Native American UK Alien Registration Card

The great expansion into the American West, which began in the 1840s, transformed America. This expansion across the Great Plains of North America came at a high cost to the Native Americans. There were many Native American tribes or ‘Indians’ as they were known, living on this land, and they were seen to be standing in the way of white people who wanted to take these lands as their own. The white settlers wanted this land for railways, building roads, mining, and the ‘sunshine’ states on the West Coast, such as California. White settlers saw the Indians as backward and standing in the way of progress, resulting in battles and wars with the Indians during the nineteenth century. Native American Alien Registration