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-three million acres, or nearly the combined area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Furthermore, they were no longer savages.  The Creeks were the lowest in civilization; but even they had become more settled and less warlike since their chastisement by Jackson in 1814.  The Choctaws and Chickasaws lived in frame houses, cultivated large stretches of land, operated workshops and mills, maintained crude but orderly governments, and were gradually accepting Christianity.  Most advanced of all were the Cherokees.  As one writer has described them, they “had horses and cattle, goats, sheep, and swine.  They raised maize, cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, and potatoes, and traded with their products to New Orleans.  They had gardens, and apple and peach orchards.  They had built roads, and they kept inns for travelers.  They manufactured cotton and wool....  One of their number had invented an alphabet for their language.  They had a civil government, imitated from that of the United States.”  Under these improved conditions all of the tribes were growing in numbers and acquiring vested rights which it would be increasingly difficult to deny or to disregard.