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Faced with this threatening situation the Creek and the Cherokee reorganized themselves as political nations, stripping local chiefs of power and giving it to national councils. In 1827 the Cherokee nation declared itself a republic with its own government, courts, police, and constitution. By 1830 the situation had become a crisis. New president Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee plantation owner and a famous fighter of Native Americans, refused to exercise federal jurisdiction over Native American affairs, allowing southern states to find their own solutions. The Cherokee took the state of Georgia to court, and in 1832, in the case of Worcester v. Georgia, John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, ruled that Georgia's extension of its authority over Cherokee land was unconstitutional. President Jackson simply refused to enforce the decision, allowing southern states to continue to encroach on Native American lands. In the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Congress-with Jackson's blessing-offered Native American peoples east of the Mississippi federal land to the west, where the United States government had the authority to protect them. Many of them accepted. Then in 1838, Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, sent the U.S. Army to evict 18,000 to 20,000 Cherokee remaining in the South and move them to what is today Oklahoma. In all, 4,000 Native Americans died on the march that became known as the Trail of Tears. Jackson, who more than any other person was responsible for this removal policy, argued, "What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?" Again, the white empire of land and liberty came at the expense of other races. See also Indian Wars: Native American Removal Policy In 1804, a year after the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson sent an expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the purchase and to continue on to the Pacific Ocean. The Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled up the Missouri River, spent the winter of 1804 to 1805 with the Mandan people, and with the help of a Shoshone woman named Sacajawea traveled west along the Snake River to the Columbia River and on to the Pacific. Even as they traveled, mounted bands of Sioux were conquering the northern Great Plains. The Sioux had already cut off the Pawnee, Oto, and other peoples of the lower Missouri from the western buffalo herds and were threatening the Mandan and other agricultural peoples on the upper reaches of the river. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, epidemics of European diseases traveled up the Missouri River. The worst of them came in the 1830s, when smallpox killed half the Native Americans along the river.

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