ee or seisin, or the laws of conveyancing, as his white brother knew
it. He knew only that the rivers and the forests were there, and that he
gained his subsistence from them. With him, the strongest and the
fiercest had the right to rule; the right to hunt the buffalo and elk.
The European put fire arms into the hands of the Iroquois warrior, and
that warrior at once made himself master of all north of the Ohio and
east of the Mississippi, without regard to the prior claims of other
tribes. To expect that a savage of this nature could be dealt with under
the ordinary forms and conventions of organized society, was to expect
the impossible. To him, the appearance of a surveyor or a log cabin was
an immediate challenge to his possession. Today he might be brought to
make a treaty, but on the morrow he was filled with a jealous hate
again, and was ready to burn and destroy. On the other hand, to leave
him in the full possession of his country was, as Chief Justice Marshall
said: "To leave the country a wilderness." To stop on the borderland of
savagery and advance no further, meant the retrogression of
civilization. The European idea of ownership was founded on user. The
inevitable consequence was, that the conqueror or discoverer in the new
world claimed the ultimate fee in the soil, and the tribes receding, as
they inevitably did, this fee ripened into present enjoyment. When Great
Britain, therefore, owing to the conquests of George Rogers Clark,
surrendered up to the United States her jurisdiction and control over
the territory north and west of the Ohio river, she did, according to
the precedent and usage established by all the civilized nations of that
day, pass to her grantee or grantees, the ultimate absolute title to the
land itself, notwithstanding its savage occupants, and the right to deal
with these occupants thenceforward became a part of the domestic policy
of the new republic, with which England and her agents had nothing to
do. "It has never been doubted," says Chief Justice Marshall, "that
either the United States, or the several states, had a clear title to
all the lands within the boundary lines described in the treaty, subject
only, to the Indian right of occupancy, and that the exclusive power to
extinguish that right was vested in that government which might
constitutionally exercise it." These facts should be kept in mind when
one comes to consider the equivocal course that England afterwards
pursued