Treaties were repeatedly negotiated in good faith by Native leaders and then broken by the US government

Brown documents a recurring pattern across nearly every nation covered in the book: US government representatives negotiated formal treaties promising specific Native nations defined territory, often described as guaranteed for as long as the nation existed, in exchange for ceding other land or ending armed resistance. Native leaders, in many documented cases, engaged with these negotiations in genuine good faith, believing the agreements would be honored as legally binding.

Brown shows this pattern breaking down consistently once the ceded arrangement became inconvenient to settler, mining, or railroad interests — new waves of settlement, gold discoveries, or infrastructure projects repeatedly triggered renegotiation or outright unilateral seizure of land previously guaranteed by treaty, sometimes within a matter of years of the original agreement.

He presents this not as an occasional lapse but as a structural feature of the era's federal Indian policy, in which treaties functioned less as durable legal guarantees and more as temporary tools for managing conflict until the next wave of expansionist pressure arrived.

Takeaway: understanding this era requires recognizing that treaty violation was not an aberration from US policy toward Native nations but a recurring, systemic pattern.