Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/242

222 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