"I shall not spend much time on Tocqueville's discussion of the fate of the Indians, except to mention one fascinating argument that I found there for the first time. It was not, he reported based on what he had learned, the hostility of the white settlers that drove the Indians further and further into the interior. The problem was that the Indians lived by hunting animals, and that the wild animals that fed them invariably fled into the interior when whites settled nearby, thus forcing the Indians to follow them. He did describe the process by which the advancing whites forced or induced tribes to admit them to their neighborhood by treaty, but it was the impact of their settlements on the Indian hunting grounds that pushed the tribes relentlessly inland."
Elliott has a very useful passage that summarizes this situation of a moving frontier. The passage is called "Moving frontiers", p 265. He mentions hunting grounds, but not as an explanation, and gives a variety of other causes both tribal, military, and diplomatic.
Allison, of course, devotes a number of very illuminating and enjoyable lectures, Before 1776, to Indian ways, and Indian and colonist interactions.
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