Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/355

Rh of the despoiled would furnish business for a high court of claims.

A selection from our local annals of a few of the numerous cases recorded of the sale of parcels of land or of stretches of territory, by the Indians to the whites, may help us to form some idea of the nature of the transaction and of the conditions involved in it. It is to be observed that the transaction was always a loose one, whatever attempt may in any instance have been made to make the terms and warrants formal. There was in most cases an utter neglect of all definiteness and precision as to boundaries; a disregard of all rival claims that might be set up by other parties than the sachem who made the transfer; and no absolute quit-claim as to any reserved rights which might be implied, and which in many cases, as it will appear, were afterwards asserted.

We find frequent positive and even boastful assertions in our early New England records, — like that repeated by Increase Mather, — that till Philip's war, in 1675, the English did not occupy a foot of land without fair purchase. This assertion, if true in the spirit of it as indicating the intent and will of the colonists, is subject to so many abating and qualifying conditions as greatly to reduce the seeming equity of the transactions to which it refers.

There were honest attempts from the first, on the part of the Plymouth and Massachusetts authorities, to prevent the trespass of white men on land that had not been purchased from the Indians. Intruders, in some cases, on complaint being made, were compelled to vacate. Laws were passed to prevent individual bargains. So far as the English were concerned, James II., by proclamation, made the right of purchasing territory from the Indians exclusively a government prerogative. The colonies and States have maintained the same prerogative; but the restriction has been little regarded. In some cases the Indians invited white men to settle and plant among them; but the