For most of the middle part of the nineteenth century, the U.S. government pursued a policy known as “allotment and assimilation.” Pursuant to treaties that were often forced upon tribes, common reservation land was allotted to individual families. The removal of the Cherokees was a product of the demand for arable land during the rampant growth of cotton agriculture in the Southeast, the discovery of gold on Cherokee land, and the racial prejudice that many white southerners harbored toward American Indians.
