Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/419

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AND CHRISTIANITY.
403

braced a compact and most magnificent expanse of territory. It was true that the Indians, the ancient and rightful possessors of the soil, had yet large tracts within these lines of demarcation; but, then, what was the power of the Indians to that of the United States? They could be compelled to evacuate their lands, and it was resolved that they should. It is totally beyond the limits of my work to follow out the progress of this most unequal and iniquitous strife; whoever wishes to see it fully and very fairly portrayed may do so in a work by an American—"Drake's Book of the North American Indians." I can here only simply state, that a more painful and interesting struggle never went on between the overwhelming numbers of the white men, armed with all the powers of science, but unrestrained by the genuine sentiments of religion, and the sons of the forest in their native simplicity. The Americans tell us that this apparently hard and arbitrary measure will eventually prove the most merciful. That the Indians cannot live by the side of white men; they are always quarrelling with and murdering them; and that is but too true; and the Indians in strains of the most indignant and pathetic eloquence, tell us the reason why. It is because the white invaders are eternally encroaching on their bounds, destroying their deer and their fish, and murdering the Indians too without ceremony. It is this recklessness of law and conscience, and the ever-rolling tide of white population westward, which raised up Tecumsch, and his companions, to combine the northern tribes in resistance. Brant assured the American commissioners, that unless they made the Ohio and the Muskingum their boundaries, there