For Maryland and the other states without land claims, the disposition of western lands was of major importance. They needed lands to reward soldiers who had served in their regiments against the British, but they also feared that the land-claim states would dominate the nation economically and politically. Maryland went so far as vowing not to sign the Articles of Confederation until land-claim states relinquished their titles to lands in the trans-Appalachian West to the central government.
The land-claim states resisted at first but realized the importance of Maryland to the Union. Their own claims to Trans Appalachia were ambiguous enough to carry the potential of conflicts among neighboring states. One by one, between the years 1780 and 1802, all the states with claims to the western lands ceded them to the federal government. This was the birth of the Public Domain. Seventy-five years later, as a result of treaties, conquests, and purchases, the public lands stretched from the Appalachians to the Pacific Ocean.
The indigenous people of North America -- who had their own history of claiming lands that were unoccupied or that belonged to others--contested the young nation's claim to lands they considered theirs and often they did so at the cost of many lives. Thus, inseparable from the expansion of the Public Domain are the broken treaties and the wars with Indian tribes that inevitably led to the expulsion of native peoples from most of their homeland. The history of the Public Domain is also the tragic story of the ever-diminishing lands of America's first inhabitants.
I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, not within walls.
-- Ten Bears, Comanche
When I think of our condition my heart is heavy. I see men of my race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.
-- Chief Joseph, Nez Perce
. . . I hear that you have come to move us. Tell your people that since the Great Father promised that we should never be removed we have been moved five times. I think you had better put the Indians on wheels and you can run them about wherever you wish.
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| Colonists and Native Americans, Hudson River, NY, 1600s |
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