigned on the the Mexican-American War, was
slogan of “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” At his inauguration in March 1841, Harrison elected president in 1848.
caught a cold and developed pneumonia. He died a month later. Other military leaders who
became president were Ulysses S.
Osceola, Seminole Leader
Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Before his election to the presidency, Andrew Jackson had a long record of
fighting the Native Americans of the Southeast. In the First Seminole War,
Jackson invaded Spanish Florida in an effort to end Seminole raids into the
United States. Weakened by war and in need of money, Spain sold Florida to the
United States. By the 1830s, the Seminole had been forced south to live in the
Everglades, a swampy area.
When the Seminole were told they had to leave Florida and resettle in
Oklahoma, Chief Osceola and his supporters refused. It is said that Osceola
stabbed the treaty with a dagger and declared: “This is the only treaty I will make
with the white man!” By 1835, the Second Seminole War was underway. For two
years Osceola and his warriors foiled successive American campaigns to destroy
the Seminole. They did this even though they were outnumbered. Hiding in the
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