the state power over the Cherokee Nation. Their lands were legally moved into the market for white settlers to buy.(Takaki, 95) Then, in 1838, Cherokee Chief John Ross presented a petition signed by 15,665 Cherokees protesting the sale of Cherokee lands. However, the resistance was overlooked by the United States government, and the entire Cherokee nation slowly began its move to lands west of the Mississippi River under the pressure of General Winfield Scott and his troops. This movement, plagued by mass deaths of Cherokee Indians caused by disease, famine, and hypothermia, became known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears.The Plains Indians--such as the Kiowa, Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Arapaho--were also under intense pressure from the advance of the United States government and its citizens. The sacred cultural icon of the buffalo hunt became hindered as white pioneers took up the practice of hunting the animals--which the Indians so dearly needed in order to survive--for mere sport and fun. The white settlers brought with them diseases which were previously alien to the Native Americans such as smallpox. Smallpox reduced the Pawnee population from ten thousand in the 1830s to four thousand in 1845.(Takaki, 100) Not long after that, railroad track in the United States exploded from 73 miles to 3,328 miles in ten years, as the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific strived to build the transcontinental railroad. Slowly but surely, the Native Americans were bullied out of their own homes.Between 1815 and 1920, five and a half million Irish emigrated to America.(Takaki, 140) Just as the Native Americans were forced west of their homelands by the Americans, the British were forcing the Irish west, across the Atlantic to the United States. An Irish folk song tells the story in brief:My father holds 5 acres of land, it was not enough to support us all,Which banished me from my native land, to old Ireland dear I bid farewell.My hol...
