ABSTRACT
In time, the United States overcame imperial competitors in the lands from the pacific territories to the heart of Texas and the southwest borderlands. Native Americans were not set pieces in moments of encounter with U.S. expansionists, but cultures that continued to adjust to changing circumstances as they had for hundreds of years. American expansionists brought the concept of the market and the state as they moved into western territories like Texas, at first with the approval from Mexico. Americans brought concepts of property boundaries, slavery, and market economy into a swirling world dominated by the unrestricted movement of equestrian Native Americans who relied upon a centuriesold, local-level economy of violence and captivity exchange. The distant state government of the United States had no control over the border territories and the horseback native cultures that controlled an extensive and elaborate trade in captives. Once they won their freedom from Mexico, Texans, driven by greed and racism, looked to exterminate the Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, and other horseback native groups who did not share the same values of land tenure and governance in the state. In the American southwest, a centuries-old economy involving the exchange of captives faced American expansion into the west. The idea that the United States won the west is more fiction than historical reality. The west was still Indian Country by 1850, and at the center of every struggle were native peoples. ■
Andrew Jackson grew up on the frontiers of North Carolina, and became a lawyer and politician in Tennessee. He then became a war hero during the War of 1812, first in defeating the Creek Redsticks at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, then with his march to the New Orleans and his defeat of the British. A known Indian fighter, Andrew Jackson was not a president expected by his opponents to show sympathy to the plight of the Indians who lived east of the Mississippi. In fact, Jackson made his position on the “Indian Question” very clear with the passage of the Indian Removal Bill of 1830.
