Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/269

Rh to the aborigines. These monarchs of all they surveyed probably never connected an idea of proprietorship on their part of the scenes over which they roamed, any more than does the fisherman on the banks or shoals of the sea, or one who daily enjoys the view of the changing aspects of the horizon or the sky, associate with it any claim of his own beyond the right of transient use. Private property among the Indians was scant and simple, confined individually to each one's apparel and implements. Nor as a tribe do the members in fellowship appear to have been prompted, at least before the coming of the whites, to bound any region between themselves and their neighbors to be especially and jealously guarded from intrusion. The recognition of an enemy in wilderness travel was simply as he belonged to a hostile tribe, not as one intruding upon domains where he had no rights. The first example of anything like jealousy in the assertion of territorial limits among the Indians themselves was when, in the rivalries of English, Dutch, and French traders for traffic with tribes at enmity with each other, the right of way over the trails and portages of one or another band was disputed. The white men would allege that forest and stream were as free for common highways as were the feræ naturæ found upon them by roving hunters.

Yet if we thus question the right of any one tribe or nation of the aborigines to anything of such positive force as a long-inherited claim in connection with the actual occupancy of any particular territory, we do not then dispose of the prior question as to the tenure by which human beings held this continent before the coming of the white man. The race of red men, taken as a whole, was here; and even if local tribes held one or another portion of the soil only temporarily and by conquest, liable at any time to be displaced, yet the race, as a race, certainly had some common and comprehensive right to an abiding place. This right the white man has always professed to respect.