sufficiently advanced in civilization to be admitted into
the family of nations. Our claim to forbid their selling to
individuals, and our guarantying to tribes who would not sell to us in
our corporate capacity, portions of country occupied as hunting
grounds, by more distant tribes, can only be based on the right of
discovery, taken in connection with a right conferred by our superior
civilization; and seems never in fact to have been fully acknowledged
by them. It was not, at least, admitted by Tecumseh. His doctrine seems
to have been that we acquired no rights over the Indians or their
country either by discovery or superior civilization; and that the
possession and jurisdiction can only be obtained by conquest or
negociation. In regard to the latter, he held that purchase from a
single tribe, although at the time sojourners on the lands sold, was
not valid as it respected other tribes. That no particular portion of
the country belonged to the tribe then within its limits--though in
reference to other tribes, its title was perfect; that is, possession
excluded other tribes, and would exclude them forever; but did not
confer on the tribe having it, the right to sell the soil to us; for
that was the common property of all the tribes who were near enough to
occupy or hunt upon it, in the event of its being at any time vacated,
and could only be vacated by _the consent of the whole_. As a
conclusion from these premises, he insisted that certain sales made in
the west were invalid, and protested against new ones on any other than
his own principles.

It must be acknowledged that these views have much plausibility, not to
grant to them any higher merit. If the Indians had been in a nomadic
instead of a hunter state, and in summer had driven their flocks to the
Allegheny mountains--in winter to the banks of the Wabash and Tennessee
rivers, it could scarcely be denied that each tribe would have had an
interest in the whole region between, and as much right as any other
tribe to be heard on a question of sale. The Indians were not
shepherds, wandering _with_ their flocks of sheep and cattle in quest
of new pastures, but hunters, roaming after deer and bison, and
changing their location, as the pursuit from year to year, or from age
to age, might require. We do not perceive a difference in principle in
the two cases; and while we admit the difficulty of acquiring their
territory on the plan of Tecumseh, we feel bound also to