Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/558

538 outlaws, and avowed implacable enemies, to be dealt with as wild beasts and then paupers. We have made with them solemn covenants, pledging to them their territory as reservations, and we have broken these covenants as wisps of straw. We have agreed to defend their lands against encroachments by the whites; and then when settlers, surveyors, miners, and railroad engineers have invaded them, we have sent our armies to protect, not the Indians, but the white men. Our national Government has made treaties with tribes, reserving to them territories that soon after were found to lie within the bounds of newly created States, which at once claimed supreme rights of domain. And the Indians have been as much mystified as were foreigners in our late civil war, to dispose of the perplexities arising from a conflict between National and State sovereignty. Meanwhile much is to be allowed to the ever-changing aspects and bearings of the questions at issue, and to the coming in of new and unforeseen elements which have perplexed it. The shifting of the frontiers of civilization, by a much more rapid advance through emigration and occupation than was ever dreamed of, has crowded the Indians ; and the discovery of enormous mining wealth, of comparatively little use to the savages, in their reservations which we had made over to them simply as hunting-grounds, has seemed to justify a reconsideration of the bargain. The plea is, “We had given the Indians hunting-grounds; we never intended to make over to them our gold mines.”

But the fundamental error in our policy, the root of most of the evil, of wrong towards the Indians, and of acts of perfidy on the part of our Government, — the error, as it is now admitted to have been, with which we started, — was that of entering into treaties with Indian tribes as independent powers or nations. In reality we never really so regarded them; and the only relief we can find from the charge of intentionally deceiving the Indians, in assuming or pretending so to view them, is in uttering the