Claudio Saunt > Quotes

“Native peoples imbibed all of the vices of U.S. citizens, they claimed, while slaves absorbed their virtues.”
― Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

“In late June 1776, a week before Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, José Joaquín Moraga built a small shelter of branches on the banks of a lagoon that the Spanish called Arroyo de los Dolores. The site became Mission Dolores, the first colonial settlement in San Francisco. While the young republic took shape on the opposite side of the continent, San Francisco moved in its own direction. In 1808, shortly before James Madison became the fourth president of the United States, Ivan Kuskov, an employee of the Russian-American Company, secretly buried a copper plate in San Francisco that read, “Land belonging to Russia.” Four years later, he would found the Russian outpost of Fort Ross less than one hundred miles to the north.”
― Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

“by the mid-nineteenth century, Plains Indian men were taller than any documented population in the entire world, standing about a half inch above European Americans and towering a full two to five inches over their sickly European counterparts. The Cheyennes, who were the tallest of all, were the same height as well-nourished American men in the late twentieth century.”
― Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

“in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the indigenous land base shrank by 600,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Alaska.10”
― Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory