; and it was the West that was
chiefly interested in further circumscribing Indian lands, trade, and
influence. In Jackson's day, too, the people ruled; and it was the
adventurous, pushing, land-hungry common folk who decreed that the red
man had lingered long enough in the Middle West and must now move on.

The pressure of the white population upon the Indian lands was felt
both in the Northwest and in the Southwest; but the pressure was
unevenly applied in the two sections. North of the Ohio there was
simply one great glacier-like advance of the white settlers, driving
westward before it practically all of the natives who did not perish
in the successive attempts to roll back the wave of conquest upon the
Alleghanies. The redskins were pushed from Ohio into Indiana, from
Indiana into Illinois, from Illinois and Wisconsin into Iowa and
Minnesota; the few tribal fragments which by treaty arrangement
remained behind formed only insignificant "islands" in the midst of
the fast-growing flood of white population.

In the South the great streams of migration were those that flowed
down the Ohio, filling the back lands on each side, and thence down
the Mississippi to its mouth. Hence, instead of pressing the natives
steadily backward from a single direction, as in the North, the whites
hemmed them in on east, west, and north; while to the southward the
Gulf presented a relentless barrier. Powerful and populous tribes were
left high and dry in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama--peoples who in
their day of necessity could hope to find new homes only by long
migrations past the settled river districts that lay upon their
western frontiers.

Of these encircled tribes, four were of chief importance: the Creeks,
the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and the Chickasaws. In 1825 the Creeks
numbered twenty thousand, and held between five and six million acres
of land in western Georgia and eastern Alabama. The Cherokees numbered
about nine thousand and had even greater areas, mainly in northwestern
Georgia, but to some extent also in northeastern Alabama and
southeastern Tennessee. The Choctaws, numbering twenty-one thousand,
and the Chickasaws, numbering thirty-six hundred, together held
upwards of sixteen million acres in Mississippi--approximately the
northern half of the State--and a million and a quarter acres in
western Alabama. The four peoples thus numbered fifty-three thousand
souls, and held ancestral lands aggregating over thirty-t