The Mission Indians
child-like dependence upon the guiding hand of a stronger people.
"Wherever, in California," says one of the earlier Government reports, "an Indian is discovered superior to the mass of his fellows, it will be found, with scarce an exception, that he speaks Spanish (not English), from which it may be safely inferred that he was once attached to some mission. There is about the same difference between these Mission Indians and the wild tribes as there is between the educated American negro and a wild African; these have both undergone the same process, and with very nearly the same results."
If the Mission Indian question appeared to the Government as a novel one, the attitude of the Government toward the Mission Indians was no less unique. From the earliest times it had been the custom of the Government to recognize in the wild, nomadic tribes a possessory right to their vast hunting-grounds which required extinguishment by treaty and by purchase. For a more or less (usually less) valuable consideration the aborigines had been induced to recede before the white population, but always with at least the color of a bargain.
But the rights of the Mission Indians were summarily disposed of in an astonishing manner by this decision of a committee of the United States Senate: "that the United States, acquiring possession of the territory from Mexico, succeeded to its rights in the
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