es of the streams, and searching
out every trace of gold upon the mountains, till recesses have been
penetrated which five years ago were scarcely known to trappers and
guides, and lodgement has been effected upon many even of the more
remote reservations. The natural effects of this introduction by the
railroad of white population into the Indian country have not yet been
wholly wrought. There are still reservations where the seclusion of the
Indians is practically maintained by the ill-repressed hostility of
tribes; some, where the same result is secured by the barrenness or
inaccessibility of the regions in which they are situated; but it is
evident that the lapse of another such five years will find every
reservation between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains
surrounded, and to a degree penetrated, by prospectors and pioneers,
miners, ranchmen, or traders. Against the intrusion of these classes, in
the numbers in which they are now appearing in the Indian country, the
Intercourse Act of 1834 is wholly ineffective. It was an admirable
weapon against the single intruder: it avails nothing against the
lawless combinations of squatter territories.

While the movements of population have thus in great part destroyed, and
threaten soon utterly to destroy, at once the seclusion in which it was
hoped the native tribes might find opportunity for the development of
their better qualities, and the natural resources to which, in the long
interval that must precede the achievement of true industrial
independence by a people taught through centuries of barbarous
traditions to despise labor, the Indian might look for subsistence,
Congress in 1871 struck the severest blow that remained to be given to
the Indian policy, in its fourth great feature,--that of the
self-government of tribes according to their own laws and customs,--by
declaring that "Hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory
of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an
independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may
contract by treaty."

In the face of three hundred and eighty-two treaties with Indian tribes,
ratified by the Senate as are treaties with foreign powers, this may
perhaps be accepted as quite the most conspicuous illustration in
history of the adage, "Circumstances alter cases."[L] Since Anthony
Wayne received the cession of pretty much the whole State of Ohio from
the Wyandots, Delawares, a