From Indian Country to American Real Estate: A Spatial History of US Territorial Expansion

FAIN: FEL-263301-19

Robert Lee
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

Preparation of a digital publication for the study of Indian land cessions and settler colonialism in the 19th-century American West.

Between 1790 and 1890, 12 cents of every dollar spent by the United States went into the conquest of Indian Country. These expenditures underwrote hundreds of treaties, which transferred three out of every four acres now in the continental United States into the public domain. In their wake, millions of settlers poured into Indian cessions to buy land patents from the federal government. The enormous scope of this process has made it difficult for historians to assess, a problem this project will overcome with emerging methods in historical GIS. The project will produce a website combining data on roughly four hundred Indian land cession treaties and over six million federal land patents. This will enable visitors to dynamically filter, analyze, and map the relationship between Indian land loss and settler land gain for the first time, and to learn, as I argue, that movements in the Indian treaty line are essential to understanding the settlement history of the United States.