Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/346



is matter of intensely exciting interest and of momentous bearing upon the fortunes of the red man running through the whole colonial period of our history before we had become a nation, with a central power and a common responsibility for our acts. During this colonial period, — beginning with the first scattered and independent settlements, from Acadia and Canada, down along the seaboard to the Gulf, and ending with the war of the Revolution, — each isolated group of colonists was of necessity left to its own methods and policy in intercourse and treatment of the savages. There was of course an ultimate reference to the authority of the different sovereignties at home, represented here by their respective subjects. Instructions were from time to time received as to the way in which the natives should be dealt with. But the straits and emergencies of each feeble and exposed band of settlers had to decide for them their own attitude and course of conduct towards the aborigines. It was from the beginning a steady struggle between the forces of civilization, aided by intelligence and arbitrary power, and the natural rights and the impotence of barbarians. The result was an inevitable one; but the wrongs and outrages which secured it sadly stain the record of the white man's triumph.

This chapter by its title covers the period and the events reaching from the first settlement of the territory of the United States by Europeans down to the Revolutionary