. Eight months ago a
number of persons were induced by offers of land from Government to go
to Lake Superior in search of copper; and a large party had lately been
occupied in removing an immense block of copper from the bed of a river
which empties into the Lake. This miner had been thus occupied; and he
informed me that the task was done--that the block weighed three
tons--that it was to be taken to New York &c as an object of curiosity.
A fortnight ago he had started from the spot--skirted the Lake to a
certain river, ascended that to its source, then carried the canoe with
its contents 2 or 3 miles on their shoulders until they met the head
waters of the St. Croix, and descended that river to the
Mississippi."[473]

XII

THE CHIPPEWA TREATY OF 1837

The relations of the United States government to the Indians prior to
1871 shows a dual attitude. On the one hand, the Indians were the
government's wards. By the ninth of the Articles of Confederation,
Congress was given the right of "regulating the trade and managing all
affairs with the Indians who were not members of any of the
states";[474] and by the act regulating Indian trade no cession of land
could be valid unless made by treaty or convention.[475] On the other
hand, these treaties were negotiated and proclaimed with all the pomp
and ceremony which would appeal to the Indian's mind and impress him
with his importance as a member of a sovereign nation. This was
distinctly a "legal fiction", but it continued as the customary method
of procedure until the act of March 3, 1871, abolished the practice of
considering the tribes as independent nations.[476]

As the nation increased in strength and the agricultural and commercial
forces of the country were pushing westward and coming into contact with
the distant tribes, the treaties increased in number and importance.
Urged by the cries of hungry land-seekers the cession of land by the
natives gradually became the most important phase of all treaties; and
in order that the new settlements might be protected from
vengeful Indians the title to the land rested on legal cession rather
than on conquest. It is stated on the authority of the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs that "Except only in the case of the Sioux Indians in
Minnesota, after the outbreak of 1862, the Government has never
extinguished an Indian title as by right of conquest; and in this case
the Indians were provided with another reservation, an