# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.
INDIAN TENURE OF LAND AS VIEWED BY EUROPEAN INVADERS AND COLONISTS.
We are in the habit of speaking of our sweep of territory on this continent as our “national domain.” Its area, excluding Alaska, is estimated at a little more than three million square miles, or 1,936,956,160 acres. We may form a comparative view of this extent by reminding ourselves that the acreage of England and Wales together is 37,531,722. Adding the areas of Ireland and Scotland, we have an acreage for the United Kingdom of 76,842,965, or less than one twenty-fifth part of the territory governed by the United States on this continent. But Great Britain on the main and on the American islands has the control of territory exceeding our own by some sixty-two million acres.
By the last census we have a population rising fifty millions. Of these, about forty-three millions are whites, more than six millions have negro blood, and there are less than three hundred thousand Indians, sixty or seventy thousand of whom are regarded as tamed and civilized, while a hundred thousand more are somewhat advanced in that process, being clothed, according with the ways of the whites, with some of our implements and resources. Less than fifty thousand of the natives are now regarded as violently hostile; though many more of them, partially subdued and brought to terms, are restless, subject to outbreaks, and require constant and watchful restraint and oversight. All ​of the natives may be said — through pensions, supplies, or gratuities — to share in the favors of our Government, or, as one may view the matter, in compensation for the losses and wrongs suffered by them from the whites.
It is computed that some fifteen hundred thousand square miles of our territory are settled by a thriving population on homesteads, pursuing peacefully all the occupations of industry and thrift. Nearly fifty million acres have been given by the Government as largesses to railroads, for their services in advancing surveys and opening the country. Other tracts of territory have been deeded for educational and agricultural institutions, and as bounties or pensions to soldiers. There are estimated to be about two billions of acres of public lands, more or less perfectly surveyed and explored, in possession of the Government.
Our Government, representing a people that has well-nigh dispossessed and displaced the original occupants of our present domain, is for the present time under covenants, with various terms and conditions, to hold some one hundred and thirty patches of this territory, as reservations, for the sole ownership and use of native tribes. About one hundred and fifty-six millions of acres, or two hundred and forty-three thousand square miles, are thus covenanted.
I have just used the limitation, for the present time, with a reason. Many of those treaty covenants embrace the solemn phrase “for ever,” as extending the term for which they were to be binding. But experience has shown that that phrase is practically inapplicable, and has to be qualified, reduced, and taken as limitable; just as, in the discussions of theologians and scripturists, the same phrase applied to the duration of future retributive punishment is argued by many to mean less than endlessness in the lapse of time. An examination of a digest of all the treaty covenants made by the Government with Indian tribes during its century of existence, will show very many revisions and annulments of them, from necessity, ​emergency, or the alleged stress of circumstances. Sometimes these have been made with the full consent and approbation of the tribes concerned in them; sometimes they have been compelled to assent to them against their wills, more or less compensatory substitutes being made to them. We shall have soon to meet and deal with the question, whether the occasions, reasons, and terms under which the Government entered into these covenants with Indian tribes, with the intent or promise to secure to them perpetual possession, committed it virtually and in the court of honor to an acknowledgment of the previous absolute ownership of even the whole territory. In other words, have the Indians received their reservations as of right, and in confession of our trespass in dispossessing them during all previous years, since the first European colonization of the regions over which they had roamed; or has the Government been dealing with them in the character of chance interlopers, having no certified rights, while for reasons of humanity it might well have granted to them indulgences and favors?
Having given in the previous statistics the number of thousands of square miles of our territory occupied by the homes and fields of thrifty industry, we are tempted, in passing, to contrast the tenure by which these possessions are now held with that — such as we shall find it to be — of the aboriginal occupants of the soil as they roamed over it, or as the dictation and authority of our Government have defined that tenure of the whole, or over some of its parts.
The homes, fields, forests, mill-streams, and mining tracts of the whites holding our subdued territory, or even regions still in the depths of the unreclaimed wilderness, are secured to them by a system of deeds, carefully drawn with bounds and measurements, with indications of previous ownership, and the terms of transfer and possession. These deeds, legally attested, are matters of registry in a series ​of offices provided for them, with other provisions for their testamentary or non-testamentary disposal. Excepting always the guardianship of human life, none of the possessions of civilized men are more jealously watched over and secured than is real estate. The whole powers of a gradation of courts are engaged — even without charge to individuals concerned, because having to do with a common public interest — to guard these landed rights of ownership. There certainly is a fundamental difference between this tenure of land as held by civilized men, and that of nomadic roamers or transient squatters over portions of wilderness territory. Precisely what that difference of tenure is, we are to try to define. But it is well for us to anticipate the inquiry by presenting to ourselves in full contrast the claims, usages, and acquired rights of those who by settlement and toil improve the surface of the earth, and those who only skim it.
Another preliminary and comprehensive question now presents itself. As in the last resort we all look to our General Government for protection and security in our titles to land, as to other forms of property, we assume that the fee of the whole territory vests in that Government. How did the Government acquire the right and power to hold this territory, parcelled out to individuals, or secured by it in large spaces to Indians? In answer to this question — postponing the notice of what had previous to our Revolutionary war transpired in the relations, peaceful or warlike, with the aboriginal tribes — we have to say, in general, that our Government holds part of the territory by cession in the treaty with Great Britain closing our national struggle. Portions of the territory have been since added by purchase from the French and Spaniards, and by conquest, annexation, and compensation in our relations with Mexico. But primarily our rights, such as they are, accrue from our victory over Great Britain. That power claimed at least such a portion of our continent as at the period ​of the war had been explored and occupied by the whites, by right of discovery and possession; by victory over the French, and the cession through them by treaty of all their claims upon regions explored and held by them; and by conquest of additional portions in wars with the savages. We acceded to whatever territorial rights Great Britain had acquired, and impliedly to some that it had claimed, and would have asserted and vindicated had its dominance continued. If Great Britain had cause of grievance in being compelled to yield this territory, much more (as we shall see) had France to complain of the previous dispossession of it by that conquering power. Only in the later period of the colonization of the country, and when the times of rough and hard beginnings had been passed and rewarding success achieved, did Great Britain in its patronizing or protecting functions of government concern itself with its nominal subjects on this continent; and then it came in not so much for their benefit as from jealousy and hostility to France. France, on the other hand, had from the first reachings forth of its enterprise and its costly outlays over our seas and bays, our lakes and rivers, and the capacities of trade and commerce here, engaged the power and patronage of its monarchs and prime ministers, its nobles and its armies, to secure and improve an inheritance on this broad continent. But when it yielded to British arms in a conflict substantially lasting through a century and a half, our Government succeeded to such benefits and to such controversies and quarrels of the temporary dominion as were left here below our present boundary-line. If Francis of France, for the benefit of his royal successors, had been provided for, as he thought he should have been, by a clause in Adam's will disposing of this continent, those successors would have been in no wise benefited by it.
Whatever compunctions may be felt by any among us as to our method of dispossessing our aborigines, none such ​are entertained about any advantage or property obtained in our victory over Great Britain. We rest without a single throb of conscience in the fullest enjoyment of them. Indeed, we are ready to put the most indulgent construction upon, and to strain to the fullest vindication which candor and justice will allow, the sort and right of tenure which Great Britain had enjoyed to the territory which we conquered from her. Our Government is not responsible for trespass against the natural rights of the aborigines which Britain committed in following what it would call a law of Nature, after discovery. A striking illustration is found of the views of our Government on this matter in the course pursued by General St. Clair, when he went, in 1788, as governor of the Northwest Territory, to Fort Harmar, — Marietta, — at the confluence of the Muskingum and the Ohio, to enter into treaties with savages north and west of the latter river. When the savages complained that the whites were not willing to regard the river as a boundary, St. Clair flatly told them, that, as they had been allies of our British enemies in the war, they must meet as the consequence of defeat the loss of their lands.
It is time for us now to turn to the aboriginal tribes, to inquire what had been and were their territorial rights before and while they were being ground in the mill by rival European nationalities, all intruders.
What were the right and tenure by which the red men, on the first coming of Europeans as colonists to this continent, are to be understood as holding the soil, either in localities by their several tribes, or as a race in possession of the whole territory? Of course we put out of sight all those terms — instruments, covenants, and constitutions — in use among nations, states, and municipalities under civilization, to define their bounds and mark their jurisdiction. No state-paper offices, no registries of deeds, no treaty sanctions even, have place in this question; and only such ​elements of the common law as pertain to the simple rights of humanity can come into the argument.
It has been assumed that on the first occasion of contact between the red man and the white man on each portion of this continent, as successively entered upon by colonists, the Indians then and there in occupancy — after their mode of use — had the full right of ownership, as if indigenous or lawful inheritors. Following the localities on the seaboard and the interior then occupied by tribes of the savages, we might be tempted to identify them with such spots, and, assigning each tract to each party, might infer a long and secure occupancy, known and certified, so as to cover a complete title. But such a conclusion on our part would be wide of the mark.
The right of any one tribe — or, as often loosely named, any one nation — of the savages to any particular region of territory here over which they roamed, or where they planted their cabins or cultivated their maize, was simply the right of present occupancy and possession. We can hardly, in any case known to us, say that it was a right of inheritance even, much less of continuity through generations of this or that same stock identified with a particular locality. We draw upon our fancies somewhat, if not in excess, when we speak of the ancestral forests, lakes, streams, and mountains passing by inheritance through the generations of a tribe. They were an Ishmaelitish race. The fact of possession was more often found through conquest than through inheritance. We have positive historical knowledge, in a large number and in a wide variety of cases, of the transient occupancy of one or another region by those whom the white men found upon it. The aborigines were in a chronic state of civil war. The war-path for them alternated with the hunting-path, though both paths often were on the same route. Their wars were for conquest, for revenge, for self-defence, and not infrequently ended only in the extermination of one party, ​the sparse remnant left being adopted into the tribe of the conquerors. Such had been the state of things before the coming of the whites, and it has so continued to our own times.
It was not till more than a century after the whites had formed permanent settlements on the Atlantic and the Canadian borders of this continent that they knew anything positively about the extent and manner of its occupancy by native tribes in the interior. The natural inference, in the absence of knowledge, was that the interior was occupied very much as were the borders, — by the same sort of sparse and roaming tribes, each claiming the spaces and regions over which they hunted, or where they reared their lodges and planted their maize; so that in effect the rights of savagery, such as they were, covered substantially our whole present domain. This inference, too, was a part of the assumption that there were many millions of natives spread over the continent. Actual exploration, positive knowledge, and better-grounded inferences have greatly modified the views assumed when these vast realms were all shadowed by the mystery of the unknown. Those supposed millions in our native forests have been reduced by well-informed inquirers to only three, and again to only one million, and even to a much diminished estimate. The better we have become informed about the numbers and the conditions of life of existing savage tribes, the more unreasonable seems to us a large estimate of the numbers of their predecessors.
The fancy that our vast interior spaces, with their lakes and river-courses, their valleys, plains, and meadows, were all parcelled out and occupied, after their fashion, by our native tribes, has yielded to assured facts of proved inconsistency with it. Tribes vanquished near the seaboard and on our lake-shores were always able to find a refuge in unoccupied territory. The whole of Kentucky, when the white pioneers explored it, was tenantless, unclaimed, ​crossed only as it might have been by war-parties on their raids beyond its bounds. Enormous reaches of Upper Canada, and large parts of the present States bordering on the south of the great lakes, had no human tenants; one might roam in them for weeks and find no trace of man. It has been intelligently affirmed that just before our Revolutionary War the number of Indian warriors between the ocean and the Mississippi, and between Lake Superior and the Ohio, did not exceed ten thousand. If the theories drawn from the examination of the Western earth-mounds have good reasons to support them, an unmeasured length of time had passed since their disuse and desertion. However populous the regions around them may once have been, they had long been lonely and tenantless. These theories, in connection with others of the archæologists, trace successive conquests from north to south and from south to north, sweeping over these midland territories, causing them at last to be turned to solitudes. Epidemic diseases also may have ravaged over those long reaches of the interior, and nearly or entirely depopulated them. Never in a single case within the last century, when white men have first come to the knowledge of remote tribes, have they been found to be very numerous. As successively the tribes have moved back from our frontiers into farther spaces, they have, till quite recent years, always found sufficient wild territory for their own habits, where they could go undisturbed; or, if meeting with any already roaming there, found them to be so few that there was no crowding. The traditions of many tribes also preserve relations of voluntary migrations made by them, independently of any catastrophes of war, and merely for bettering their condition. The abundance of the game in former centuries, when compared with its rapidly increasing scarcity in recent years, would indicate that it was not of old drawn upon for any vast number of consumers. In the lack, therefore, of the more positive knowledge which is out of our reach, there ​are reasonable grounds for the belief, that, when the Europeans arrived, there were no vast multitudes of natives here, and that they could not have appropriated the whole continent.
The statement may be strongly emphasized, that, from the first entrance of the white man on this continent, the condition in which the natives were found, and the relations in which they stood to each other furnished every facility for their conquest and dispossession of the soil, and indeed even solicited and tempted the new comers to assume over them the tyranny of superiors. In discussing under the broadest terms the responsibility of the Europeans, coming hither either as conquerors or as peaceful settlers, for their treatment of the red men, the statement just made opens many important suggestions which are to be candidly considered. It may be affirmed in very positive terms, that if the natives had been in a state of peace, of union and harmony among themselves, and had with one purpose fronted the early European adventurers, giving them no aid and comfort, and resisting their first feeble, forlorn, and impoverished encroachments, both conquest and colonization on this soil would have been long deferred, and when finally accomplished would have been accompanied by very different circumstances, conditions, and results. Europeans, conquerors and colonists, of each nationality, — Spanish, French, Dutch, and English, — found their opportunity and their facility in the intestine strifes and the savage hostilities of the natives. The new comers in every case were able to find, and at once availed themselves of, Indian alliances against Indians. Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru would inevitably have been cut off, starved, and disabled in their schemes but for the fortuity of circumstances which gave them strong native alliances with rival chieftains, with rebels, or with the whole or portions of tribes smarting under the wild or tyrannical sway of their native despots. To each single ​Spaniard in the sparse ranks of each crew of the invaders, one or even many hundred of the Indians were to be found acting as guides, purveyors, or actual and vigorous combatants. The rival caciques of Peru, as well as Montezuma and his heirs, found that the intruding white man was constituting himself an umpire in their intestine quarrels. When the French were seeking their first foothold in Canada they happened to fall among the Hurons, who were ready to be their friends against hostile neighbors across the lakes who had already humbled them. In the early abortive attempts of French colonization in Florida, — those of the Huguenots under Ribault and Laudonnière, in 1562 and 1564, — it proved that there were several rival confederacies of native tribes on that peninsula. They had been at bitter feud, and engaged in deadly strife with each other for a hold on the soil, previous to the arrival of the French. With three of these warring and jealous bands the commanders came into intercourse. At a critical stage in his enterprise Ribault saved his company from the threatening violence of the tribe on whose soil he was about erecting a fort, by agreeing upon an alliance with its chief in his projected raid upon his nearest enemy. The commander entered upon the covenant, but was perfidious to it, and made friends with the other tribes so far as to serve his own temporary ends. The first French missionaries in Acadia found the Souriquois, or Micmaks, in fierce warfare with the Esquimaux, paddling by sea thirty or forty miles to attack them. The rapidity with which the process, well-nigh exterminating, of Indians against Indians, went on may be inferred from a statement made by the heroic Father Brebeuf. While he was living among the Hurons, he estimated their numbers, perhaps excessively, at thirty thousand, distributed in twenty villages, besides a dozen numerous sedentary tribes speaking their language. All these had been well-nigh exterminated at the close of the seventeenth century by the fiercer Iroquois, ​the remnant being barely sufficient to compose a small mission at Lorette.
The pacific policy of William Penn, in his fair purchase of land and his honest covenant with the Indians, stands accredited in our popular histories and traditions with all the distinctive qualities of justice and humanity which can fairly be claimed for it. Perhaps a keen scrutiny, instituted by severer tests, of historical authorities might reduce the special and exceptional dignity and rectitude of the Quaker purchase. But it is to the point to recognize the very important fact, that the Delaware Indians, with whom Penn made his treaty, were then a vanquished and humbled remnant of several tribes, which had previously been under the harrows of the ferocious Iroquois of New York. The conquerors of the Delawares exacted tribute from them, and stigmatized them as women. Under these circumstances the white man's friendship was worth its easy cost. Nevertheless, the exceptionally pacific spirit and equitable dealing which characterized the first relations of Penn's proprietary government did not secure his colonists under the administration of his grandson, Governor John Penn, from a full share in the hostilities of the Indians in the French and English wars preceding and following the Revolution. In their dire emergency the Quakers were obliged to abandon their peace policy.
In connection with the aggression of the whites, it is natural to lay stress on the fact that there were repeated instances in the case of the earliest colonists from each of the European nationalities, when the foreign adventurers, rovers, and settlers were so weak and helpless, so reduced to absolute starvation, that had it not been for the pity and aid of the natives, as well as for the fact of their being at bitter feud among themselves, there would not have been a survivor left of them. Had the natives, with or without concert, and with a prescience of what was to be their fate from the intruders, availed themselves of their opportunity, the ​miserable plight of the white men would have made their ruin easy. But in most of these cases of the extremity of the whites they owed their safety and relief as much to the animosities of warring tribes as to the pity and kindness of the red men. Though the Spaniards by their atrocities had roused against themselves the dread and fiercest hate of their wretched victims, they were several times generously and piteously fed by them when they had neither money to purchase nor arms to wrest supplies. When the arrogant company of French Protestants under Ribault, in 1562, in the St. John River in Florida, had been reduced to starvation by their idleness and recklessness, the Indians, who despised their frivolity as much as they hated the haughty ferocity of the Spaniards, came to their relief. A friendly chief built and filled for them a store-house of supplies in their fort, and when on the night following a fire destroyed it with all its contents, rebuilt and filled it again. And when the desperate Frenchmen resolved to seek their way back to France, the savages helped them to build and rig a vessel. But instead of manifesting simple gratitude under such circumstances, the invaders were always on the watch to foment discords among the natives, that they might profit by engaging, if possible, a stronger tribe, or the stronger faction of a tribe, on their side.
There was a very broad distinction in the course pursued by the permanent English colonists, when their turn came, from that which was taken up by the Spaniards and the French in the earlier periods, as to any bargains or treaties about land with the natives. I cannot call to mind a single instance in which the Spaniards, recognizing any sort of vested right to territory occupied by the Indians, were at the pains even to ask leave of them for residence, much less to obtain a release of claims and a transfer of any space for their own lawful possession. The only exception to the sweep of this statement is in the case in which Columbus, after the loss of one of his vessels in his first ​voyage here, obtained the consent of a cacique for constructing his fort at La Navidad for the party left by him as a colony. The Spaniards always acted complacently on their own church theory, that, as heathen territory belonged to Christians, no title-deeds were necessary to transfer its ownership.
The French, according to the purpose and method of their errand and occupancy here, seem never to have thought of the propriety of asking leave or of acquiring a title from the natives. In their steady progress of exploration and establishing trading-stations and missions along the Northern lakes and by the courses of the Western rivers, they assumed that the natives and themselves were to share in mutual advantages, and might take for granted that the new comers would be welcome. They were not bent upon establishing cleared farms and townships, like the English. They never objected, as did the English, to the unrestrained presence of the natives circulating among them, and keeping up a free intercourse. It seems never to have occurred to them to ask for the transfer to them, by covenants, of bounded tracts of land. The French took up their first permanent residence in the territory of the Algonquins and Hurons, making themselves agreeable to the natives at first by profitable trade, and soon afterwards necessary as allies against their ruthless enemies the Iroquois. These Iroquois, who were in amicable relations with the Dutch, were deadly enemies of the French, because the latter were in alliance with the Hurons. The powerful Iroquois were themselves invaders, and held by conquest the splendid region at the centre and the west of New York. They drove out the previous occupants. The strife between them and the Adirondacks of Canada continued more than half a century after the early voyages of the French in 1535.
We may make the largest allowance for the fact that the whites, in many places all over the country and in all the ​years that have passed, have justified their dispossession of successive tribes by the plea that they were only spoiling spoilers. The Muscogees from the Ohio moved down into Alabama after it had been desolated by De Soto, and pursued their conquests over many enfeebled tribes. In 1822, in a talk with the missionary Compère, Big Warrior, the chief of the Creek Confederacy, boasted of their prowess in conquering, driving out, and destroying the tribes in possession before them. But the missionary silenced the boaster with this question: “If this is the way your ancestors acquired all the territory of Georgia, how can you blame the Americans now in the State for trying to take it from you?”
Just previous to the arrival of the Plymouth and Bay colonists in Massachusetts a fatal plague had devastated the local tribes. Massasoit, the sachem of the once powerful Wampanoags wasted by this scourge, had in consequence become tributary to the Narragansetts; and he was glad to lighten the yoke by entering into a solemn treaty with the Pilgrims. This first treaty of white and red men lasted also longer than any one ever made between the parties, — unbroken for fifty years. The Pilgrims thus found protection, in their first extreme feebleness, in allies jealous of a superior native tribe. And when Philip began to organize his league he became tributary to Plymouth. In their exterminating war against the Pequots the English had the Narragansetts as allies. The Mohicans, who had occupied the upper Hudson, had been driven from it by the Mohawks in 1628, and, settling again on the Connecticut, had been made tributary to the Pequots, — thus being ready for an alliance with the English.
It must be admitted that the Europeans of every nationality, even when not fomenting discord, were all too ready to avail themselves of the rivalries, the hostilities, and the internecine struggles of the native tribes, and to turn them to their own account. Doubtless, too, the Europeans ​primarily opened some of these quarrels, raising jealousies and trying to persuade the Indians that the new comers would be better friends and more useful to them than they could be to each other. When in Philip's war the noble Canonchet, a sachem of the Narragansetts and Philip's chief captain, was taken prisoner, he was offered his life on condition of the submission of his tribe. Refusing the condition he was sentenced to be shot. The English sought to insure the future fidelity of their allied tribes against any vengeful feeling for his execution by making them, after a sort, parties to it. So the subjugated Pequots were made to shoot him; the Mohicans to cut off his head and quarter him; the Niantics to burn his body; and then his head was sent to the English commissioners at Hartford as “a token of love.” And when the time for it came, the Indians were always ready to make alliances with rival and warring colonists, to the sacrifice of their own common interests. Even on the Island of Nantucket, on the first coming of the whites, there were two Indian tribes at feud; and Philip claimed tribute there.
Yet had it been the fact that each and every tribe of Indians found in occupancy here had secured its tract of territory by conquest from some other tribe, at any previous interval of time near or remote, and that the Europeans were aware of it, this fact alone could not in the view of the latter have proved that the possessors had no rightful tenure on such soil. Rights obtained by conquest were recognized in what we call the code of natural law. The ancestors of all the Europeans who dispossessed our aborigines had, to a greater or less extent, acceded to the lands held by them in the same way of conquest. Never in any case have the whites on this continent undertaken to drive off any tribe in transient occupancy of a particular region for the purpose of restoring it to those who formerly held it. It has been always for their own possession and use that Europeans have induced or compelled the natives to yield ​their successive resting places, and to move on. So that though the whites have on all occasions made the most of the plea that they only spoiled spoilers, it is plain that this alone would not have been relied upon as justifying them in disputing the sufficiency of the aboriginal tenure of territory. Looking beyond this, therefore, we find that there were two other grounds of defence and of privilege assumed by the Europeans: first, some shape of the assumption that the heathenism of the Indians impaired their natural rights; and second, that they made no such use and improvement of the soil as to secure a title to it.
The tenure of land among the ancient and some modern migratory hordes of the Eastern World was similarly loose and undefined with that of our aborigines. When the Israelites wished to justify their conquest of Canaan, they said that they were only reclaiming an old ancestral possession, of which in the absence of written title-deeds there were three expressive tokens, — the altar on the hill of Bethel, the well of Jacob, and the family sepulchre in the field of Machpelah.
It would be irrelevant to quote here, and to institute an application of, the principles advanced in the treatises of Maine and other recent publicists on the conditions regulating, or rather allowing, the occupancy and use of wild land by wild men, as they simply follow the law of Nature, personal liberty, and impulses of their own, in roaming or resting here or there. The principles of natural law may suggest the theories which are to be drawn from or applied to the kind of tenure to territory thus claimed or held. But the theories, after all, have to be constructed from the facts in any instance of large application. In the case of our own aborigines we have as signal and significant a one as could be proposed for a precedent. All the conditions which could ever present themselves together for raising all the terms of the question as to the natural and acquired rights of barbarians found in temporary occupancy of wild ​territory, were necessarily met here; and the way in which the whites viewed claims founded on those assumed rights, presents the other side of the problem. As we have already seen, some of the Europeans — the Spaniards — utterly despised such rights, never giving the least heed or deference to them; others of the Europeans — the French — did not find it necessary for their purposes to bring them under controversy or discussion. Either of these two courses might be pronounced as consistent as they were convenient, in averting all complications of argument or arbitration. But the English colonists, as we shall see, did not follow the example either of the Spaniards or the French. They adopted views and pursued courses distinctively their own as to the recognition of and dealing with the assumed rights of the savages on this wild territory. Their way of dealing with the matter, if not their opinions about it, was not consistent, but vacillating and variable, adjusting itself to circumstances. And this inconsistent course, adopted from the first by the English, has run down through our whole history, and is really at the root of the worst perplexities and embarrassments entailed upon our Government in its dealings with the Indians. The inconsistency was in admitting certain natural rights of the natives without defining them, and then trifling with them by a vacillating policy.
The claim of the disciples of the Roman Church was, as we have seen, absolute in this matter; and, practically, the course pursued by the Protestants — though they would have pleaded that they were driven to it by stress of circumstances in their self-defence — at first proceeded upon the assumption of the same claim, though it was soon modified. When Francis I. of France had reminded himself that, if Adam had made a will, a portion of the New World which the Pope had given over in a lump to the monarchs of Spain and Portugal would have fallen to him, he determined to act on the reasonable supposition and to ​claim his share in the spoils of the heathen, and sent Verrazano, in 1524, to pick up the leavings. Verrazano made three voyages, and planted the arms of France from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence. Though the bull of Pope Paul III. had pronounced the natives here to be real men, not monkeys, — “utpote veros homines” — Francis, in his Commission, declared them to be “savages living without the knowledge of God and without the use of reason.” His successor, Henry IV., wrote : “We have undertaken, with the help of God, — the Author, Distributor, and Protector of all kingdoms and states, — to guide, instruct, and convert to Christianity and the belief of our holy faith the inhabitants of that country, who are barbarians, atheists, devoid of religion,” etc. So the Marquis De la Roche was appointed viceroy here in 1598; but he brought over for this work of conversion only fifty felons from the prisons, and no clergymen.
A similar commission was given in 1601 to M. Chauvin, who was ordered to spread the Catholic faith over North America. But he was a Calvinist. He collected peltry, in which he did a profitable business, and left the missionary work unattempted. In all the subsequent enterprises of the French for colonization and empire here, according to the patronage under which each of them was pursued, there was an alternation of preponderance given to secular or sacred objects to be advanced. As in all worldly interests, according to the Scripture text never challenged, “Money answereth all things,” the support of mission work depended upon thrift in trade. Though the traffickers in brandy and peltry were often brought into collision with the priests, the parties which both of them represented were considered as equally essential to the success of each successive enterprise; so that, as we have said, it was not thought necessary to ask leave of residence or grant of territory. Whether the French monarch conferred his vast gift of geometrically bounded spaces and ​reaches of dominion, of island or continent, on individuals or companies, he never gave a thought to extinguishing an Indian title, or perplexing himself with the tenure by which the aborigines held the regions given away so lavishly by him.
When on the expansion of our population by pioneer emigration from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, the Americans came into hostile relations with the old French posts beyond the Ohio, they assumed that, having conquered the French and the English, they might take possession of any territory previously held by them. The British from Canada, and such of them as still lingered holding the lake and river posts, under the chagrin of their defeat endeavored to instigate many Indian tribes into a conspiracy against the inflowing emigrants. They also prompted the Indians to affirm that the English had never received any deeds or titles to the disputed lands. These controversies were more or less satisfactorily disposed of by new treaties, beginning with that of Fort Harmar. But when the emigration reached the farther French posts, the plea was that the French had never really owned any territory there, but had set up their trading-houses and missions merely by allowance, — neither receiving nor asking formal covenants to do so, — and thus had never acquired a permanent title to the soil.
The theory under which Europeans came and took possession of parts of this continent, and have been led by the development of circumstances to claim the whole of it, was in their view a very simple one. So far as regarded any rival questions among themselves, the right of occupancy was admitted to be founded upon discovery, confirmed by actual entry upon any defined portion of the territory. This was the political element of the right. But as regards the ​moral right, involving a dispossession of human beings then occupying the soil, a full justification was found in a more or less emphasized assertion of a divine prerogative of Christians over and against all heathendom. Very rarely, and always ineffectually, was this sweeping claim challenged or discredited. Roger Williams, from the first and always a radical champion of the natural rights of all men, struck at what he regarded as the fundamental falsehood involved in this claim when he denied the right of a Christian sovereign to give a patent to the territory of the natives on the ground of their being heathens. He wrote in his “Key,” etc., that it was “a sinful opinion amongst many, that Christians have right to heathen lands.” Williams's fellow Rhode Islander, Coddington, wrote from Newport to Massachusetts, in 1640, a letter from his companions, in which, as Winthrop says, the Rhode Islanders “declared their dislike of such as would have the Indians rooted out as being of the cursed race of Ham; and their desire of our mutual accord in seeking to gain them by justice and kindness, and withal to watch over them to prevent any danger by them.”
The Friends, or early Quakers, also stood for the natural rights of the savages. In Penn's interview — as he was about leaving England — with Charles II., the King asked him what would prevent his getting into the savages' war-kettle, as a savory meal for them. Penn replied: “Their own inner light. Moreover, as I intend equitably to buy their lands, I shall not be molested.” “Buy their lands!” said the amazed monarch; “why, is not the whole land mine?” “No, your Majesty,” answered Penn. “We have no right to their lands; they are the original occupants of the soil.” “What! have I not the right of discovery?” asked Charles. “Well,” said Penn, “just suppose that a canoe full of savages should by some accident discover Great Britain: would you vacate or sell?” Yet Charles's great predecessor, William the Conqueror, when he ​stepped on the English shore, said he “took seisin of the land.”
If the Indians could have been parties to the argument and discussions as to their natural rights compared with those of European sovereigns whose mariners discovered the continent, they might have suggested that if their possession of the continent, though only as roamers over it, did not assure their ownership, certainly the mere skirting of its ocean-shores by a crew of foreign sailors did not confer a better title.
But these exceptional pleas for the native rights of the savages, as human beings, in the soil which they occupied, were but feeble in view of the prejudgment of the case in favor of the prerogative of Christians over heathen.
The claim as to the reduction of the native tribes to the state of subjects of the monarch to whom the settlers among them owed allegiance seems to have been very distinctly and warmly contested by King Philip, in the contentions between him and the authorities of Plymouth and Massachusetts. Practically, these authorities acted as if they acceded, as by commission or otherwise, to the functions of the crown over the Indians. Even the natives may have appreciated a difference between being subjects of the King of England and being subjects of his subjects. It was especially aggravating to the haughty sachem Philip and his fellows to be summoned as culprit subjects to the colony courts; nor was their irritation relieved at being told that these courts were representing a foreign crown. The chiefs also complained that their own people were thus drawn from their former allegiance to themselves as sachems. They said the whites had no right to intrude themselves between them and their people, or to interfere with their jurisdiction in their forest domains; nor had the whites, unless their intervention was asked by both parties, any justification for intermeddling between Indians and Indians. The whites had sentenced and hung one of Philip's Indians ​for killing another of them: Philip insisted that in this case the administration of justice should have been left to him. When Philip once proposed an arbitration on the difficulties, which had become aggravated, between him and his white neighbors, doubting their impartiality, he urged that the Governor of New York and an Indian king should be the umpires. He was willing to take his place and hold his rank with those who held the highest authority as representing the English crown; but he could not be made to understand or to approve the process by which he who had been obeyed as a sovereign over his own people, previous to the coming of the white men, was reduced before a petty colonial magistrate into the condition of one of his own subjects before himself. To the Europeans, however, there was a logical consequence in this reduction of Indian chieftains to the state of subjects of their monarchs, following from the extension of foreign sovereignty over the territory, whether or not the whites had gone through the form of purchasing title. And when afterwards some of the native chiefs were proud of calling a foreign monarch their Great Father, others preferred to regard him as a brother potentate.
This cool assumption on the part of the European adventurers, discoverers, and colonists here was adopted as an axiom to the inference that their respective monarchs acceded to territorial rights to the soil. It was that the Indian tribes among whom they planted themselves became fellow-subjects of their own foreign sovereigns, and thenceforward owed them allegiance. The Spaniards at once acted on this assumption, and put in force everything that followed from it. When the great circumnavigator, Sir Francis Drake, entered the harbor of San Francisco and explored it, — not knowing that the Spaniards had preceded him, — he took possession for the crown of England, and called the country “New Albion.” The natives were quiet and friendly. They wore feather head-dresses, somewhat ​after the fashion of a crown. One of the chiefs giving Drake this “emblem of royalty,” he interpreted the act as an abdication of sovereignty in favor of Queen Elizabeth.
In some cases there was a degree of formality in the methods by which the European intruders sought to make intelligible to the natives the fact — whether admitted by them or denied — that they were henceforward subjects of monarchs across the salt sea.
It must have mystified the aborigines, till use had emptied the phrase of meaning, to be told that the king of Spain, of France, or of England was their Great Father. A pretty fair test for measuring the relative manliness and native spirit of different forest chieftains might be found in the attitude in which they placed themselves, secretly or avowedly, towards the sentence announcing to them their bounden duty of subjection, allegiance, and loyalty to a foreign superior. Some chieftains, with their tribes, allowed it to pass unchallenged, especially when it assured to them the desired material aid of their European guests in their own internecine strifes. Others made no open remonstrance, content that silence should conceal their disdain at the assumption. Some, however, there were who from the first doubted the grounds of it, and as they gradually came to understand what the assertion of their subject state signified, and what it carried with it, stoutly and resolutely repudiated the claim. This was emphatically the case with each of the successive Indian chieftains known in our history as the master-minds among ordinary savages, who sought to combine their tribes for rooting out the white man. Philip, Pontiac, and Tecumseh were the patriots of their race.
Instead of attempting to indicate in any precise terms the view which Europeans, in anticipation and at their first coming, took of the rights of tenancy and occupancy of the savages on this continent, let us come to the conception which we wish to reach, by stating the actual result, ​either of theory or practice, in the disposal of the whole question by the whites. We can afterwards acquaint ourselves with any terms or bargains by which the English alone of all the colonists, with a slight exception for the Dutch and the Swedes, appear to have qualified their general assumption that the Indians had no territorial rights whatever. In treating in later pages upon the subject of the cession made by Indian chiefs or tribes of portions of territory, — by private bargain, covenant, or formal treaty transfer, — we shall have occasion to note what were the Indians' views of their land tenure, and what was the valuation which they set or allowed the white man to set upon the property surrendered.
The result of the white man's view of the tenure of the natives to the soil, as we are to attempt to define it, was, — as we see it now over the larger part of this continent, and as coming generations will surely see over the remainder of it, — this, the succession of the civilized white man, or possibly the civilized Indian, to the savage red man in occupying it. This was from the first, and will be, inevitable. The nature and constitution of things, as we say, decide it. According to our preference of thought and phrase, we may assert either that fate compelled or that a wise Providence decreed it. The reasoning was as follows: If the earth and man have the relation of place and occupant to each other, then each portion of the earth and the whole of it will belong to those men whose best use of it will give them the mastery of it. If this earth is to support human life, then the extending and increasing needs of man must decide the conditions under which it shall be populated and ruled. If the magnificent resources of this continent, instead of being unused or wasted, were to be turned to the account of man's subsistence, improvement, development, and general welfare, then certainly the red man's habits and ways of life must give place to those of the white man. All our regrets and reproaches, — our ​laments over the grievous wrongs inflicted upon the savages, and our reproaches upon our ancestors here or upon the continuous course of our Government in its dealings with the natives, — all these complaints and censures must attach only to the process, the way, the attendant acts and methods, by which the savages have been despoiled and the whites have come into possession. Let the statement just made be strictly limited, lest it be supposed to exaggerate a plea or to prejudice it. It urges only and simply the fair judgment, that the white man's uses of this continent rightfully succeed to and displace the red man's uses of it. This is not saying, nor necessarily implying, that the white man should displace and exterminate the red man. Quite other and far less simple and well-grounded reasoning and argument and dealing with facts and principles come in, when, from standing for the fair uses of enormous portions of the earth's territory, we pass to the treatment of those who were found in occupancy of it.
It is not strange that the general and popular judgment of the inevitableness of the result — namely, the displacement of the natives of the soil — should attach the same character of necessity and fate to the means by which the result has been brought about; and should urge that every successive step and act, however harsh or cruel or ruthless, by which the savages have been pressed or crushed or slaughtered, is to be ascribed to the stern compulsion of circumstances. Of late years at least, a far more discriminating and considerate view has been taken of the object to be realized, as involving one or another method for reaching it. The conviction is now as firmly cherished through our nation at large as it ever was by the most ruthless body of the earliest colonists, that the land must be rid of savages; even the most remote regions now occupied by them must sooner or later find in them tamed and civilized inhabitants. While this conviction holds unqualified, civilization is substituted for extermination as the ​method for realizing the conviction. The last Report of the United States Commissioner for Indian Affairs (1881) is emphatic on this point. He says: —
“There is no one who has been a close observer of Indian history and the effect of contact of Indians with civilization, who is not well satisfied that one of two things must eventually take place; to wit, either civilization or extermination of the Indian. Savage and civilized life cannot live and prosper on the same ground. One of the two must die. If the Indians are to be civilized and become a happy and prosperous people, which is certainly the object and intention of our Government, they must learn our language and adopt our modes of life. We are fifty millions of people, and they are only one fourth of one million. The few must yield to the many.”
Anticipating a matter which will demand our deliberate notice farther on, the Commissioner adds, that, as we cannot expect the Indians to abandon their own and to adopt our habits of life while we carry victuals and clothes to their reservations, we must compel them to work for a subsistence as we ourselves do.
Happily for all who desire to view this momentous and profoundly interesting question with the utmost candor and intelligence, not forgetful of all humane sentiments, the question is not one that concerns merely the long or the recent past in our country. On the contrary the right, the just, the wise, the expedient, the best possible way in which the civilized whites as a people, and through their government, can and ought to deal with the original, native, and savage occupants of our territory is one of the most living and exciting and serious questions of our day. The perplexing issues on the trial of which we have had two and a half centuries of practical experience have never been settled, and are open to-day. This experience seems to have made us no wiser; it has not introduced any essentially new elements for our guidance, nor relieved the sadness and the suffering and the injustice which ​invest the whole subject before us. Substantially the same course which the white men first pursued towards the natives, when in feeble companies of way-worn adventurers and colonists they invaded the soil, has followed on step by step, as a mighty nation, swarming to half a hundred millions, with all its increase of power and humanity, has pushed its frontiers into savage domains steadily and as resistless as the flow of its own river torrents.
To revert to the point first stated, — the right of civilized man to succeed to wild territory occupied by savages, — deferring for the present the subject of the treatment of its occupants. We admit the right of human beings on occupying wild territory to exterminate all noxious vermin and wild beasts, to cut down forests, to dam streams, and to do everything else on and with the soil to make it secure and habitable. An arresting scruple comes in when this right is inferred to include or to justify the allowance that a more civilized or powerful body of new comers may trample upon, drive off, or subjugate an inferior race occupying the territory. Now practically, with a fair, frank avowal, we may as well make short work of all ingenious pleadings and subterfuges here, and speak right out the historic fact, — the fact of to-day, — that the white man made a logical syllogism which connected his right to improve the soil with his way of treating the Indians; namely, he satisfied himself that the savages were a part of the vermin and wild beasts which he was justified in removing, and compelled to remove, before the territory would serve its use. However wide off from this view any of the early colonists here may have been, no candid person can deny that the view steadily came to fill the eye and mind of those whom we should have thought would have been most shocked by it.
From the first European occupancy of this continent up to these recent years when it has been sternly rebuked, the basis, the real root, of every assumption and ​justification involved in our treatment of the Indians proceeded upon this opinion or belief, — that they are in fact simply a part of the vermin and wild beasts which must be exterminated in order that the territory may be habitable by civilized man. There are infinitely varied degrees of frankness and fulness in which that radical and sweeping opinion may be held or expressed. Those who have successively encountered the perils and massacres of frontier life (pioneers and Indian fighters) for two and a half centuries, the rank and file of our armies at Northern and Western posts, have, with very rare exceptions, boldly and sternly avowed their belief that Indians are tigers, wolves, and wild-cats, and as such in the sight of man and God must be exterminated. Those who have had most to do with the Indians are almost unanimously of that belief; and very many men who are not cruel, nor vindictive, nor careless of their words or judgments, have accorded in it. Statesmen, magistrates, and various functionaries who have had responsible and practical relations with the Indians have with milder terms, and perhaps with some qualifying or softening clauses, expressed their conviction that the savage is more a beast than a man. This opinion is now held as literally and as firmly by vast numbers among us as it ever was; subject, however, from some of them to the qualification that the savage is such a peculiar sort of a beast, that, while there is any possibility of his being domesticated, his slaughter ought to be deferred.
A few, a very few, of those who with means of a like sort for knowing the Indians have listened to this classification of them with noxious vermin have, with degrees of earnestness in their protest, remonstrated against it. The humane, the philanthropist, the Christian missionary have sternly denied the assumption, and have censured with withering denunciations the course of power or policy which has proceeded upon it in dealing with the Indians ​as if they were beasts and not men. And, of course, those who thus protest and denounce do not fail to affirm that it is the white man's treatment of the Indian that has infuriated him, and made him act like a tearing beast in his torture and rage; and that in fact the white man has proved the wilder beast of the two.
If it should be regarded as worth the while of any two earnest disputants, the one standing for and the other challenging the course pursued towards the aborigines on the ground of their being noxious and pestilent nuisances on the soil, the philanthropical pleader could hardly fail to intimate a suggestion something like the following: that in every great city of Christendom there are proportionately to the population of each of them more men, women, and children in the slums and drains of vile filth, desperate incompetency, wretchedness, vice, and destitution than there are of the original native race on this continent; that we do not deny to the most degraded and worthless of these wretches some harborage and dole of pity, nor the right to live out their days in their own fashion; but that on the contrary we assume the burden and protection of them at our own cost. And why, it would be asked by the philanthropist, might not the same course pursued towards the human vermin of the wilderness be taken with these vermin of cities, — the Indian having at least the one advantage of being ventilated by the free air?
The only answer that seems to offer itself to this question is, that the comparison between the nature and the state of the Indians and the condition of the most wretched classes in cities is not wholly one of likeness, but yields a marked difference. The vilest classes in the cities are the outgrowth, the refuse, the deposit, the residuum of civilization, and so deserve the care and pity of those who enjoy its full blessings; while the Indians oppose a fresh, resisting force to the very beginnings of civilization. They are all merged and overshadowed by the disabilities and ​wretchedness of pauperism, ignorance, and the lack of any spur in themselves to shake off their squalor and barbarism; there are none among them able and disposed to do for them what prosperous and merciful people do for the refuse of civilization.
If we thus find the root or starting-point of the white man's whole course towards the Indian to lie in the assumption or the belief that he was a part of the vermin of the soil whose removal or extinction was essential to secure the white man's unquestioned right to make waste territory habitable by civilized human beings, it is but fair that we examine the reasons or the evidence which the white man had for coming to that opinion. And fairness requires the statement that the white man did not begin his intercourse with the natives with that prejudged view of them. That opinion was not a theory to start from, — certainly not with the leading English colonists. Some of the earliest intercourse of the English more especially, but also of the French and Dutch comers here, with individual natives or with groups of them, was marked by considerate sympathy and generosity. And the whites acknowledged it as such; they recognized in it human kindness, — the response of fellow-feeling in the heart, which knits kinship independent of race. It must be urged that the whites did not from the beginning assume as a foregone conclusion that they would need to exterminate the red men utterly, as a condition of their own comfort and security. Indeed, in many very significant instances they seem to have sincerely felt and acknowledged that they had human obligations to fulfil towards the savages. It is true that all the Protestants of those times did believe, as on most sufficient and positive Scriptural authority, that Christians had a right to possess themselves of soil occupied by heathens, and to assume the mastery over heathens. But they by no means claimed or believed that it followed from this, as included in it, that they had a right to put ​the heathen to death as they did the bears and wolves and panthers. The claim of possession and mastery over the heathen was avowedly understood to carry with it the obligation to civilize and Christianize them, to treat them with human kindness; and in this way, while standing to them as benefactors, to obtain their good-will and security from their hate and violence. A careful study of the primary sources of information concerning the earliest intercourse of the white and the red men, always excepting the Spanish invaders, will abundantly prove that the colonists felt and owned an obligation to the natives as human beings. But the continuance of that intercourse for a few years supplanted this obligation by the vermin theory.
This ruthless view of the natives as belonging to the wild beasts of the forest and the valleys, not having been assumed or acted upon from the first by the Europeans, was of subsequent adoption. Those who have ever since avowed it, maintained it, and resolutely and sternly put it into effect in exterminating warfare, and all who allow this view plausibility and acquiesce in it without protest, stand ready to vindicate it as certified by actual, positive experience. They say that it has been forced upon their convictions by an infinite variety and a vast amount of evidence, the result of actual trial. All purposes and efforts (they will plead) to treat Indians as other than vermin have been utterly thwarted and wasted. More than two centuries of more or less considerate scheming and working for the Indians, as tractable and improvable human beings, have been demonstrated to be failures.
Stress is laid upon this very significant affirmation, that those who were found living on this whole continent from the first coming of the whites down to this day, so far from showing among them any self-working process of improvement or development of manhood, have been steadily deteriorating; and that, on the whole, — leaving out of view the wrongs inflicted on the Indians by the whites, even ​if wrong and outrage have predominated in that treatment, — everything which the whites have sincerely, humanely, and intelligently intended for their benefit has invariably been a bane and an injury to them, — depriving them of their wild virility, and reducing them to a mean, abject, and grovelling incompetency or idiocy. Under the influences of civilization which have come the nearest to taming the Indian, it is affirmed that he always exhibits those reversionary characteristics shown by that species of dog among the Esquimaux which is a domesticated wolf: he exchanges a howl for a bark. More than this, intelligent and humane observers have remarked that the same influences and means which advance the white man in steady progress and accumulating good, have a deteriorating and pernicious effect upon the Indians. The enormous amount of materials and helps for improving the condition of the Indians which our Government, for instance, has supplied, — implements and tools for husbandry and domestic thrift, stock-cattle, goods of every kind, — have been wasted on unappreciative and swinish receivers, and have simply resulted in pauperizing them and making them more lazy. The cooking-stoves, frying-pans, and other like utensils which have been sent into the Indian country by the hundred thousand to prompt the squaws to improve their housewifery, and which careful white matrons pride themselves upon burnishing and keeping for a lifetime, rust out from filth and neglect in a few days of use.
It was then through force of the reasons following that the whites, as soon as they became acquainted with the facts about the Indians, justified themselves in taking possession of the wild territory occupied by them: —
1. They found the native tribes in a state of internecine conflict, fighting with, subduing, and exterminating each other.
2. They satisfied themselves that no one tribe on the locality on which for the time being it happened, so to ​speak, to be encamped, had any long-secured and enjoyed ancestral right of domain upon it; they simply occupied it from stress of circumstance or by result of conquest.
3. They failed to see any signs of improvement or betterment on the soil, marking an appropriated ownership; no dwelling, no fence, no well, no stable token of proprietorship appeared. The wild rovers or campers left no other trace of themselves than does a horde of buffaloes or a pack of wolves.
4. Very early in the civilized occupancy of this country the conviction rooted itself that there was no possibility of a joint and peaceful occupancy by the two races. No cordon could keep them apart; one of the two, the civilized or the barbarian, must have the whole or none.
Having reached the conclusion that the right of local tribes to portions of the territory on which the white men found them was the right of actual possession or occupancy for different and unknown terms of time of regions won by conquest and liable at any time to be yielded to a stronger party, another suggestion comes up, which seems to intimate an acknowledgment by the whites of a certain legality in their tenure of the soil by the Indians. The colonists of New England from the first settlement, as individuals and in towns, did consider it a matter of duty, or security, to obtain conveyances of land-titles from the savages. By what right did a petty sachem or a tribal chief deed away and alienate the lands of his people? We can answer only that the whites put the idea of sale into his head; suggested it to him; and in so doing seem to have justified him in assuming the right, to have recognized that he had it so far as to meet their wishes, and to have accepted his scrawls and scratches of bows and tomahawks as signatures completing a quit-claim. We know that transactions of this sort were disputed as invalid within a very short time after they had been made, and that a claim was afterwards advanced by the representatives of foreign ​sovereigns that all deeds to land here made by the Indians were worthless. The theory being that all wild territory discovered by a subject vested in his monarch, the inference was drawn that all subdivisions of it, large or small, needed the royal sanction to convey possession of them. Governor Andros threw all the people of Massachusetts into a panic by asserting this doctrine. Lands held here directly from the Indians by deed to an individual, or by partitions of a township through the same sort of instruments, might even have the sanction of the General Court of the colony; but as that court had acted illegally by illegal use of the charter, and the charter had been vacated, all proceedings under it were null. The trepidation of the disfranchised and non-suited Puritan folk was intense till they stiffened themselves to assert their rights of possession by purchase and improvement. Andros's doctrine would have left their tenure of the soil hardly any firmer than was that of the Indian.
In various parts of the older settlements of the country, preserved among the towns' records or in the cabinets of individual housekeepers, are cherished deeds and instruments of conveyance from the Indians, which those who hold them regard as something more than mere curiosities. They are held in many cases as evidences of an honest, humane, and generous purpose on the part of magistrates or ancestors to recognize the natural territorial rights of those found on the soil. The efforts to attest these instruments by the generous use of English letters in unpronounceable Indian names for persons and for places, and the “armorial bearings,” as La Hontan would call them, of the chiefs, certify at least to their antiquity. Many a New England farmer, showing his rough acres to a visitor, will say complacently, “Our family hold this estate from the Indians.”
The next question in order is this: When an Indian executed a deed of land to white men, what rights of his ​own did he consider that he yielded up or parted with, and what rights did he intend to transfer to the purchaser? We must remember that the land in all cases was without improvements, clearings, fencings, wells, or buildings. It was in its wild state of nature. Curiously enough, the actual testing of the transactions between the seller and the purchaser in such cases showed what the Indian thought he was doing when he sold his land. The moment the white man changed this wild state of nature and began to make improvements upon it, the Indian regretted and tried to retract his transfer of it. It would seem that he had intended to allow the white man a right of joint occupancy with himself, using the facilities of the region in common. The Indians had no idea of moving off to a distance and keeping away from the fields of the white men. Nor did they generally do so. They came and went as before, loitered about, occasionally got jobs of work and food, and they were always accessible. Nearly half a century after the settlement of Boston and scores of towns around it, the Apostle Eliot found Indians enough to occupy a dozen towns of their own within thirty miles.
It comes at last to this. The white man's uses of territory are always and everywhere incompatible with the red man's uses of it; and the white man's uses nullify and destroy the red man's. The issue, turned to plain fact, is this, — the red man must consent to make common and joint use of territory with the habits of the white man, or he must give way to the white man. A railroad track, a mail route, a telegraph wire passing through a wilderness, puts an interdict upon the savage and claims the territory for civilization. The comity of nations, independent and jealous in their sovereignty, does not forbid those links and fibres of transit and intercourse. The untamed ocean allows them, and the wild red hunter must not prohibit them. Here is the central turning-point of all the struggle between civilization and barbarism. King Philip began ​with complaints of the white man's fences at Plymouth; the savages on our ever-shifting frontiers complain that the white man's surveying parties, engineers, and miners frighten off his game on plains and mountains, — and the white man tells the Indian that if he cannot give up his game he must go with it. All the theories about the rights of savage occupants of unimproved territory, all the principles of natural law argued out by the most accomplished publicists, yield to the pressure of practical expediency and of the action of another series of laws developed from human activity. Most of those who have had to recognize and deal with the undefined rights of the savages in the tenure of land have known nothing at all of these theories and principles of natural law. Those who have known more or less about them, and who might have been expected as statesmen or lawyers to have had some regard for them, have found them set aside by such a prevailing force of practical defiances or obstructions of them that they have quietly allowed them to fall into abeyance as inoperative. No upright and candid man, magistrate, colonist, army officer, member of Congress, or simple pioneer, would ever have stoutly denied that the Indians were entitled to some sort of a heritage here; but in all the pages referring more or less directly to the subject which have passed under my eye, I have never met with a clearly defined and positive, however limited, statement of what precisely that right was and is. Nor would such a statement even in the form of a legal definition, and allowed as a precedent, have proved practically to carry authority with it, as it would in all cases be held to be subject to the qualification that it must in no case permanently impair the prerogative of civilization over barbarism.
According to the natural features and products of different regions, competent authorities have made and warranted this estimate, — that an extent of from six thousand to fifty thousand acres (that is, more than seven square ​miles) is necessary for the support in his way of life of a single Indian with his family. And the land must be and continue in a perfectly wild state — of forest, meadow, swamp, coverts, and streams — that it may shelter and subsist all the creatures which live on each other, and then serve the Indian. The axe must never be heard in those deep forest recesses; the streams must not be dammed at the peril of the fish-ways; the scent of humanity must not needlessly taint the air; the tinkle of a cow-bell is a nuisance, and the restless enterprise of the white man is a fatality.
No inapt illustration of the contrasted uses of territory by the red man and the white man may be suggested in setting against each other a countless herd of bellowing buffaloes, trampling over the succulent grasses of the prairie, and the groups of domestic cattle lowing in their fenced pastures and barn-yards. The pond which being dammed to a falling water-power grinds the food of families and saws the lumber for their dwellings, is put to better service so than when it shelters the lodges even of the industrious and wise beavers. It has been said by a United States Indian Commissioner that a single Indian requires for his support a number of square miles fully equal to the number of civilized whites that can subsist on one square mile. The latest proposition and argument looking towards the most humane and practical dealing with the Indian question, recognize the very same principle which has asserted itself in reference to the actual land-tenure of the natives. The most hopeful solution for all our difficulties is said to offer in dividing Indian lands, breaking up all tribal communes, and assigning to each person a severalty of possession to be for a term of years inalienable. At present the United States holds in Reservations some one hundred and fifty-six millions of acres for an estimated population of two hundred and sixty-two thousand Indians. Any one who pleases may cast the sum as to the number of acres which would fall to ​each out of this commonalty. This baronial ownership of territory it is proposed largely to reduce. The space which is by common agreement thought both equitable and practically expedient to assign to each Indian for fixed occupancy and improvement by his own forced or voluntary labor, is one hundred and sixty acres, — leaving the remaining undivided part of each Reservation as a common stock for investment for the whole tribe. If this scheme should take effect, with assured and recorded legal guarantees, it would prove the first real recognition ever made of land-tenure for our aborigines.
This estimate that has been made of the number of acres of wild forest-space required for the range of each single savage, even if allowed to include provision for his squaw and his pappooses, would not even then in all portions of the continent suffice for the maintenance of those dependent in a wasteful way upon it, for all the seasons of the year. In most parts of this country the Indians have always been compelled or prompted to lead a more or less nomadic life. When they are induced to move from one region where game has become scarce in order to seek it in another, they must be able to find such another equally wild region in reserve for them. The deer, the elk, the moose, the bear, and many small animals were their favorite food. The wolf and the cougar were oftener let alone than molested. Maize was necessarily relied upon by natives not living within the range of the buffalo, for winter's use, and as a very small store of it was easily carried on their tramps. It was at best but dry and hard though nutritious food. Parched and pounded, a handful of grains of it mixed with water, either with or without the help of further cooking, would, as we have noticed, sustain an Indian for a long journey. There is a favorite dish prepared by old-fashioned New England households, of boiled green corn and beans, known by the name of “Succotash” as coming to us from the ​Indians. But we should not much relish a dish which a squaw might have cooked for us under that name; we should have missed the butter and the salt, of which the Indians knew nothing. Fish too, caught in a rude way from full waters, was a resource at some seasons.
We must remember, too, that the Indians used the fur-bearing animals only for their own moderate needs, and did not require any such number of them as would threaten their extermination. The rapacity and commercial spirit of the Europeans at once turned the skins of the bear, the deer, the beaver, the fox, the marten, the otter, and the buffalo into articles coveted for traffic. From the first colonization a wasting raid has been made upon these animals by the whites, utterly exhausting the near supply, and compelling the Indians — for their own needs and for barter sale — to move deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Much of their land which the whites have occupied had been abandoned by the Indians, and much more has been readily sold by them as useless for their purposes. Indeed soil, forest, valley, and meadow and stream, represent quite different capacities and values to the red man and the white man. And if no violent dealing were spent on the Indians, the steady wasting of their old game would put a period to their way of life.
We have also to take into account the fact, that vastly the larger portion of the Indians now on the continent, even the wildest of them, have become, in different degrees, dependent upon help and resources for subsistence furnished to them by the whites. I have already made mention of the fact, that, among the vast variety and divergency of views which have found expression concerning the whole relations between the Europeans and the Indians on our northern continent, the bold opinion has been advanced that the savages have on the whole found a balance of advantages and benefits from our intercourse with them. If there is a shadow of truth to warrant that eccentric assertion as ​applicable in the past, there is reason for believing that it has much to verify it in these last years. The present generation of savages profit largely either from the remorse, or from the apprehensions, or from the generosity of our people as expressed by the Government. While in our largest cities are crowded hordes of wretched, houseless beggars, suffering all the direful miseries of penury, cold, nakedness, and disease, the Indians who are pensioners of our Government have transported to their fastnesses, by most costly modes of carriage and distribution, a marvellous variety of necessities and even of luxuries. Droves of beef on the hoof, with whole warehouses of clothing emptied of materials for their apparel, minister to prime necessities. But this is by no means all: any one who will turn over the annual report of the United States Indian Commission will find in it a most elaborate table, covering (for 1881) one hundred and sixteen closely printed pages, headed “Proposals received and Contracts awarded for Supplies for Indian Service.” On reading over that table, one will have really a new and grateful impression of the resources, appliances, ingenuities, and ministrations of civilization for human life. All the varieties of food, of household and farming, mechanical and artistic, tools, of stuffs and garments, of groceries and furniture, of iron, tin, glass, and crockery ware, — fill the specifications in the tables. The eye falls with pleasure upon the hundreds of thousands of pounds of soap, and the thousands of combs, which may be put to excellent use. Cosmetics hold a large space. The variety of surgical instruments and mechanical medical devices is an amazing one. The elaborate list of drugs and medicines would seem to indicate that a system of light practice does not prevail among the natives. Tobacco is furnished most lavishly. When it is considered that ninety-nine hundredths of the articles on these tables were never used by or even known to the Indians before their intercourse with the whites; and when we also take ​into view the fact that having once received them and turned them to account they ever after come to depend upon them, clamoring in impatience for the supply, — we may estimate the service of the white man to the Indian. Nor must the statement be omitted that last year, for example, the Government spent more than a million of dollars for Indians not in reservations, nor under treaty with it. These facts, anticipatory of later discussions, are noticed here as having a bearing upon the virtual right of the Indian tenure of land, as recognized by the favors extended by the whites.
It is hardly to be supposed that any humane or ideal pleader for the rights of the red man would affirm that his heritage of this whole continent, when first visited by white men, should have been regarded and respected as inalienably belonging to him for all time to come, not to be encroached upon or shared with those who could make a better use of it. It can hardly be conceived that regions of a globe of very moderate size, — seemingly the only orb in the universe available for the subsistence, expansion, and development of the human race, or at least the only one which we at present can occupy, — instead of being turned to account by millions of happy civilized beings, should be held for all time as reserved to be coursed over by a few thousand savages. Is it reasonable to maintain that one or several annual visits and roamings over a vast extent of wild territory — lakes and forests — by a group or a tribe of hunters conferred ownership, superiority, or even priority of claim to it? Why, even the pre-emptive right, the first claim to the right, of a purchaser of soil under our Government, is secured only by betterments and improvements on and below its surface. The formality and rigidness of legal exactions by which civilized peoples regulate the ownership and transmission of titles to land, is of itself an indication, and to some extent a justification, of the exceedingly slender claim of tenure which they would allow ​to the aborigines. These monarchs of all they surveyed probably never connected an idea of proprietorship on their part of the scenes over which they roamed, any more than does the fisherman on the banks or shoals of the sea, or one who daily enjoys the view of the changing aspects of the horizon or the sky, associate with it any claim of his own beyond the right of transient use. Private property among the Indians was scant and simple, confined individually to each one's apparel and implements. Nor as a tribe do the members in fellowship appear to have been prompted, at least before the coming of the whites, to bound any region between themselves and their neighbors to be especially and jealously guarded from intrusion. The recognition of an enemy in wilderness travel was simply as he belonged to a hostile tribe, not as one intruding upon domains where he had no rights. The first example of anything like jealousy in the assertion of territorial limits among the Indians themselves was when, in the rivalries of English, Dutch, and French traders for traffic with tribes at enmity with each other, the right of way over the trails and portages of one or another band was disputed. The white men would allege that forest and stream were as free for common highways as were the feræ naturæ found upon them by roving hunters.
Yet if we thus question the right of any one tribe or nation of the aborigines to anything of such positive force as a long-inherited claim in connection with the actual occupancy of any particular territory, we do not then dispose of the prior question as to the tenure by which human beings held this continent before the coming of the white man. The race of red men, taken as a whole, was here; and even if local tribes held one or another portion of the soil only temporarily and by conquest, liable at any time to be displaced, yet the race, as a race, certainly had some common and comprehensive right to an abiding place. This right the white man has always professed to respect. ​We may even say positively that the Europeans, from the first down to the present day, have intended to respect this general right of the aborigines to exist on some portion of this continent, and to be allowed to live after their own fashion as nomads or hunters. Provision has indeed been made by a long series of enactments and measures on the part of our Government for securing these rights to the Indians. Before the enormous growth of our own population by natural increase and colonization and immigration, the problem seemed to be one very easily disposed of. It being taken for granted that there was a limitless expanse to our territory, and that one region was as suitable and acceptable as another to an Indian, provided it were wild forest-land where he could hunt and fish, there seemed to be no particular hardship in compelling the savages displaced at one point to move on farther off. It was but adding a new inducement to pursue a course which their own habits of life, when game became scarce or they were in dread of hostile neighbor-tribes, led them voluntarily to adopt, of roving to new hunting-grounds. But as soon as the seaboard was deserted by new colonists, and the frontier settlers pushed farther and farther inland, the savages who had taken refuge in successive beltings of the continent had to begin the series of removals which have continued in steadily increasing rapidity to our own times. We find at last that there is a limit to this process of pushing the savages into new Western domains. We have crowded the tribes together, and they are now, like the deer or buffalo which they used to encircle and drive into their traps and pounds, circumscribed by the white men.
There is one significant phrase used in the opening of this chapter, which we meet daily in our papers, that sums up the whole story and the whole situation. It is that by which our Government documents describe our almost boundless realm as “the public lands,” or “the public domain.” Yes; we have claimed — in one sense we have ​got — the whole. And what of the former owners? If we look at certain Government maps we see that States and Territories are parcelled out over this magnificent realm like the squares in a vast checker-board. Among these partitions, shown in colors, we may count some hundred and thirty patches, large or small, called Reservations. Each of these marks — in homely language, which is best for it — a scrape into which our Government has got itself by making a bargain about it which it cannot keep, and does not mean to keep. These were certainly, in letter and form, covenants which positively recognized the territorial rights of savages; and the spirit in which they were entered into was certainly, in some cases, sincere and fair. It has been found inexpedient or impracticable to keep them. This, however, is a subject for later pages of this volume; passing reference to it comes here, as the vacillation and so-called perfidious course of policy of our Government in regard to these covenants is only another evidence of an original distrust or denial of any proprietary rights of the savages.
It was, of course, only gradually that our aboriginal people came to realize the full meaning of the struggle which they would have to maintain against the white men. At first they were wholly ignorant of the real purposes of the European colonists. The early companies of them were poor and few; they might have touched and landed here by accident, with no intention of remaining; they were often objects of pity, and needed help; then they appeared to be transient traffickers, seeking an exchange of commodities — fish and peltry — for a few implements and trinkets. These early days of the white man's weakness and poverty have been ever since referred to with pathetic pleading and reproachful remonstrance in the forest eloquence of Indian orators at councils, since we have become so strong and encroaching. Over and over again have these wild spokesmen by council fires, in making treaties ​with the grasping and arrogant white men, — sometimes in taunts, sometimes in dignified appeals, — reminded their conquerors of our early days of weakness and poverty. So far as the Indian could take into his mind an idea of what to the white man is policy, — a scheme with an ultimate object in view, at first concealed, and exposing its aim or tendency only as it could be safely developed, stage by stage, — he came to the conviction that the Europeans had from the first been practising guile towards him. Coming as transient visitors in ships still at their anchorages, which might be expected to return whence they came, carrying back their companies with such freight as they might gather, the Indians found that these companies left some of their number on shore to fortify or to plant, while the vessels returned merely to bring reinforcements. All the facts involved in permanent colonization presented themselves to the Indians gradually. It must have been very long before they reached any adequate conception that the feeble beginnings of intercourse would lead on to a struggle and rivalry that would result in their close and final conflict for any heritage on their old domains. The Indians, taken together as a race, might well have such a knowledge of the boundlessness of the continent as to be well aware that there was room enough for any moderate number of the foreigners without being crowded themselves. The newcomers at first confined their residences, though not their roamings, to the sea-coast, or to the large rivers emptying into ocean bays. Here they were comparatively harmless, and seemed to be simply traffickers, not hunters, nor likely to penetrate deeply into the interior forests.
But it could not have been very long before some of the most gifted, far-sighted, and after their fashion patriotic of the forest chieftains — Powhatan and his son, and King Philip, and afterwards Pontiac, for instance — took in the aspect of the future for their race, as doomed to yield their inheritance if the white man strengthened himself on ​the soil. Though we cannot suppose that the Indian tribes bordering on the whole Atlantic seaboard maintained such close communication with each other as to be well informed about what was transpiring at widely separated points on the coast at the time of most rapid colonization, yet they had some common knowledge on the subject. They found the Europeans rushing hitherward in swarms, evidently with a purpose of remaining, of taking possession of the soil, and extending their settlements. The Indians were amazed and bewildered by the spectacle. They came to think that for some reason unknown to them the people from another world were all coming hither and emptying themselves on this continent. Nor did it relieve their wonder when they found that the new comers represented rival and hostile parties like their own tribes, fighting each other, and transferring Old World quarrels to this soil.
While the natives thus came to realize the ultimate purpose of the whites, and to realize too what destiny it would involve for them, the Europeans on their part had strengthened themselves for each successive stage of conflict which the struggle would encounter. As the first objects of their enterprise, invasion, and exploration — the precious metals and peltry — were abandoned or subordinated, new aims and attractions took their place. Commerce on the high seas, the fisheries, freedom of range for those who had been cramped in the Old World, the privilege of trying theories of government and of religion denied them in Europe, and even the opportunities for obtaining abundant subsistence though at the cost of healthful toil, began in the first half century of real colonization to prepare the way for the stupendous development of the continent and for making it the harborage of emigrating Europe. If the aborigines could ever have withstood this process, or in any way modified the fate which it would inevitably involve for them, it could have been only in its very earliest stages. Even then ​anything that they could have done would have required a combination among them such as, indeed, has after a sort presented itself in successive critical struggles, but for which all the needful conditions failed. The whole issue is summed up in the fact that the natives were barbarians, and as such had in the view of Europeans a very dubious tenancy on the continent.
It has been in the treaty negotiations with the Indian tribes by the United States, extending over nearly a century, that the question as to the tenure and title of the soil held by them has come to be of prime consequence. The question has never been judicially pronounced upon in any conclusive and comprehensive decision; nevertheless, it has been practically decided over and over again in the course and mode of dealing with it by our Government. In this as in all our other relations and negotiations with the red men our assumptions, our theories, and our acts have been experimental, inconstant, vacillating, and inconsistent. Our treaties have frankly and emphatically recognized some territorial rights of the natives; our action under these treaties indicates that we regard the claims of the natives as absurd, trivial, and groundless. Did we make a mistake from the start, or have we been perfidious? In our fright under Indian border-warfare, our readiness to protect our frontier settlers, to encourage oar mining prospectors, and to secure a passage for our Pacific railroads, we have admitted that the Indians, as foreigners and independent proprietors, had territorial rights which we could reduce or extinguish only by a bargain, completed at once by payment or suspended on annuities. But all the while our subsequent course under our own treaties has proved that we never really believed that nomadic hordes, roaming over thousands of miles of wild land, could possibly acquire any such title to it as is alone recognized by civilized people. When an individual proprietor of land in a well-organized community has his rights to possession brought under ​question or peril, he has but to invoke the aid of the law, and if need be he will have the active help of the whole community in which he lives to maintain those rights. Here, in this case, a personal interest, legal sanctions, and a support by the sympathy of neighbors and fellow-citizens, all unite to maintain the rights of each single proprietor of land. The Indian never asserted any rights strictly as a person, an individual, to a single foot of territory on this continent, not even to that on which he planted his lodge; the law of the white man has made but a faint, shadowy, and vacillating recognition of any such rights of an individual Indian. Thus, instead of the three securities and appliances which the land-owner in a civilized community enjoys, the Indian has but one; namely, such as he may find in the sympathy and helpful engagement of his tribe to vindicate a claim common to all its members. Hence the United States Government in its treaties with the natives for the cession of territory has never made the slightest recognition of any individual proprietary rights among them; it has always dealt with them as tribes, often with a very loose estimate of their numbers, — as the proprietors of some of the great Western ranches sell out their cattle as stock, in the gross, without an inventory by count. Thus the Government perpetuates the theory that there are no individual rights among the Indians; they have but the same claims to a common pasturage as a herd of cattle, or of buffalo, when they shift their range.
If so many other more immediately pressing perplexities had not come up to be met by our Government as the consequences of its loose policy in treaties with the Indians, the very searching question would have been sure to have presented itself as to the authority or right which two or three Indian chiefs, in council with officers of the Government, have to deed away an extent of territory, thus defrauding their own posterity of a heritage. The Government has thus allowed that the Indian title is sufficiently ​defined to admit of being legally transferred; and the Indians have put the estimate of their rights as a race at a very low and dubious condition of tenure.
Among the various theories and opinions as to the relations between the red and the white men on the present territory of the United States, we recognized in the opening of this chapter that one which perhaps a majority of persons on hearing it stated would flout as mean and abominable, while the rest would grant that it is at best but specious and plausible. Yet it has had its advocates. This theory proceeds upon what are said to be admitted principles under the law of nations and the usages which apply to rights of conquest and accession to territory that has changed sovereigns. Spain, France, and England once claimed and substantially had possession of the whole northern part of this continent, and also claimed sovereignty over its inhabitants. We are not, it is said, to inquire too curiously about the method and process, nor even the justice and effect, of the way in which this mastery was obtained: we are to regard only the fact. Now, with the exception of those portions of the territory which we have purchased, with all the claimed rights from France and Spain, we conquered this country from Great Britain. She claimed to own the territory, and that the people on it, red and white, were her subjects. We have sprung into being upon it, a new and independent nation; and the same struggle which freed us from the mother country made us owners of the territory and masters of all the natives on it whom Great Britain regarded as a subject race. Great Britain set us an example for our own following as a nation, in claiming this incidental right of conquest. At the close of the long and savage conflict which we call the French and Indian War, — and which led to the cession of Canada and extinguished French occupation here, except in Louisiana, — Great Britain acted upon the assumption that its conquest covered that of all the Indians who had been the helpful ​and effective allies of the French, and all their territory besides. It was in asserting that claim and in the attempt to take possession of such territory that England provoked one of the most ferocious and tragic of the episodes in our Indian warfare, known as the Conspiracy of Pontiac. Next, she engaged the aid of Indian allies against us in our War of Independence, making a contract with them for their services, the terms of which she violated. Great Britain appears again on the field against us, acting through her governor and agents in Canada, and such able Indian conspirators as the Mohawk chief Brant and Little Turtle. Her scheme then was, while holding the Northern and Western “posts,” which she had agreed to give up to us, to prompt and aid the Indians west and north of the Ohio to the conspiracy, on the ground that the territory which she had ceded to us by treaty did not include that into which our pioneers began to rush on the conclusion of peace. The immense cost which this renewed Indian war involved to our then merely confederated government, — impoverished, and with distracted councils, — and the barbarities of slaughter and burnings and desolation which it involved for the settlers, might well have persuaded the generation of that day that the British and the Indians constituted but one common enemy for us, and that our victory included the conquest of the territory over which the direful struggle extended. At any rate, such is our title to that territory held according to the allowed principles of natural and international law.
So we close our review of the subject of the Indian tenure of land on this continent as recognized and dealt with by Europeans. There has been no harmony or consistency either of opinion or action on the subject. According to that law of honesty and economy which teaches us that the righting of a wrong, when that is even possible, involves much heavier costs than would have been requisite to avoid it, our Government both in its war policy and its ​peace policy has expended sums of money which would over and over again have sufficed to extinguish the Indian title by the strictest terms of a bargain. Nor is this all: our existing obligations in trust funds, annuities, pensions, supplies, and agencies exceed in amount the original property value of what we hold through them.
* ↑ I have a note of a quotation from Lamartine, though I have misplaced the reference to it, in these words: “Le globe est la proprieté de l'homme; le nouveau continent, l'Amerique, est la proprieté de l'Europe.”
* ↑ From the Narragansett language.