small camps from place to place, shifting sores upon the
public body, the men resorting for a living to basket-making, beggary,
and hog-stealing, the women to fortune-telling, beggary, and harlotry;
while a remnant will seek to maintain a little longer, in the mountains,
their savage independence, fleeing before the advance of settlement when
they can, fighting in sullen despair when they must. It is doubtless
true that some tribes could still remain together as social, even after
being dissolved as legal, communities; but the fate we have indicated
would certainly befall by far the greater part of the Indians of the
plains, were the reservation system broken up in their present social
and industrial condition. To believe that a pioneer population of two,
three, or four millions, such as is likely to occupy this region within
the next twenty years, can, in addition to its own proper elements of
disorder, safely absorb such a mass of corruption, requires no small
faith in the robust virtue of our people, and in the saving efficacy of
republican institutions.

This last consideration we have urged, not on behalf of the Indians, but
in the interest of the present white communities beyond the Missouri, to
whom such a dispersion of the tribes would be a far greater burden than
the maintenance of the reservation system in its integrity could
possibly be, and in the interest of a score of States of the Union yet
to be formed out of that territory. Surely it is not in such cement that
we wish to have the foundations of our future society laid.

We conclude, then, that Indian citizenship is to be regarded as an end,
and not as a means; that it is the goal to which each tribe should in
turn be conducted, through a course of industrial instruction and
constraint, maintained by the government with kindness but also with
firmness, under the shield of the reservation system. It is true that
this system can no longer be kept up without sacrifice on our part. In
the days of Pres. Monroe, the sequestration of the Indians involved
only the expense of transporting eighty or ninety thousand persons to a
region not settled, nor then desired for settlement. To-day there is no
portion of our territory where citizens of the United States are not
preparing to make their homes. To cut off a reservation sufficient for
the wants of this unfortunate people in their rude ways of life; to
hedge it in with strict laws of non-intercourse, turning asid