Illegal immigrants and land stealing

[hunter]

6. Terrible truth.

My wife's Native American ancestors retreated into Mexico, escaping the U.S. Army and exile to barren reservations, some of the most desolate in the U.S.A. Southwest. Her father's parents returned as "immigrant" Mexican farm workers. They were not immigrants in any true sense, not to the U.S.A., not to Mexico. They'd arrived her in the U.S.A. thousands of years before the Europeans.

My white ancestors, most of whom were religious dissidents, economic refugees, misfits, and other undesirables, jumped off ships from Europe and ran without filing proper documentation. My own documented, most recent immigrant ancestor was a mail-order bride to Salt Lake City. She didn't much like sharing a husband, or the Mormons in general, so she ran away.

Most of my ancestors claimed to be no enemy of the Indians, but they did homestead and establish mining claims on land in the West after the Indians had been forced off of it.