Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/249

Rh 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