Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/229

Rh 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