yond the limits of the settled
country. In consequence the warlike tribes were not then, and never have
been since, quelled save by actual hard fighting, until they were
overawed by the settlement of all the neighboring lands.

Nor was there any alternative to these Indian wars. It is idle folly to
speak of them as being the fault of the United States Government; and it
is even more idle to say that they could have been averted by treaty.
Here and there, under exceptional circumstances or when a given tribe
was feeble and unwarlike, the whites might gain the ground by a treaty
entered into of their own free will by the Indians, without the least
duress; but this was not possible with warlike and powerful tribes when
once they realized that they were threatened with serious encroachment
on their hunting-grounds. Moreover, looked at from the standpoint of the
ultimate result, there was little real difference to the Indian whether
the land was taken by treaty or by war. In the end the Delaware fared no
better at the hands of the Quaker than the Wampanoag at the hands of the
Puritan; the methods were far more humane in the one case than in the
other, but the outcome was the same in both. No treaty could be
satisfactory to the whites, no treaty served the needs of humanity and
civilization, unless it gave the land to the Americans as unreservedly
as any successful war.

Our Dealings with the Indians.

As a matter of fact, the lands we have won from the Indians have been
won as much by treaty as by war; but it was almost always war, or else
the menace and possibility of war, that secured the treaty. In these
treaties we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been
abundantly generous, for we have paid them many times what they were
entitled to; many times what we would have paid any civilized people
whose claim was as vague and shadowy as theirs. By war or threat of war,
or purchase we have won from great civilized nations, from France,
Spain, Russia, and Mexico, immense tracts of country already peopled by
many tens of thousands of families; we have paid many millions of
dollars to these nations for the land we took; but for every dollar thus
paid to these great and powerful civilized commonwealths, we have paid
ten, for lands less valuable, to the chiefs and warriors of the red
tribes. No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the
original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has