From the early years of the presence of Western colonists on the American continent there was evidence of attempts to assimilate the Indigenous peoples into European societies through marriage and conversion to the Christian religion, as discussed in this 1863 letter from George Bonga to Henry Benjamin Whittle. Bonga was a mixed race American, the child of an Indigenous mother and an American Trapper father and writes of the difficulties of surviving as a Indigenous community in the increasingly Anglo society of the US. 

There were two Christian approaches to the Indigenous "problem’" in the developing years of the U.S. The first was the concept of Manifest Destiny, which argued that God intended the U.S. to be a Christian country and that consequently any heathens could simply be bulldozed through. The second approach was that the heathens were simple people whose best chance of survival, and redemption, was for them to assimilate and convert to Western ways. This second option was often thought of as unrealistic. Bogan complained that “I am one of the many, who think it almost impossible to educate and civilize the Ind[ian]”. His argument is based on his observation that the Indigenous Peoples were often reluctant and resistant to settle and farm the land. 

The Office of Indian Affairs employed a number of government agents to deal with the Indigenous Peoples living on land that the American citizens wanted to use and swiftly found that employing staff who saw conversion to Christianity as their primary gain was cheaper than employing others who were instead looking for a satisfactory salary, and consequently the government work with the Indigenous Peoples was often led by evangelism. The success of mission ventures were extremely varied however. Many missionaries found that whilst the Indigenous Peoples were happy to adopt Western technology and practises that could benefit their lives, they were often bemused by the strict doctrine of the Christian church and saw no need to adopt practices that even the Christian missionaries did not fully understand themselves. As well as this, any success on the part of missionaries in conversion was often quickly undermined by government action. The biggest success story of the missionaries was the conversion of the Cherokee nation, who quickly adopted Western culture and religion, but were soon practically wiped out by the ‘Manifest Destiny’ led Trail of Tears. 

At the time of Bogan’s writing, the Civil War was raging in America and the previously powerful League, a gathering of Indigenous peoples, was dissolving into infighting and uncertainty. By the conclusion of the war the immigrant Americans had almost finished the long term project of sorting out the ‘Indian Problem’. By the twentieth century, the majority of the Indigenous Peoples had either been forced onto their respective reservations and left to fend for themselves on ever-decreasing land or had been absorbed into the American culture through intermarriage, thus proving that the argument of ‘assimilate or perish’ was sadly true for many.