than to those of our citizens who are building
their homes within reach of the red man's hand. If the savages--Sioux,
Kiowas, Cheyennes, Comanches, whom the United States are thus playing
with--realized in any adequate measure what the next few years have in
store for them, how completely they will be surrounded and disarmed, how
certainly they will be forced to labor like squaws for their bread, how
stringently the government will enforce its requirements when their
power of resistance shall have departed; it is inconceivable but that,
in their present temper, ignorant as they are of the real resources of
the whites, and conscious that they can still bring eight thousand
warriors into the field, they would precipitate a contest which, though
it would involve untold misery to our border population, must inevitably
end in their own destruction.

If, then, there is nothing inconsistent with national dignity or honor
in thus temporizing with hostile savages, it certainly can be shown to
be in a high degree compatible with the interests and the welfare of all
the white communities which are, by their advanced position, placed at
the mercy of the Indians. Thousands and even tens of thousands of our
citizens are now living within reach of the first murderous outbreak of
a general Indian war. Since 1868, when the trans-continental railroad
was completed, population has found its way into regions to which the
rate of progress previously maintained would not in fifty years have
carried it,--into nooks and corners which five years ago were scarcely
known to trappers and guides. Instead of exposing to Indian contact, as
heretofore, a clearly defined frontier line, upon two or three faces,
our settlements have penetrated the Western country in every direction
and from every direction, creeping along the course of every stream,
seeking out every habitable valley, following up every indication of
gold among the ravines and mountains, clinging around the reservations
of the most formidable tribes, and even making lodgement at a hundred
points on lands secured by treaty to the Indians. Even where the limit
of settlement in any direction has apparently, for the time, been
reached, we learn of some solitary ranchman or miner who has made his
home still farther down the valley or up the mountain, far beyond sight
or call.

It is upon men thus exposed, without hope of escape or chance of
resistance, that the first wrath of a general India