rning, find his wife murdered and scalped, and the brains of
his little ones dashed out against his own doorpost! And if a deadly
hatred of the Indian took possession of his heart, who shall blame him?
It may be said, the pioneer was an intruder, seeking to take forcible
possession of the Indian's lands--and that it was natural that the
Indian should resent the wrong after the manner of his race. Granted:
and it was quite as natural that the pioneer should return the enmity,
after the manner of _his_ race!

But the pioneer was _not_ an intruder.

For all the purposes, for which reason and the order of Providence
authorize us to say, God made the earth, this continent was
vacant--uninhabited. And--granting that the savage was in
possession--for this is his only ground of title, as, indeed, it is the
foundation of all primary title--there were at the period of the first
landing of white men on the continent, between Lake Superior and the
Gulf of Mexico, east of the Mississippi, about one hundred and eighty
thousand Indians.[72] That region now supports at least twenty millions
of civilized people, and is capable of containing quite ten times that
number, without crowding! Now, if God made the earth for any purpose, it
certainly was _not_ that it should be monopolized by a horde of nomad
savages!

But an argument on this subject, would not be worth ink and paper; and I
am, moreover, aware, that this reasoning may be abused. _Any_ attempt to
construe the purposes of Deity must be liable to the same
misapplication. And, besides, it is not my design to go so far back; I
seek not so much to excuse as to account for--less to justify than to
analyze--the characteristics of the class before me. I wish to establish
that the pioneer hatred of the Indian was not an unprovoked or
groundless hatred, that the severity of his warfare was not a mere
gratuitous and bloody-minded cruelty. There are a thousand actions, of
which we are hearing every day, that are indefensible in morals: and yet
we are conscious while we condemn the actors, that, in like
circumstances, we could not have acted differently. So is it with the
fierce and violent reprisals, sometimes made by frontier rangers. Their
best defence lies in the statement that they were men, and that their
manhood prompted them to vengeance. When they deemed themselves injured,
they demanded reparation, in such sort as that demand could then be
made--at the muzzle of a rifle or the p