Lewis & Clark

From the time the Mayflower arrived, Manifest Destiny was etched onto the consciousness of European settlers. An immutable sense of entitlement, coupled with a belief in the spiritual purpose of the mission, is what permeated every decision made by colonial and later, American officials with regards to settlement patterns, land acquisitions, and relations with Native Americans. Native Americans may have had their own "manifest destiny," which was unfortunately to be driven off ancestral lands, massacred, and their cultures collectively and systematically decimated. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery military expedition into Indian Lands, it was nothing but an expression of American intentions to seize all that was possible to seize. Americans felt entitled to the land, and did not value (or in many places even consider) the input, opinion, or needs of the Native Americans. Manifest Destiny had a dark side to...
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