Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/571

Rh These mistakes have been related and incident to our primary error. They have directly operated to the injury of the natives, and are now found to offer vexatious difficulties in the way of the wiser methods which we are seeking to adopt. Among these errors three have been especially mischievous.

First, after having with much cost and management assigned a reservation to some troublesome tribe and planted it on the territory, we have been induced, by the advances of civilization and the trespasses of the whites upon it, to move off the tribe to another region. In some cases this has been done four or five times. The Indians have thus been kept in a restless and unsettled condition, which has in fact aggravated their roaming tendencies, and precluded their forming any local associations.

A second error has been in assigning to these treaty tribes, as reservations, altogether too extensive regions of territory, — so large, in fact, as to encourage the expectation that they may continue to live by their old methods of the chase, without labor. We have learned that any hopeful policy towards the Indians must look to the breaking up of their tribal relations, and leading each individual and family to a proprietorship of lots or parcels of ground. We have greatly hindered this result in assigning to a tribe so vast an expanse of wild land as to confirm their old habits of holding it in common and trusting their livelihood to its natural products.

The third of these errors is, that, in conformity with the terms of nearly all the older treaties, we have paid the Indians, for the cession of their lands, in money annuities, to pass into the hands of their chiefs, or to be distributed per capita, through the agents. These sums of money have been squandered thriftlessly, and have made the Indians the easy spoil of grasping traders in whiskey and gewgaws, encouraging them in laziness and profligacy. Nor has the result been much better when the annuities have been paid