Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/270

250 We may even say positively that the Europeans, from the first down to the present day, have intended to respect this general right of the aborigines to exist on some portion of this continent, and to be allowed to live after their own fashion as nomads or hunters. Provision has indeed been made by a long series of enactments and measures on the part of our Government for securing these rights to the Indians. Before the enormous growth of our own population by natural increase and colonization and immigration, the problem seemed to be one very easily disposed of. It being taken for granted that there was a limitless expanse to our territory, and that one region was as suitable and acceptable as another to an Indian, provided it were wild forest-land where he could hunt and fish, there seemed to be no particular hardship in compelling the savages displaced at one point to move on farther off. It was but adding a new inducement to pursue a course which their own habits of life, when game became scarce or they were in dread of hostile neighbor-tribes, led them voluntarily to adopt, of roving to new hunting-grounds. But as soon as the seaboard was deserted by new colonists, and the frontier settlers pushed farther and farther inland, the savages who had taken refuge in successive beltings of the continent had to begin the series of removals which have continued in steadily increasing rapidity to our own times. We find at last that there is a limit to this process of pushing the savages into new Western domains. We have crowded the tribes together, and they are now, like the deer or buffalo which they used to encircle and drive into their traps and pounds, circumscribed by the white men.

There is one significant phrase used in the opening of this chapter, which we meet daily in our papers, that sums up the whole story and the whole situation. It is that by which our Government documents describe our almost boundless realm as “the public lands,” or “the public domain.” Yes; we have claimed — in one sense we have