foreign [Music] this continent has some of the most dramatic Landscapes on the planet from the ocean shorelines to the Alpine mountains in the Sandy deserts and also in this land mass from coast to coast and everywhere in between there lived hundreds if not thousands of different nations tribes of people whose land this was this was their home but then others showed up to these shorelines in their boats and that is when everything changed [Music] [Music] okay okay in the spring of 1803 two American politicians visiting Paris closed the sweetest real estate deal they had ever seen with the simple stroke of a pen their country doubled in size all for just 15 million dollars but in this deal which was called the Louisiana Purchase the US didn't actually buy this land from France France didn't actually own the land what the United States was buying was the Imperial rights to this huge swath of North America this basically meant that France would stay out of the way and let the buddy new Empire the United States colonize it without interfering if the United States really wanted ownership over this land they would need to get it from the people who were here first which at the time was lots of different native tribes these are the people who had been here for thousands of years way before Europeans had the idea of leaving their continent and this land that the U. S just bought was theirs oh and this isn't just me like some Modern enlightened person looking back and judging the United States at this time the U. S knew that this wasn't their land and that they were going to have to buy it from the people living there and their big plan was to do things differently not like the old Imperial powers that they had just broken away from in fact George Washington was quote determined that the U.
S government's administration of Indian Affairs shall be directed entirely by the great principles of justice and Humanity go USA let's do this in the right way so instead of Conquest they would negotiate and sign formal treaties with these native nations then they would pay them for their land farron Square after all this was a country whose founding document highlights Justice Tranquility welfare and Liberty in our series how the US stole we get to see how the US Grew From A group of English settlers to a global superpower but none of those stories would exist without this one the origin story the first thing that the U. S ever stole so Europeans are pouring into this newly formed country the United States and the government is making deals and signing treaties with the tribes allowing these newcomer immigrants to settle on their land at first this is a fairly peaceful transactional process the U. S would offer food farming equipment cash the services of a blacksmith all in exchange for ownership over this land but unsurprisingly a lot of these tribes had no interest in moving out of their ancestral lands in exchange for like farming equipment and this is where all of George Washington's ideals of justice and Humanity really start to dissolve the U.
S was becoming a more powerful Nation they needed more land for their booming population so the impatient settlers and their government started playing dirty The Westward Movement was like a great tidal wave you start to see what happens when these tribes say no to the newly powerful United States in one instance one group of tribes up near the Great Lakes didn't want to sell their land they told the United States that this River would be the border and to not cross it to stay off their land the U. S said no and they took them to war and lost twice but on the third time they won the battle and forced the tribes to sign a treaty giving away all of this land basically all of present-day Ohio something very similar happened down here when the Seminole tribes refused to leave their land the U. S military came in another War killing thousands forcing the tribes to sign a treaty and pushing them into the swampy interior of the state where they had no access to their farmland or the ocean down here in what was becoming Alabama the Muskogee Nation refused to sign a relocation treaty but not wanting to go to war agreed to sell a portion of their land in return for a guarantee that they could keep the rest and the United States agreed and they actually did and the Muskogee kept their ancestral lands forever womp womp no that didn't happen four years later a bunch of white settlers moved in boxing the Muskogee out of their ancestral land as tensions grew because of this violated agreement the U.
S military was called in to force the Muskogee out of their lands no treaty was ever signed I mean the shenanigans ranged the whole gamut here they would get tribal leaders drunk to trick them into signing this paper that gave them all the land they would appoint random people to be the tribal leaders and then tell them to sign away the land for the whole tribe in another conflict the Sioux and Arapahoe Nations defeated the US military over and over until the U. S finally signed a peace treaty acknowledging their land and they were safe until gold was discovered eight years later and the U. S broke their treaty redrew the boundaries built roads on their land and before you know it you've got a bunch of white guys with gold pans harvesting this land treaties and Justice be damned [Music] but eventually other tribes caught on to what was going to happen realizing that refusing the US government would mean violence so they would sign the paper take the money and leave over the course of almost 100 years the United States signed 368 treaties with tribal Nations who were driven out one way or another to make way for white settlers who established control over this land that their government had stolen for them and yes you have all the paperwork all the spreadsheets that they were making all the treaties a nice paper trail but this was all a facade of Justice a thinly veiled campaign for Imperial Conquest before we go on to the story I just need to tell you that we don't have a sponsor for today's video lately I've been hearing from some sponsors that my videos are too political which is kind of a bummer because we work really hard to tell really cool stories and if that means that uh people don't want to sponsor us that's fine luckily we have a patreon where all of you can support this work it's called The Newsroom we call it The Newsroom because it just sounds cooler than patreon but it is a place where you can support what we are doing which is something more and more we need on The Newsroom you get an extra video every month it's a behind the scenes Vlog from all of the people and processes and happenings around here in the studio you get to see my scripts you get royalty free music from our composer Tom Fox that you can use in your videos and live q and A's with me members of The Newsroom get to chat with me on a q a uh where they can ask me anything but more importantly you get the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting independent journalism and if that floats your boat you can go to the link in my description patreon.
com Johnny Harris Let's Get back to the story okay so we have all of this like fake treaty Shenanigans going on to help the United States feel like they're doing Justice and it's working they are moving loads of native people out of their ancestral lands so that white people can settle it but there was one region that proved particularly difficult for this extermination project that was going down here in the Deep South we had these five large Nations that lived side by side with the settlers for a long time they had all signed treaties with the United States that acknowledged their right to this land many of them spoke English practice farming wore European clothes some even owned slaves because of this these five tribes the Cherokee Chickasaw Choctaw Muskogee and Seminole were known as the Five Civilized Tribes and there's an alternative world where these tribes could have remained on their land living side by side with the Europeans as they settled but that's not what happened mostly because of cotton [Music] farmers down here were getting super rich off of a very valuable cash crop called cotton that they could sell to textile mills around the world it was an industry made even more profitable by its key input Free Labor from stolen Africans there was this one strip of land down here called the black belt Prairie that was particularly desirable for farming cotton but as you can see it was locked up in what the United States treaties had formally acknowledged as belonging to native nations but the farmers down here were looking at this as like this is a perfect place to expand our cotton Kingdom so these southern slave owners did what was kind of becoming U. S policy towards the people living on the land that they wanted they made up their own rules the state of Georgia was particularly aggressive in trying to clear this land out or in the words of their governor at the time to replace quote all of the red with white population they targeted the Cherokee Nation passing a law that abolished their governments the Cherokee are not going to stand for this so they fight back using the same shenanigans that the United States is trying to use the U. S legal system they take Georgia to court a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court and guess what the Cherokee Nation won like there was no way around the fact that they had Ironclad rights to this land signed and sealed the highest court in the country just ruled that the states could not impose on tribal sovereignty but as we all learned in government class A ruling from the judicial branch only works if the executive branch enforces it oh and who is in charge of the executive branch oh this guy the guy who wrote a letter to his wife during the War of 1812 from the battlefield saying that he had successfully slaughtered 170 Native Americans in quote An Elegant Style Oh and the guy who's on our 20 bill yeah him Andrew Jackson thought that negotiating treaties with the people who were living here was a ridiculous notion so he looks at the Supreme Court ruling that validates the Cherokee's right to their land and he literally responds in the snarkiest way possible saying the Chief Justice John Marshall has quote made his decision now let him enforce it no he was not going to enforce it Jackson had a different plan in mind it came in the form of a new law that he pushed through both houses of Congress his whole world view towards first Americans embodied in a piece of American legislation the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
this law used taxpayer money to get tribes out of the United States and to relocate them to an uninhabitable place that surely no American Settler will ever end up the Great Plains seemed an inhospitable land to people familiar with the eastern states and of Europe This became their dumping ground and it came with a promise move here and we will never mess with you again and what's crazy to me is that even after all of the shenanigans all the facades they continued to play this charade saying that the nation of Indians may choose to exchange their land where they now reside the law says that the government had to negotiate these treaties fairly voluntarily peacefully and that the government would quote forever secure and guarantee them their new land and that they wouldn't break any of the pre-existing agreements that they had made in previous treaties but no this was just more pretending a paper trail of pretend Humanity just as Andrew Jackson had ignored the Supreme Court ruling he had no intention in following the law that he helped create but he kept up the ruse more documents more signatures more paper that made these civilized justice-minded people feel like they weren't orchestrating a mass ethnic cleansing sanctioned by the government paid for by taxes but they were so this law is implemented and the United States government military and even private companies start to ramp up their removal efforts of first Americans they focus in on these five tribes that were sitting atop the land that they wanted for their cotton Empire more bribes more pretend negotiations and when push came to shove more threats of violence the Cherokee eventually signed a treaty agreeing to sell their last portion of land and they moved West out to their little rectangle of land that had been allocated to them by the government on maps the only problem was that the leader who signed the treaty on behalf of the Cherokee People was not actually the real leader they had no authority to make this decision the Cherokee Chief furiously protested this but the U. S didn't care they had their signature from someone in their eyes all was justified between 1831 and 1838 nearly every member from the five tribes was expelled from their land a hundred thousand people whose home this was now forced to walk by foot for more than a thousand miles through brutal weather and terrain towards a little box on the map a place they had never been before the Cherokee would eventually call this journey the trail where we cried or at the Trail of Tears some tried to fight back against their oppressors and others stood their ground until they were forcibly Bound in chains by the US government and herded West at gunpoint their land was vacant and cotton Farmers with their slaves moved in and the economy grew [Music] we'll never know how many people died during all this how many lives were really destroyed some people say 3 000 other estimates say 15 000 but you don't need those numbers to see how destructive this was it was systematic it was documented and it was enshrined in law we have a paper trail of all of it showing the receipts the payments the treaties the bureaucracy of it all it's like a bunch of spreadsheets from the 1800s American settlers in an effort to be different from the old world Empires they fled ended up carrying out the first state-sponsored ethnic cleansing there's a reason why Hitler a hundred years later references this exact event this process when he was carrying out his own ethnic cleansing he said that the Volga which is a river in Russia would be quote our Mississippi he said that Europe not America would be the land of unlimited possibilities the story of what happened to many nations of the first Americans doesn't end here in fact this is kind of the beginning we're going to make a second part to this video and in that part two I want to show you what happens next once these tribes arrive to their little rectangle on the map Indian Territory the place where these tribes were forced out dumped and left to build a new life and how they once again tried to fight back using the legal Frameworks that had pushed them out and how all of that led to the establishment of one state in our country that could have looked a lot different [Music] foreign [Music] hey um thanks for watching this video I need to tell you about something we have a a poster I finally have a poster I've been dreaming about this poster for a very long time all maps are wrong and indeed they are this poster shows dozens of map projections all the weird quirky shapes that you get when you try to map a sphere which is what our globe is onto a piece of paper which is flat is available right now you can go buy it and doing so supports this channel but it also gives you a really sweet poster um we printed it on really nice paper I spent a very long time nudging every one of these Maps I got help from some of my best friends and designers like Becky from Becky and Chris is like a really good graphic designer I literally sent her the illustrator file and I was like hey can you like do this and she was like I got you so she made it better anyway it's a fantastic cool thing and I'm really excited about it so Link in the description we also have a big thing going on over at patreon a few thousand people are over there supporting us um so that we can make more videos like this something I am very grateful for so that's patreon.
