Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/590

570 for a war policy or a peace policy, we may as well have in view the cost of the former. Competent persons certify us, and past experience warrants them, that military operations against the Indians cost ten times more than a peace policy. And the estimate has been fairly made, that the extermination of the Indians by warfare would tax this nation more heavily in money and in the lives of white men than did the war of the Secession. The common impression among those who have not informed themselves on the subject is, that in the two and a half centuries of the hostilities between the white man and the red man here, the number of the Indians killed has been in excess of the whites. This is wide of the truth. The lowest estimate I have ever found among experts is, that ten white men have fallen for each single Indian: some have even put twenty or twenty-five instead of ten.

The money cost of our Government wars with the Indians is doubtless set within bounds, when it is estimated at five hundred million dollars. In the first ten years after our Independence, a million a year had been expended in expeditions and commissions. The Seminole war cost twenty-five millions. The Cheyenne war, thirty millions. The bills for the Sioux war are not yet all paid, as it is still only in a state of truce. Indeed, the sum of thirty millions of dollars was probably exceeded in the Seminole war, which, though fought against only two or three thousand savages, was protracted through seven years, and engaged a force of fifty thousand of our soldiers. Some of the cost for opening military roads and maintaining forts and stations of course accrues to the benefit of civilized uses, and we are to regard the outlay as well spent in bringing territory under our knowledge and control. The expenses of the War Department since our nationality was established amount in round numbers to a thousand million dollars, exclusive of the Civil War. Of this sum about a hundred million was spent in the war of 1812 and the Mexican war.