Soon after their arrival in North America in the 1600s, settlers from England and other European lands began pushing Native Americans off the lands they had occupied for countless generations. At first, white expansion and Indian removal were haphazard, spontaneous events. But in the 1830s, the U.S. government developed a methodical policy in which it forcefully, and at times even brutally, uprooted the remaining eastern tribes and marched them to what would eventually become remote reservations in the American West.