Permanent Indian Frontier

Historic US border established by the US government, designating all lands west of the Mississippi River, as a Permanent Indian Domain ‘forever’, following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The act attempted to relocate all American Indian peoples living in the eastern USA to Indian Territory in the Great Plains. This region had been named the Great American Desert in 1823, and there was a national belief that it would never be wanted for American settlement. However, as pressure increased on land in the East, settlers began to creep across the frontier in the 1840s, bound for California and Oregon. When the USA adopted a belief in its manifest destiny to expand westwards, a term coined in 1845, the government's Permanent Indian Frontier policy collapsed.

After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the flow of Americans across the frontier increased to tens of thousands a year. The US government did virtually nothing to stop the breakdown of the frontier, and attacks on wagon trains and settlers who disturbed the Plains Indians and the North American buffalo (bison) occurred, although they were not common. The adoption of the concept of manifest destiny by the USA meant that the final collapse of the supposedly ‘permanent’ frontier occurred in less than two decades. After the frontier collapsed, the USA began to divide the Great Plains and place the American Indians on ever smaller Indian reservations of worthless land.