Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/30

The Indian Reservation losses sustained in actual conflict and by the desertion of individuals as they should become weary of a profitless and hopeless struggle, until, in the near result, the system adopted should apply without exception to all the then roving and hostile tribes. Such a use of the strong arm of the Government is not war, but discipline."

Not war—certainly not; but discipline. It is fairly alive with discipline. If some captious reader persists in the notion that every war of conquest since the world began aimed to "steadily reduce the number of the refractory," both by killing and by strangling hope in the living, he may content himself with the reflection that, sometimes, discipline is hell.

So the well-disposed Indian was to revel in plenty, and the hostile, "scourged without intermission." How did it work?

The Government soon discovered three things: first, that the well disposed and subjugated tribes could be kept in a state of quiet at an extremely small expense, simply because they would not or could not fight; second, that by providing for the powerful and semi-hostile tribes so bountifully as to allay their resentment of the intrusion, the white settlements could gain foothold far up into the Indian country without the aid of the military; and third, that while the system of rewards to the righteous was correct as a sentimental proposition, the same amount of money 19