Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/575

Rh vagueness and mist about the Indians have been dispelled. We know their numbers almost as accurately as we do the population of one of our oldest towns. Classified statistics of the tribes, in count and in condition, are spread upon documentary records in Washington, and we find, to our satisfaction, though the former exaggerated conceit of the vast number of their hordes may not have shrunken so rapidly as did the estimate of Falstaff's men in buckram, yet that there are by no means so many wild Indians in our domain as we had imagined. They are now circumscribed too, all around, by the regions of civilization in its various stages, — rude, or in the way of advance. There is no longer an unexplored and unlimited realm of mysterious fringes and depth, to which they may wander as the white man pushes them farther to the horizon; for the whites occupy that horizon.

2. And this suggests another advance in relieving the Indian question of what was till very recently one of its most perplexing and embarrassing conditions. We have found that it is utterly impossible to keep the Indians from contact and intercourse with the whites: push them back as far as we please, they are still our neighbors. Once it was the opinion of our wisest statesmen that the prime condition for just and peaceful relations with the Indians was to divide our territory with them, and leave them to themselves. We cannot do that now. The Indians themselves have had so much to do with the whites, and in spite of all our fights with them have received such benefits from us, that they desire more. In fact they cannot now exist without the presence and the help of the whites. Their range over the former wild reaches of territory for hunting has been steadily reduced, and the game has become scarce, in many vast spaces extinct. So they absolutely need our best improved weapons, our goods and implements; and whole tribes of them are now kept from actual starvation only by the supplies which Government