For more than a decade after the Bank was destroyed the United States had a troubled financial history. The payment of the last dollar of the national debt in 1834 gave point to a suggestion which Clay had repeatedly offered that, as a means of avoiding an embarrassing surplus, the proceeds of the sales of public lands should be distributed according to population among the States. One bill on this subject was killed by a veto in 1832, but another was finally approved in 1836. Before distribution could be carried far, however, the country was overtaken by the panic of 1837; and never again was there a surplus to distribute. For seven years the funds of the Government continued to be kept in state banks, until, in 1840, President Van Buren prevailed upon Congress to pass a measure setting up an independent treasury system, thereby realizing the ultimate purpose of the Jacksonians to divorce the Government from banks of every sort. When the Whigs came into power in 1841, they promptly abolished the independent Treasury with a view to resurrecting the United States Bank. Tyler's vetoes, however, frustrated their designs, and it remained for the Democrats in 1846 to revive the independent Treasury and to organize it substantially as it operates today. CHAPTER X THE REMOVAL OF THE SOUTHERN INDIANS It was not by chance that the Jacksonian period made large contribution to the working out of the ultimate relations of the red man with his white rival and conqueror. Jackson was himself an old frontier soldier, who never doubted that it was part of the natural order of things that conflict between the two peoples should go on until the weaker was dispossessed or exterminated. The era was one in which the West guided public policy; and it was the West that was chiefly interested in further circumscribing Indian lands, trade, and influence. In Jackson's day, too, the people ruled; and it was the adventurous, pushing, land-hungry common folk who decreed that the red man had lingered long enough in the Middle West and must now move on. The pressure of the white population upon the Indian lands was felt both in the Northwest and in the Southwest; but the pressure was unevenly applied in the two sections. North of the Ohio there was simply one great glacier-like advance of the white settlers, driving westward before it practically all of the natives who did not perish in the successive attempts to roll back the wave of conquest upon the Alleghanies. The redskins were pushed from Ohio into Indiana, from Indiana into Illinois, from Illinois and Wisconsin into Iowa and Minnesota; the few tribal fragments which by treaty arrangement remained behind formed only insignificant "islands" in the midst of the fast-growing flood of white population.