Page:Visit of the Hon. Carl Schurz to Boston, March 1881.pdf/59

46 We must face the simple and rigid condition that not until the Indians break up their tribal relations, and occupy, in severalty by families, as farms, tracts of regions which heretofore they have only roamed over and skimmed,—only then will the whites allow them to be owners of the soil, and treat them as such. And in exacting that condition the whites will claim that they follow the law of all civilized people, and even the law of Nature. The reason why no individual, tribe, people, or nation can assert and hold dominion over any portion of the high seas or ocean, is because no permanent occupancy or improvement can be set up there. All are free to course them or to fish them; but they have no owners. By the same test, however, in councils and treaties with tribes of Indians, our Government may have shammed a recognition of their territorial rights. It has been but a sham. From the first coming here of the whites they have never honestly held—yielding all that followed the admission—that any tribe of Indians found in occupancy of a portion of territory had a bona fide title of ownership of it. Though they might, after first getting a footing in it through conquest or vacancy, amid an incessant internecine warfare, have hunted over it for two or three generations, still it was not theirs as against any rival roamers. They had merely skinned vast spaces of it of its natural productions; they set up no tokens of possession, with bounds and fencings and improvements. These are the