![]() The survey work made him familiar with “the great plains of the Columbia,” as he called the interior Columbia Basin, and he promoted both railroad construction and permanent settlements in the region, which he considered well-suited for agriculture. Because of Stevens’ background as an engineer, surveyor and military officer, in 1853 Pierce named him, concurrently, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs of Washington Territory, and director of the Pacific Railroad Survey, northern division. Stevens supported Franklin Pierce in his run for president, as did many other military officers, and Pierce remembered. Following the war he received scientific training and valuable experience in surveying with the United States Coast Survey. He distinguished himself through his career in the Topographic Engineers Corps during the Mexican War of 1846-47, rising to the rank of major general. The look of Indian country today in the Pacific Northwest is very much the result of his treatymaking on behalf of the United States in 1855.īorn in Massachusetts, Stevens graduated from West Point at the head of his class. The man assigned to this duty in the Pacific Northwest was Isaac Ingalls Stevens, an arrogant, politically ambitious West Point graduate who, it can be said, proved himself to be a shrewd and ruthless negotiator among the Indians. Georgia, the United States government sought to push Indians off their lands and onto reservations that were created by treaty in locations away from transportation corridors and the most productive farmland - that is to say, out of the way of “progress.” The point was to limit or extinguish Indian land claims so as not to interfere with non-Indian settlement. Despite the specific direction of Worster v. Settlers began pouring into the American Columbia River Basin in the 1840s, and by the 1850s the inevitable conflicts with indian tribes led to hostilities. In both countries, then, westward expansion from the settled areas of the East to the unsettled West was a national policy goal. Specifically, the law stated that: “such right of pre-emption shall not be held to extend to any of the Aboriginies of this Continent.” In 1927, the federal government made it illegal for Indians to pursue their land claims in court or even raise money for that purpose, punishable by imprisonment. ![]() The Colonial Land Ordinance of 1870, for example, gave away land in British Columbia, in 320-acre increments, to any British man over the age of 18 and pre-empted any other claim to the land. Meanwhile in Canada, the federal and provincial governments aggressively sought to extinguish or deny Indian claims to land and, in this way, encourage immigration to British Columbia by Europeans. This spirit of joint occupation of the territory imbued treaties the United States already had signed with Indians, beginning in 1787, but by the mid-1800s the implied balance of power among the separate nations began to shift toward dominance by the United States as the country steadily fulfilled its westward expansionist dreams. In this, the fledgling United States recognized the sovereignty of the Indian people who were here first and with whom the United States shared the continent. Importantly, the United States did not grant rights to Indians through treaties, Indians reserved rights for themselves. Georgia that the “several Indian nations” had legal status as “political communities within which their authority is exclusive.” On their reservations, created by treaties with the United States, Indians had exclusive authority, and this authority and all rights to land within the reservations were “not only acknowledged but guaranteed by the United States,” according to the court. The United States recognized the sovereignty of Indian peoples in 1832 when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Worster v. Both countries pursued treaties with Indians to establish rights to land and resources the effort was particularly slow to develop in Canada. The United States and Canada have long but very different histories of relations with the original citizens of the Columbia River Basin.
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