"It was a complex of causes that led the Indians to make war upon the white settlers in 1862, but underlying all was the simple fact that the white man wanted to move in, the red man did not want to move out, and the two were so different that they could not live side by side.
"By one treaty after another the tribes had been pushed farther west, but still the white man's land hunger was not appeased. The Indians began to see that no matter how much of their ancestral domain they ceded, in a very short time they would be asked to relinquish more. There was already enough land open for settlement to provide every immigrant for many years to come with a farm, but agitation for the acquisition of more persisted. Francis Walker once said: 'The eagerness of the average American citizen of the territories for getting upon Indian lands amounts to a passion. The ruggedest flint hill of the Cherokee or Sioux is sweeter to him than the greenest pasture which lies open to him under the homestead laws of the United States.'
"The white man's determination to get all the Indians' land was the underlying cause of the Sioux Outbreak of 1862."
[source: Christianson, Theodore. Minnesota The Land of Sky-Tinted Waters A History of the State and Its People, Chicago and New York: The American Historical Society, 1935. p. 345]
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