2.1: Native Americans in the American West

Paired Sources from U.S. History, 1877-present
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Abstract

The United States was never empty. From the very beginning of the country’s settlement, European immigrants encountered Native American tribes that had lived off the land for centuries. Many of those encounters led to wars that effectively displaced Native Americans from those lands so that Europeans could develop them and exploit whatever natural resources were available. By the late nineteenth century, the trajectory of this struggle had become obvious. The frontier of settlement stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and nothing would stop American settlement from occupying every desirable acre in between.

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