Displacing Indigenous Peoples

The native peoples of South America and North America differed in several ways.

- In South America, there were large empires such as those of the Aztecs and Incas before European conquest, with more developed kingdoms, states and surplus-based agriculture.
- In North America, many communities lived in bands and villages rather than large kingdoms. They depended on hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening and small-scale farming.
- North American tribes generally did not produce large surpluses, so they did not develop empires like those in Central and South America.
- North American peoples valued gift exchange, alliances and friendship and did not think of land as private property.
- They spoke many languages, had oral traditions, and believed time moved in cycles.

So, South American native societies were more urban and state-based, while North American native societies were more tribal, mobile and less centralised.

Besides the use of English, nineteenth-century USA showed many features of English economic and social life:

- The settlers followed the English idea of private property and the right to property.
- They created large farms and used land for profit-oriented agriculture.
- They developed railways, industries and market production, especially to support settlement and trade.
- The social life was based mainly on white settlers, and democratic rights were meant only for white men.
- Like English society, it also had strong ideas of individual rights, but these were not given equally to everyone.

So, the USA copied English patterns of property, farming, industry, markets and social privilege, though in a new American setting.

For Americans, the frontier was the moving boundary of settlement where European settlers were advancing into native lands.

- It was not a fixed line; it kept shifting westward as settlement expanded.
- As the frontier moved, the native peoples were pushed back, forced onto reserves or into new lands.
- To settlers, the frontier meant opportunity, land, wealth and a chance to build farms and towns.
- It was linked with the dream of expansion and progress, but for natives it meant loss of land, freedom and livelihood.

So, the frontier meant the advancing edge of American expansion into the west.