"The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years"

George Crook’s remark uses a vivid simile, comparing white men in the Eastern United States to birds that hatch more eggs every year, producing new offspring and expanding their populations at a continual rate. The “eggs” metaphorically represent families, generations, or surges of population. Just as birds propagate and overflow from their nests in search of new habitats when their original homes become too crowded, so too do the white settlers multiply in the East and eventually find the available land and resources insufficient for their growing needs.

As the East becomes “not room enough,” overcrowding, economic ambition, and the pursuit of prosperity prompt waves of migration. Crook’s language suggests relentless pressure: the natural consequence of overpopulation is the need for expansion. The Western territories become the new frontier, a destination for these restless populations. This pattern evokes not just a demographic trend, but the inexorable force driving American westward expansion, sometimes known as Manifest Destiny, a belief in the nation’s preordained expansion across the continent.

For Native Americans, Crook’s words carry a sense of foreboding. The simile reduces the influx of white settlers to a process of nature, inevitable and unyielding. It suggests the movement is not a matter of choice but a requirement for survival, as if external forces beyond individual control are at work. At the same time, the perspective implies the disregard for the people already residing in the West, the land is seen as open and available, not as homeland to existing Indigenous nations.

Crook acknowledges the continuous stream of settlers moving westward over recent years, which hints at the growing tensions and conflicts over land, resources, and sovereignty. His observation exposes both the demographic and ideological pressures fueling displacement and dispossession experienced by Native Americans, framing the Westward movement as a consequence of both biology and social structure. This metaphor casts settler colonialism as a natural process, rather than one shaped by policy, violence, and conscious decision, subtly questioning the limits of resistance against such perceived inevitability.