ABSTRACT
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the 1846 acquisition of the Oregon Territory, and the Mexican Cession of 1848 greatly expanded US territorial claims, which now extended across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Official negotiations with California Indians in the early 1850s revealed once again that indigenous groups were prepared to share the land on reasonable terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, Indian nations of the western regions were either persuaded or, more often, forced to cede most of the territory they reasonably understood to be theirs, and were confined to much smaller reservations. Many Indian children were forcibly taken from their parents to distant schools, which coercively barred Indian languages, dress, and practices. In the Oregon territory, fur traders and Indians coexisted peacefully until Congress in 1850 opened the region to homesteading without regard to Indian land rights.
