page_title: American frontier
section_title: Acquisition of indigenous lands
hierarchical_section_title: American frontier / New Nation / Acquisition of indigenous lands
caption_attribution_description: English: "The death of Tecumseh" lithography shows Richard Mentor Johnson shooting Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames.
context_page_description: The American frontier includes the geography, history, folklore, and cultural expression of life in the forward wave of American expansion that began with English colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last remaining western territories as states in 1912. This era of massive migration and settlement was particularly encouraged by President Thomas Jefferson following the Louisiana Purchase, giving rise to the expansionist philosophy known as "Manifest Destiny" and the frontierist "Frontier Thesis".
  A frontier is a zone of contact at the edge of a line of settlement. Leading theorist Frederick Jackson Turner went deeper, arguing that the frontier was the defining process of American civilization: "The frontier," he asserted, "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." He theorized it was a process of development: "This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward...furnish[es] the forces dominating American character."
context_section_description: The War of 1812 marked the final confrontation involving major British and Indian forces fighting to stop American expansion. The British war goal included the creation of an independent Indian state (under British auspices) in the Midwest. American frontier militiamen under General Andrew Jackson defeated the Creeks and opened the Southwest, while militia under Governor William Henry Harrison defeated the Indian-British alliance at the Battle of the Thames in Canada in 1813. The death in battle of the Indian leader Tecumseh dissolved the coalition of hostile Indian tribes. Meanwhile, General Andrew Jackson ended the Indian military threat in the Southeast at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 in Alabama. In general, the frontiersmen battled the Indians with little help from the U.S. Army or the federal government.
  To end the War of 1812 American diplomats negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, signed towards the end of 1814, with Britain. They rejected the British plan to set up an Indian state in U.S. territory south of the Great Lakes. They explained the American policy toward the acquisition of Indian lands:
  The United States, while intending never to acquire lands from the Indians otherwise than peaceably, and with their free consent, are fully determined, in that manner, progressively, and in proportion as their growing population may require, to reclaim from the state of nature, and to bring into cultivation every portion of the territory contained within their acknowledged boundaries. In thus providing for the support of millions of civilized beings, they will not violate any dictate of justice or humanity; for they will not only give to the few thousand savages scattered over that territory an ample equivalent for any right they may surrender, but will always leave them the possession of lands more than they can cultivate, and more than adequate to their subsistence, comfort, and enjoyment, by cultivation. If this is a spirit of aggrandizement, the undersigned are prepared to admit, in that sense, its existence; but they must deny that it affords the slightest proof of an intention not to respect the boundaries between them and European nations, or of a desire to encroach upon the territories of Great Britain. [...] They will not suppose that that Government will avow, as the basis of their policy towards the United States a system of arresting their natural growth within their territories, for the sake of preserving a perpetual desert for savages.
caption: Indian leader Tecumseh killed in battle in 1813 by Richard M. Johnson, who later became Vice president
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