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half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not let them remain ten years in tranquillity. In this manner do the Americans obtain at a very low price whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase.[1]
These are great evils, and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish; and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific ocean, that race of men will be no more.[2] The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.
At the first settlement of the colonies they might have found it possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the small bodies of strangers who landed on their continent.[3] They several times attempted to do it, and were on the point of succeeding; but the disproportion of their resources, at the present day,
- ↑
On the 19th of May, 1830, Mr. Edward Everett affirmed before the house of
representatives, that the Americans had already acquired by treaty, to the east and west
of the Mississippi, 230,000,000 of acres. In 1808, the Osages gave up 48,000,000 acres
for an annual payment of 1,000 dollars. In 1818, the Quapaws yielded up 29,000,000
acres for 4,000 dollars. They reserved for themselves a territory of 1,000,000 acres
for a hunting-ground. A solemn oath was taken that it should be respected: but
before long it was invaded like the rest.
Mr. Bell, in his “Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs,” February 24th, 1830, has these words: “To pay an Indian tribe what their ancient hunting-grounds are worth to them, after the game is fled or destroyed, as a mode of appropriating wild lands claimed by Indians, has been found more convenient, and certainly it is more agreeable to the forms of justice, as well as more merciful, than to assert the possession of them by the sword. Thus the practice of buying Indian titles is but the substitute which humanity and expediency have imposed, in place of the sword, in arriving at the actual enjoyment of property claimed by the right of discovery, and sanctioned by the natural superiority allowed to the claims of civilized communities, over those of savage tribes. Up to the present time, so invariable has been the operation of certain causes, first in diminishing the value of forest lands to the Indians, and secondly in disposing them to sell readily, that the plan of buying their right of occupancy has never threatened to retard, in any perceptible degree, the prosperity of any of the states.” (Legislative documents, 21st congress, No. 227, p. 6.)
- ↑ This seems, indeed, to be the opinion of almost all American statesmen. “Judging of the future by the past,” says Mr. Cass, “we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their numbers, and their eventual extinction, unless our border should become stationary, and they be removed beyond it, or unless some radical change should take place in the principles of our intercourse with them, which it is easier to hope for than to expect.”
- ↑ Among other warlike enterprises, there was one of the Wampanoags, and other confederate tribes, under Metacom in 1675, against the colonists of New England; the English were also engaged in war in Virginia in 1622.
