Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Finally 1863 is a time of civil war in the United States when northern Union soldiers fought their southern Confederate brothers in the bloodiest of conflicts. The inhabitants of the Southwest were not unaffected by events in the East. Many troops were reassigned to either northern or southern armies, and fighting between non-Indians and Native Americans stopped in some places, while elsewhere inter-tribal warfare ensued⁶ and volunteer forces initiated the massacre of many indigenous groups.

The Civil War marked the end of that phase of Indian removal between 1830 and 1860 when land was expropriated from the native inhabitants of the lower South, stretching from South Carolina to east Texas (the “Cotton Kingdom”) and the original proprietors were sent west of the Mississippi. Millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States, a privatization of the public domain that created one of the greatest economic booms up to that time. The expansion of cotton and the movement of slaves and slavery south and west continued the general trend of western expansion (and westernization) in general.⁷ Surprisingly, the year 1834 also saw the passage by the US Congress of the Intercourse Act in which most of the land west of the Mississippi, excluding Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, was declared to be Indian country.⁸ The Civil War years would witness a diminishment of that promise.