has merely moved into an uninhabited
waste; he does not feel that he is committing a wrong, for he knows
perfectly well that the land is really owned by no one. It is never even
visited, except perhaps for a week or two every year, and then the
visitors are likely at any moment to be driven off by a rival
hunting-party of greater strength. The settler ousts no one from the
land; if he did not chop down the trees, hew out the logs for a
building, and clear the ground for tillage, no one else would do so. He
drives out the game, however, and of course the Indians who live thereon
sink their mutual animosities and turn against the intruder. The truth
is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil; they had not half
as good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have to all
eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the cattlemen have a right
to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. The settler and
pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent
could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid
savages. Moreover, to the most oppressed Indian nations the whites often
acted as a protection, or, at least, they deferred instead of hastening
their fate. But for the interposition of the whites it is probable that
the Iroquois would have exterminated every Algonquin tribe before the
end of the eighteenth century; exactly as in recent time the Crows and
Pawnees would have been destroyed by the Sioux, had it not been for the
wars we have waged against the latter.

Again, the loose governmental system of the Indians made it as difficult
to secure a permanent peace with them as it was to negotiate the
purchase of the lands. The sachem, or hereditary peace chief, and the
elective war chief, who wielded only the influence that he could secure
by his personal prowess and his tact, were equally unable to control all
of their tribesmen, and were powerless with their confederated nations.
If peace was made with the Shawnees, the war was continued by the
Miamis; if peace was made with the latter, nevertheless perhaps one
small band was dissatisfied, and continued the contest on its own
account; and even if all the recognized bands were dealt with, the
parties of renegades or outlaws had to be considered; and in the last
resort the full recognition accorded by the Indians to the right of
private warfare, made it possible for any individual warrior who
possessed any influen