Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/261

Rh that all deeds to land here made by the Indians were worthless. The theory being that all wild territory discovered by a subject vested in his monarch, the inference was drawn that all subdivisions of it, large or small, needed the royal sanction to convey possession of them. Governor Andros threw all the people of Massachusetts into a panic by asserting this doctrine. Lands held here directly from the Indians by deed to an individual, or by partitions of a township through the same sort of instruments, might even have the sanction of the General Court of the colony; but as that court had acted illegally by illegal use of the charter, and the charter had been vacated, all proceedings under it were null. The trepidation of the disfranchised and non-suited Puritan folk was intense till they stiffened themselves to assert their rights of possession by purchase and improvement. Andros's doctrine would have left their tenure of the soil hardly any firmer than was that of the Indian.

In various parts of the older settlements of the country, preserved among the towns' records or in the cabinets of individual housekeepers, are cherished deeds and instruments of conveyance from the Indians, which those who hold them regard as something more than mere curiosities. They are held in many cases as evidences of an honest, humane, and generous purpose on the part of magistrates or ancestors to recognize the natural territorial rights of those found on the soil. The efforts to attest these instruments by the generous use of English letters in unpronounceable Indian names for persons and for places, and the “armorial bearings,” as La Hontan would call them, of the chiefs, certify at least to their antiquity. Many a New England farmer, showing his rough acres to a visitor, will say complacently, “Our family hold this estate from the Indians.”

The next question in order is this: When an Indian executed a deed of land to white men, what rights of his