How Did Western Expansion Affect Native Americans

The extent to which western expansion affected the lives of Native Americans is extreme. The natives weren’t made aware of the damage that was going to be caused by western expansion, they were essentially forced to comply, and the United States didn’t express the care for the native people that they should’ve humanely expressed. These points carry evidence in the form of documents, and will be elaborated in this essay. When the whites of the United States began preaching of their “manifest destiny”, they had their plans of moving into the western world and taking it for themselves- anyone or anything standing in their way was to be no issue. The buffalo and land were to be conquered, and the natives along with it all. The Native Americans living there, however,
In Document F from the last paragraph, Powell also wrote, “. . . As long as they have tents they move about with great facility, and are thus encouraged to continue their nomadic life. As fast as possible houses should be built for them . . .” Their nomadic life was just that: theirs. Without a second thought as to how the natives would be impacted, the white Americans only wanted compliance for their own needs. Santana, the chief of the Kiowas, wrote, “A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go up to the river I see camps of buffalo soldiers here on its bank. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting; I feel sorry.” He, along with nearly every other Native American of the time, was forced to watch as his life and the lives of his family before and after him were ruined by the selfish greed known as “manifest destiny”. The so-called “destiny” and the men who pushed to fulfill it, however, continued on without a care for the lives they