Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/272

Rh with the grasping and arrogant white men, — sometimes in taunts, sometimes in dignified appeals, — reminded their conquerors of our early days of weakness and poverty. So far as the Indian could take into his mind an idea of what to the white man is policy, — a scheme with an ultimate object in view, at first concealed, and exposing its aim or tendency only as it could be safely developed, stage by stage, — he came to the conviction that the Europeans had from the first been practising guile towards him. Coming as transient visitors in ships still at their anchorages, which might be expected to return whence they came, carrying back their companies with such freight as they might gather, the Indians found that these companies left some of their number on shore to fortify or to plant, while the vessels returned merely to bring reinforcements. All the facts involved in permanent colonization presented themselves to the Indians gradually. It must have been very long before they reached any adequate conception that the feeble beginnings of intercourse would lead on to a struggle and rivalry that would result in their close and final conflict for any heritage on their old domains. The Indians, taken together as a race, might well have such a knowledge of the boundlessness of the continent as to be well aware that there was room enough for any moderate number of the foreigners without being crowded themselves. The newcomers at first confined their residences, though not their roamings, to the sea-coast, or to the large rivers emptying into ocean bays. Here they were comparatively harmless, and seemed to be simply traffickers, not hunters, nor likely to penetrate deeply into the interior forests.

But it could not have been very long before some of the most gifted, far-sighted, and after their fashion patriotic of the forest chieftains — Powhatan and his son, and King Philip, and afterwards Pontiac, for instance — took in the aspect of the future for their race, as doomed to yield their inheritance if the white man strengthened himself on