When people resisted giving up their homelands, however, Americans resorted to intimidation and threat of military force, and no justifications were offered. For example, speaking in 1831 to a...

When people resisted giving up their homelands, however, Americans resorted to intimidation and threat of military force, and no justifications were offered. For example, speaking in 1831 to a delegation of Sauk leaders who balked at moving from their Illinois villages, General Edmund Gaines told them: “I came here neither to beg nor hire you to leave your village. My business is to remove you, peaceably if I can, but forcibly if I must” (Jackson 1964, 111–12). In 1851, Luke Lea, the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs, told Santee delegates in South Dakota, “Suppose your Great Father wanted your land and did not want a treaty for your good, he would come with 100,000 men and drive you off to the Rocky Mountains” (Meyer 1993, 78).