Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/561

Rh names — often unfamiliar and uncouth — of the bodies of Indians with which the covenants were confirmed. Another “List of all Indian Treaties and Agreements made,” etc., appears in the annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, for 1881, arranged in the same alphabetical order, with dates. There are six hundred and forty-two such covenants referred to by title in this latter summary. The volume first mentioned gives the full text of the treaties, with the places where formed, ratified, or proclaimed, with revisions and supplementary articles, and several lists and schedules of allotments of land or money distributions to individual Indians, their families or representatives. One would need an elastic patience to read this volume. But the turning over its pages cursorily will alike bewilder, astonish, and instruct. The utter impracticability, not to say impossibility, of keeping the covenants under the conditions pledged to meet the emergencies and crises which our Government has been dealing with for a full century in its relations with the Indians, will be so obvious to the reader that he will be ready to condone some of the wrong incidental to breaches of them. Apart from all that we have to marvel over and to regret on this score, the volume will in future years have an interest of an antiquarian and historical character, something like to that of Homer's list of ships. Some of the names of Indian bands are already obsolete. It may therefore be of use in coming years for communities in flourishing and populous States in the north and west of the country to recall the tribal designations of some of the bands having covenanted titles to parcels of their territory.

Infinite and harassing, and incapable of adjustment, have been the embarrassments into which our Government has been drawn by its treaties with parties not having the status for enforcing or even making treaties. In the treaty with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, in 1866, Congress