Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/54

34 the Great American Desert into regions as accurately surveyed and as adequately delineated on maps as are the features of land and water and geological formation of one of the old States. The single fact that within the last decade of years more than a million of buffaloes have been annually slaughtered for their hides, the carcasses being left to the wolves, has been a significant token that the extinction of the game would come to be a constraining condition of the fate of the red man. Meanwhile, alike on the northern and on the southern borders of our national domain, the pressure of the same quickening and goading enterprises has contemporaneously aided to encircle the former limitless range of the savages till they are, as it were, coralled in the centre of a circumscribed white occupancy. The breaking of the monopoly of the Hudson Bay Company, which from its first charter not only discountenanced colonization, but jealously forbade even the exploration of the depths of the wilderness in order that they might be reserved for the traffic in fur-bearing animals, has given place to an eager rivalry in British enterprise in settling and improving its territory, aided by largesses for opening its own transcontinental railway. Simultaneously our own Indian Territory on the south — so solemnly covenanted to the exclusive occupancy of the five so-called civilized tribes, as well as to remnants of others under treaty — is threatened with a gridiron system of railways. The demands of civilized intercourse and of commercial and passenger traffic are made inexorable. Nor do the hundred and twenty-nine loosely bounded spaces marked on the latest maps as Reservations answer to their titles. They are but mocking securities against steady encroachments by individuals or companies of such as covet them; and when the clash between the greed of the white man and the covenanted rights of the Indian ripens into an open feud and expands into an armed collision, the Government is ever ready for any breach of its faith which may be accounted to the issue of