f discovery, the Indians
were the rightful occupants, with a just and perfect claim to retain
possession and enjoy the use until they should be disposed voluntarily
to part with it. Great Britain, Holland, France, and Spain, the four
powers claiming sovereignty by virtue of discovery within the present
territory of the United States, conceded no less than this to the
natives; while France, in the cession of the province of Louisiana,
expressly reserved the rights allowed the Indians by its own treaties
and articles, "until, by mutual consent of the United States and the
said tribes or nations, other suitable articles shall have been agreed
upon."

"Such being the right of the Indians to the soil, the United
States for more than eighty-five years pursued a uniform
course of extinguishing the Indian title only with the consent
of those Indian tribes which were recognized as having claim
by reason of occupancy: such consent being expressed in
treaties, to the formation of which both parties approached,
as having equal rights of initiative, and equal rights in
negotiation. These treaties were made from time to time (not
less than 372 being embraced in the general statutes of the
United States) as the pressure of white settlements, or the
fear or the experience of Indian hostilities, made the demand
for the removal of one tribe after another urgent or
imperative. _Except only in the case of the Indians in
Minnesota, after the outbreak of 1862, the United-States
Government has never extinguished an Indian title as by right
of conquest_; and in this latter case the government provided
the Indians another reservation, besides giving them the
proceeds of the sales of the lands vacated by them in
Minnesota; so scrupulously, up to that time, had the right of
the Indians to the soil been respected, at least in form. It
is not to be denied that wrong was often done in fact to
tribes in the negotiation of treaties of cession. The Indians
were not infrequently overborne or deceived by the agents of
the government in these transactions; sometimes
unquestionably, powerful tribes were permitted to cede lands
to which weaker tribes had a better claim: but, formally at
least, the United States accepted the cession successively of
all lands, to which Indian tribes could show color of title,
whic