American expansion toward the West can be viewed in two different ways. One might view this expansion as a noble extension of the rights conferred on the US through Manifest Destiny. One might also view American expansion westward as a conquest. The American movement in the West was a conquest because it required the displacement of many different groups that all had their own legitimate claims to the land (Brinkley, 2015).
When moving West, the US had to fight or otherwise undermine countless American Indian groups. These groups were in the plains area, the Upper Midwest, and eventually, in the desert Southwest. US settlers moved through and often used violence to take land that they wanted. When the United States government wanted to stake its claim in a more formal way, it went about the long process of displacing American Indians. Included in this effort were actual acts of war, like the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, as well as acts of aggression like the Trail of Tears, which displaced Cherokee people into a part of the West that settlers saw as unfit (Heartland). Beyond that, the US government used tools like assimilation to destroy American Indian culture.
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When agreements were struck between the US government the American Indian tribes to respect the sovereignty of those tribes on the land they had claimed for centuries, the agreements were eventually broken whenever it was advantageous to do so. The US left in its path much destruction, with legitimate death flowing from its actions. For these reasons and many more, it is absolutely fair to think of the movement west as a “conquest” rather than just using the clean, sanitary view of the movement west as some sort of mandate from God in which Americans went to far away states and took what was rightfully theirs in the first place.
- Brinkley, A. (2015). The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume I (Vol. 11, p. 7031). McGraw-Hill.
- Heartland: America–The Story of Us [Video file]. (2016, July 1). In America The Story of US: Heartland. Retrieved December 4, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV8np9i-6F8&feature=youtu.be
