Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/599

Rh tribes, humbled by the whites or by other tribes. Their obligation to, and semi-dependence upon, us often led to their answer to our call to furnish us scouts, trailers, and other allies in our hostilities with other tribes. In the original design and planning of these reservations — except in the case of such town-lots as Massachusetts assigned to the Indians under training, and the circumscribed territory which New York set apart for the Six Nations; in fact, in all the reservations for the Indians made by our Government — the intention was to leave the natives free to their own habits and mode of life; to subsist, if they pleased, without labor, by hunting and fishing; keeping aloof from the whites, or maintaining traffic with them in peltries. Of course, this plan required vast expanses of territory, which we thought we could afford to dispense with, as we had so much that we were not likely to need for centuries to come. Once it was proposed that there should be one enormous reservation, to gather in all the tribes. Fifty years ago Mr. Calhoun advised that there should be two, a Northern and a Southern. As it is, we have them now scattered all over the West, South, and North in patches, — if we may call such stretches of space (some of them unsurveyed and unexplored) “patches.” The Indian Territory on which the first reservation was made, in 1831, lies south of Kansas, north of Texas, and west of Arkansas. It has upon it reservations for a score or more of tribes or parts of tribes. Its area is over sixty-four thousand square miles, — over forty-one millions of acres. One railroad now penetrates it, and two others skirt it. The States around it are flourishing and populous; but this magnificent region — rich, well watered, and timbered — is practically secluded as a waste, and as profitless as if it were a desert. Each human being on it has an average space of one square mile; New York has ninety-four persons on each one of its square miles, and Massachusetts has more than one hundred and eighty persons; Belgium supports three hundred and fifty persons, and the