At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida–land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River.
Taking the journey through an unusually cold winter, they suffered terribly from exposure, disease, and starvation, killing several thousand people while en route to their new designated reserve. They were also attacked by locals and economically exploited - starving Indians were charged a dollar a head (equal to $24.01 today) to cross the Ohio River, which typically charged twelve cents, equal to $2.88 today.
Indian Removal
Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. As president, he continued this genocide. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the “Indian colonization zone” that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. (This “Indian territory” was located in present-day Oklahoma.)
The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully: It did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their land. However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations. In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. They made the journey to Indian Territory on foot (some “bound in chains and marched double file,” one historian writes) and without any food, supplies or other help from the government. Thousands of people died along the way. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a “trail of tears and death.”
The Trail of Tears
The Indian-removal process continued. In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land for the last time: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.
The Cherokee people were divided: What was the best way to handle the government’s determination to get its hands on their territory? Some wanted to stay and fight. Others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in exchange for money and other concessions. In 1835, a few self-appointed representatives of the Cherokee nation negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which traded all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for $5 million, relocation assistance and compensation for lost property. To the federal government, the treaty was a done deal, but many of the Cherokee felt betrayed; after all, the negotiators did not represent the tribal government or anyone else. “The instrument in question is not the act of our nation,” wrote the nation’s principal chief, John Ross, in a letter to the U.S. Senate protesting the treaty. “We are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people.” Nearly 16,000 Cherokees signed Ross’s petition, but Congress approved the treaty anyway.
By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for Indian Territory. President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal process. Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while his men looted their homes and belongings. Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.
By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but as the line of white settlement pushed westward, “Indian Country” shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian Territory was gone for good.
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105 hours. beautiful game. I wish I understood more like trains and fluid dynamics. I sort of wish I had a consolidated jetpack/hoverpack that I could turn perpendicular to the ground to fly around like superman. I wish I got some kind of resolution with the alien hivemind - especially if my advancing technology gave me a reason to start making and hiding mercer spheres or something. The whole story, in fact, could use a little oomph. They imply a lot, going so far as to personalize ADA, and then never tell me what the heck it all meant.
They did such a fantastic job zooming out the scale the further you go. The way I could take items out of dimensional storage to make a conveyor belt to zoom half way across the map with a jetpack full of ionized rocket fuel in order to shoot hogs and take their mercer sphere is so far removed from running around the copper and iron to grab 100 ore at a time when I started. I found it funny the way, the more I automated my energy, the more it needed shepherding and looking after that took way longer than biofuel. In fact, every factory needed a little bit of tinkering to get just right and almost nothing was ever set it and forget it until the very end. When I was waiting for only my nuclear pasta I tried putting power shards in the accelerators. I looked at it and went "wait a minute, that's 20% of my total power expenditure, that's not gonna work" and then seconds later hear the fuse blow out.
I legitimately feel more hopeful about life the way I now know there are things out there that can capture my attention and make me excited to go experience it. I had never heard of this game and had only watched some factorio gameplay years ago. I tell my friend that he was about to get sucked in but then I was the one who got dropped through a wormhole instead. I hope I find the strength to take my time in the future to smell the roses and make my project look pretty instead of zerging to the end to be within the 0.5% of plays who finish the game. Maybe I had some kind of chip on my shoulder about whether I'd be smart enough to figure the game out; either way that was a complex puzzle I managed to sus out in a way that I'm proud of. Now that I learned something about myself, it's time to go put my life back together to find the balance I didn't realize I was keeping until this came along.
9/10 - inspired game
What game is this? This sounds great already
This is Satisfactory. It's a game about building a space elevator by collecting resources and using machines (that require energy) to make ever more complex parts. You're part of the FICSIT company on an exoplanet inhabited by wildlife and a spooky alien race. Your job is to automate production by way of planning and designing many machines, drones, trains, energy generators, vehicles, and jetpacks to go around finding more resources to exploit and becoming more powerful along the way.