Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/560

540 would only make the show more ludicrous. The very names on these Indian treaties, illustrated with bows, hatchets, bears, birds, snakes, and other emblematical devices, — names such as Tall Wolf, Red Nose, Big Head, Porcupine Bear, Looking-Glass, Big Thunder, and Yellow Smoke, — suggest a travesty. The Indians did not suppose that the treaties gave or originated their titles to land, but simply recognized their prior, existing, original rights. And so when the United States asked the privilege of opening military or emigrant routes through these lands, the Indians were confirmed in their view by the agreement of the Government to pay for this privilege.

Such treaties have been made with mere fragments of different, defeated, and allied tribes; with tribes setting up rival claims to the same territory; with tribes that have but for a very short time got possession of strange territory by conquest or roaming. Yet they have all been treated with equal mock dignity as foreigners, independent nationalities; we all the while knowing that in our sober view they were nothing of the sort. In order that a nation may have a footing for entering into treaty relations with one sovereign power, it must be equally free, unless it waives the right, to make treaties with other like powers. Now it would be no unfair teat of what we conceive to be the nature of our treaties with our Indian tribes, to ask how we should feel and what we should do, if those red sovereigns entered into similar covenants, say, with Great Britain, France, or Russia.

A volume of one thousand and seventy-five royal octavo pages, from the Government printing-office in Washington, published in 1873, bears the title, “A Compilation of all the Treaties between the United States and the Indian Tribes now in Force as Laws.” It is a most remarkable and suggestive, though a strangely perplexing, volume. Its contents are not arranged chronologically in the order in which the treaties were made, but alphabetically, by the