Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/499

Rh been in occupancy were, so to speak, “thrown in.” Not a motion, not a thought, apparently, was entertained about any bargain or settlement in either case with the natives. Nor has England ever added to her territory thus first acquired, as the United States has done, by purchases from other European nationalities. What consideration did the natives receive when Charles II., by a stroke of the pen, made over to his cousin the vast expanses known as Rupert's Land, afterwards the Hudson Bay Company's territory? At what date, then, did the affirmation of purchase in the Earl of Dufferin's statement begin to have a warrant? It would seem to be applicable only to comparatively recent transactions under a great change from the original circumstances. There were vast spaces of lonely, desolate, and uninhabited territory stretching all round the settlements of the French which were ceded to England. For nearly a full century British residents in Canada and the Northwest had no occasion to raise the question of extinguishing Indian titles. While our own people, beginning before the war of the Revolution, were steadily pushing forward their Western frontiers, often displacing for the second time remnants or combinations of remnants of tribes which had been displaced before, the matter of purchasing or extinguishing Indian titles, with compensations and annuities, was continually presenting itself. The occasions, too, were often aggravated by contentions as to whether the Indians in possession for the time had acquired any real ownership of certain regions in dispute. The vigorous and restless activity and enterprise of our own people made this a chronic and embittered trouble. The British on their side of the line, in the long lethargy and apathy as to any extension of their colonization, were spared all this strife. Lumber and furs could be gotten for their traffic without raising contentions with the natives. It was only when, in the planting of the Earl of Selkirk's colony in 1811, and more recently in extending settlements