Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/250

230 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,