Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/274

254 anything that they could have done would have required a combination among them such as, indeed, has after a sort presented itself in successive critical struggles, but for which all the needful conditions failed. The whole issue is summed up in the fact that the natives were barbarians, and as such had in the view of Europeans a very dubious tenancy on the continent.

It has been in the treaty negotiations with the Indian tribes by the United States, extending over nearly a century, that the question as to the tenure and title of the soil held by them has come to be of prime consequence. The question has never been judicially pronounced upon in any conclusive and comprehensive decision; nevertheless, it has been practically decided over and over again in the course and mode of dealing with it by our Government. In this as in all our other relations and negotiations with the red men our assumptions, our theories, and our acts have been experimental, inconstant, vacillating, and inconsistent. Our treaties have frankly and emphatically recognized some territorial rights of the natives; our action under these treaties indicates that we regard the claims of the natives as absurd, trivial, and groundless. Did we make a mistake from the start, or have we been perfidious? In our fright under Indian border-warfare, our readiness to protect our frontier settlers, to encourage oar mining prospectors, and to secure a passage for our Pacific railroads, we have admitted that the Indians, as foreigners and independent proprietors, had territorial rights which we could reduce or extinguish only by a bargain, completed at once by payment or suspended on annuities. But all the while our subsequent course under our own treaties has proved that we never really believed that nomadic hordes, roaming over thousands of miles of wild land, could possibly acquire any such title to it as is alone recognized by civilized people. When an individual proprietor of land in a well-organized community has his rights to possession brought under