ng as are in the nature of the case.

The tribes to which we refer as potentially hostile are, first, those
now in immediate contact with the whites, whose claims to territory are
so far disregarded, either by the action of the government or by the
unauthorized intrusion of pioneers and prospectors; or whose means of
subsistence are so far impaired or threatened by the extension of
railways and settlements,--that hostilities are only prevented by the
bounty of the government in feeding the members of such tribes in whole
or in part, by liberal presents of trinkets and useful goods, by the
exercise of especial watchfulness in avoiding occasions of dispute and
points of collision, and finally by a willingness on the part of the
government to overlook offences and even to tolerate a degree of
insolence, rather than allow a breach of the peace: second, those tribes
not now to any great extent in contact with the whites, and exhibiting
no desire to go out of their way to make trouble, but of which the same
must, in the inevitable course of the national progress, in a few years
become true as of the tribes embraced under the first class.

But these classes, as we have thus described them, are yet far too
numerous for the facts of the case. We must still further reduce them by
excluding all such tribes as, from location, from traditional friendship
for the whites, or from weakness of character, are unlikely, in any
event reasonably to be contemplated, to become involved in hostilities.

Among the Indians, who, by the force of their location and surroundings,
are rendered powerless for armed resistance, are not a few of the
Indians of Minnesota, and even some in Wisconsin, who have no love for
the whites, and would make exceedingly bad neighbors to frontier
settlements, but who, encircled as they are by powerful communities,
submit sullenly to their condition. The same may be said of many bands
in Kansas, Nebraska, and on the Pacific coast. These are Indians who
have been overtaken, surrounded, and disarmed by the progress of
population, but, either through the neglect of the government or by the
failure of the usual agencies of instruction and industrial assistance,
have remained barbarous, and, as their natural means of subsistence grow
scantier, are becoming every year more miserable.

There is another and much larger class of Indians from whom no organized
violence is to be expected in the course of the complete settlemen