Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/551

Rh hunting-grounds on the Wabash had been ceded by the Miamis to our Government. He maintained that no single tribe had absolute ownership of any space, and that the chiefs of a tribe had no prerogative of acting for the whole tribe in alienating land. Harrison defended Fort Meigs in two hard-pressed sieges. It has been affirmed that but for Tecumseh our war with Britain then might have left us in possession of Canada. But it was wise that our Government did not at that time involve itself in any further complications as to territory. It is observable, however, that each successive contest with the aborigines which brought under question their land-tenure, never induced or forced our Government to adopt a definition in terms as to what precisely that right was, — a definition to be established as a precedent, and to be recognized under shifting circumstances in its application, whether in any particular case it favored the whites or the Indians.

The fearful massacre at Fort Mims, in Alabama, then a part of the Mississippi Territory, Aug. 30, 1813, threw the whole South into a panic. There were then twenty stockade forts within a stretch of seventy miles. The scattered settlers rushed into these slender defences. There were five hundred and fifty-three whites, with their friends, in Fort Mims; and of these, four hundred were butchered. The Indians were aided by the Spaniards in Florida. The Creeks were then in our pay. The more stoutly and courageously, and for the time successfully, the Indians fought to keep their hold upon any region of territory, the more clearly did our people think themselves justified in contesting it. Savage warfare employed such arts and barbarities as to certify the right and obligation of civilization to bring it to a close. If wild occupancy of land did not secure a tenure, still less did the peculiar method of the Indian in fighting for it confirm any natural right of his to defend it as his own. Indeed one is well-nigh led to imagine that if the Indians had from the first never raised a weapon