Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/260

Rh speak, to be encamped, had any long-secured and enjoyed ancestral right of domain upon it; they simply occupied it from stress of circumstance or by result of conquest.

3. They failed to see any signs of improvement or betterment on the soil, marking an appropriated ownership; no dwelling, no fence, no well, no stable token of proprietorship appeared. The wild rovers or campers left no other trace of themselves than does a horde of buffaloes or a pack of wolves.

4. Very early in the civilized occupancy of this country the conviction rooted itself that there was no possibility of a joint and peaceful occupancy by the two races. No cordon could keep them apart; one of the two, the civilized or the barbarian, must have the whole or none.

Having reached the conclusion that the right of local tribes to portions of the territory on which the white men found them was the right of actual possession or occupancy for different and unknown terms of time of regions won by conquest and liable at any time to be yielded to a stronger party, another suggestion comes up, which seems to intimate an acknowledgment by the whites of a certain legality in their tenure of the soil by the Indians. The colonists of New England from the first settlement, as individuals and in towns, did consider it a matter of duty, or security, to obtain conveyances of land-titles from the savages. By what right did a petty sachem or a tribal chief deed away and alienate the lands of his people? We can answer only that the whites put the idea of sale into his head; suggested it to him; and in so doing seem to have justified him in assuming the right, to have recognized that he had it so far as to meet their wishes, and to have accepted his scrawls and scratches of bows and tomahawks as signatures completing a quit-claim. We know that transactions of this sort were disputed as invalid within a very short time after they had been made, and that a claim was afterwards advanced by the representatives of foreign