Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/352

332 the red men were unfavorable, and he repelled it. He complained that his own people were withdrawn from allegiance and tribute to him, and that the white man's laws and court processes were forced upon him. The white man's fencings and fields prevented free travel, while the fencings did not prevent the white man's cattle breaking through them and trampling the Indians' corn. Though the whites seem to have taken for granted that a nomadic roving or a transient occupancy over wild territory gave no valid title to it to barbarians, yet the Indians evidently thought it theirs, at least as much as it was the white man's. So it was all over the continent. When the French colonist Ribault, entering the St. John River in Florida, in 1562, quietly set up by night a stone pillar bearing the arms of France, and took possession for his king, the savages, seeing it the next morning, gazed upon it with stolid bewilderment, regarding it as an altar of worship, not as a royal prerogative, not realizing that their territory had passed from their possession. When the Popham colony, in 1607, took their position for a fort on the Sagadahoc, the natives objected to the effrontery of the act, as no permission had been asked and no compensation offered. In 1631 a Dutchman, in Delaware, had set up a post with the arms of the Dutch. An Indian pulled it down. His chief had him killed to appease the Dutchman. This stirred up the Indians, and they “massacred” every one in the Dutch fort. When Lord Baltimore was making his first settlement on the Potomac, he asked the chief if he might plant himself there. The cautious savage replied “that he would not bid him go, neither would he bid him stay; he must use his own discretion.”

When the four New England colonies confederated themselves in 1643, the preamble to their covenant assumed a very lordly tone towards the natives, thus: —