from their unprovoked outrages upon our people. The Chippewas, Ottawas,
and Pottawatamies furnished hundreds of young warriors to the parties
that devastated our frontiers generations before we in any way
encroached upon or wronged them.

Mere outrages could be atoned for or settled; the question which lay at
the root of our difficulties was that of the occupation of the land
itself, and to this there could be no solution save war. The Indians had
no ownership of the land in the way in which we understand the term. The
tribes lived far apart; each had for its hunting-grounds all the
territory from which it was not barred by rivals. Each looked with
jealousy upon all interlopers, but each was prompt to act as an
interloper when occasion offered. Every good hunting-ground was claimed
by many nations. It was rare, indeed, that any tribe had an uncontested
title to a large tract of land; where such title existed, it rested, not
on actual occupancy and cultivation, but on the recent butchery of
weaker rivals. For instance, there were a dozen tribes, all of whom
hunted in Kentucky, and fought each other there, all of whom had equally
good titles to the soil, and not one of whom acknowledged the right of
any other; as a matter of fact they had therein no right, save the right
of the strongest. The land no more belonged to them than it belonged to
Boon and the white hunters who first visited it.

On the borders there are perpetual complaints of the encroachments of
whites upon Indian lands; and naturally the central government at
Washington, and before it was at Washington, has usually been inclined
to sympathize with the feeling that considers the whites the aggressors,
for the government does not wish a war, does not itself feel any land
hunger, hears of not a tenth of the Indian outrages, and knows by
experience that the white borderers are not easy to rule. As a
consequence, the official reports of the people who are not on the
ground are apt to paint the Indian side in its most favorable light, and
are often completely untrustworthy, this being particularly the case if
the author of the report is an eastern man, utterly unacquainted with
the actual condition of affairs on the frontier.

Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, when he hears that the
whites have settled on Indian lands, cannot realize that the act has no
resemblance whatever to the forcible occupation of land already
cultivated. The white settler