Many greedy Americans wanted to take land that wasn't theirs to gain from the loss of others. The American mentality towards Indian removal could be well summed up in the words of Leonard Nimoy, who played the character Spock in Star Trek, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” While this quote has a lot of truth in many situations, when it comes to land ownership, such an idea does not apply. For example, imagine there is a city with 50 inhabitants who all have properties, but one of them has a larger amount of land than the others. Would it be fair for the forty-nine people to seize the property of the landowner who owned the most property for no other reason than personal gain? If such an outrageous principle were applied in American society, there would be no basis for the freedoms we enjoy today, such as private property rights. As the Americans developed an insatiable desire for more land, they repeatedly convinced the Indians to give up the land through treaties and sometimes even through bribes. By making treaties with the Indians, in order to obtain more land, the Americans validated the Indians' ownership rights to North American land. Having lived on American soil for much longer than Americans, Native people had rights to North American land, passing those rights down through inheritance from generation to generation. Many Indians, such as the Cherokee, also occupied the land. Some Americans had the misconception that Native people were simply wanderers who never cultivated the land and therefore had no property rights. In contrast, Cherokee Indians often occupied and improved their lands by planting crops and building tribal villages. Even when the Indians did not cultivate the land, this did not alienate them from ownership of the land. For example, if a person has a