exchange for fur at fair market prices. Such posts, scattered in
a wide arc along thousands of miles of frontier from Florida to
the Great Lakes, helped prevent Spanish and British alike from
gaining control of the native inhabitants. It was expedient to
win the loyalty of the Indians for the reason that they were
important to the outcome of the imperial contest, and the fur
trade was a part of the scheme. No power could be quite certain
that it would enjoy the privilege of exploiting the rich resources
of the Western wilderness until loyal subjects inhabited it.
Before white citizens could establish farms in the Mississippi
basin and along the rivers of the Gulf, the best hope of making
good the paper title to trans-Appalachia was to ensure that the
tribes should be allied with the United States. The westward
movement of the agricultural frontier, together with the Rush-
Bagot Agreement ( 1817), the Convention of 1818, and the
Adams-Onis Treaty ( 1819), left the Indians in a precarious situ-
ation, for they were then seen as a worthless obstacle to
"manifest destiny." ²

By the 1830's, the slackening of the struggle of European
powers for empire in North America had made possible a
profound change in United States Indian policy, since the
government had less motivation to woo the Indian as an
auxiliary and more reason to clear the tribes from land needed
for national development. Most important of the several
features of the revised policy was the removal of the eastern
tribes to the "Great American Desert" which, it was thought,
would never be desirable for white settlement, and the assign-
ment to them, in perpetuity, of lands sufficient for their sub-
sistence. Legislation defined the Indian country, forbade un-
authorized white men to infiltrate or to encroach upon it, and
provided for Indian self-government. The concept that these

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