In effect, every Indian treaty was intended as a temporary agreement, destined to be discarded once the edge of new settlements reached Indian borders. The great advantage of this approach was that it averted Indian wars because demography would do the work of armies. It was really a recipe for genocide in slow motion, and for a more gradual and palatable version of Indian removal east of the Mississippi. By the latter half of the 1780s, then, American policy toward the Native Americans had evolved from an overt to a covert kind of imperialism.
