so fearfully hard pressed. His own predicament, the exigencies of the moment, made him give to the Indian a justice, the like of which neither one of them had dared even to dream. It was quite otherwise with the northern white man, however; for he, self-confident and self-reliant, negotiated with the Indian in the traditional way, took base advantage of the straits in which he found him, asked him to help him fight his battles, and, in the selfsame moment, plotted to dispossess him of his lands, the very lands that had, less than five and twenty years before, been pledged as an Indian possession "as long as the grass should grow and the waters run."
From what has just been said, it can be easily inferred that two distinct groups of Indians will have to be dealt with, a northern and a southern; but, for the present, it will be best to take them all together. Collectively, they occupied a vast extent of country in the so-called great American desert. Their situation was peculiar. Their participation in the war, in some capacity, was absolutely inevitable; but, preparatory to any right understanding of the reasons, geographical, institutional, political, financial, and military, that made it so, a rapid survey of conditions ante-dating the war must be considered.
It will be remembered that for some time prior to 1860 the policy[1] of the United States government had been to relieve the eastern states of their Indian inhabitants and that this it had done, since the first years of
- ↑ Confessedly much to its discredit, the United States government has never had, for any appreciable length of time, a well-developed and well-defined Indian policy, one that has made the welfare of the aborigines its sole concern. Legislation for the subject race has almost invariably been dictated by the needs of the hour, by the selfish and exorbitant demands of pioneers, and by the greed and caprice of politicians.
