Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/275

Rh or peril, he has but to invoke the aid of the law, and if need be he will have the active help of the whole community in which he lives to maintain those rights. Here, in this case, a personal interest, legal sanctions, and a support by the sympathy of neighbors and fellow-citizens, all unite to maintain the rights of each single proprietor of land. The Indian never asserted any rights strictly as a person, an individual, to a single foot of territory on this continent, not even to that on which he planted his lodge; the law of the white man has made but a faint, shadowy, and vacillating recognition of any such rights of an individual Indian. Thus, instead of the three securities and appliances which the land-owner in a civilized community enjoys, the Indian has but one; namely, such as he may find in the sympathy and helpful engagement of his tribe to vindicate a claim common to all its members. Hence the United States Government in its treaties with the natives for the cession of territory has never made the slightest recognition of any individual proprietary rights among them; it has always dealt with them as tribes, often with a very loose estimate of their numbers, — as the proprietors of some of the great Western ranches sell out their cattle as stock, in the gross, without an inventory by count. Thus the Government perpetuates the theory that there are no individual rights among the Indians; they have but the same claims to a common pasturage as a herd of cattle, or of buffalo, when they shift their range.

If so many other more immediately pressing perplexities had not come up to be met by our Government as the consequences of its loose policy in treaties with the Indians, the very searching question would have been sure to have presented itself as to the authority or right which two or three Indian chiefs, in council with officers of the Government, have to deed away an extent of territory, thus defrauding their own posterity of a heritage. The Government has thus allowed that the Indian title is sufficiently