d States
and their right of soil extend" (p. 229). The Cherokees who had settled
in Arkansas agreed to leave their lands within 14 months. By the treaty
of 1836 the Cherokees ceded to the United States all lands east of the
Mississippi. There was considerable difficulty in enforcing this
provision but by degrees most of the Indians were removed west of the
river. In 1859 and 1860 the Commissioner of Indian affairs prepared a
survey of the Cherokee domain. This was opposed by the head men of the
nation. By the Treaty of 1866 other tribes were quartered on land owned
by the Cherokees and railroads were run through their territory.

Diplomacy, money and the military forces had done their work. The first
treaty, made in 1721, found the Cherokee nation in virtual possession of
the mountainous regions of Southeastern United States. The twenty-fourth
treaty (1866) left them on a tiny reservation, two thousand miles from
their former home. Those twenty-four treaties had netted the State and
Federal governments 81,220,374 acres of land (p. 378). To-day the
Cherokee Nation has 63,211 acres.[9]

A great nation of proud, independent, liberty-loving men and women,
came into conflict with the whites of the Carolinas and Georgia; with
the state and national governments. "For two hundred years a contest
involving their very existence as a people has been maintained against
the unscrupulous rapacity of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By degrees they
were driven from their ancestral domain to an unknown and inhabitable
region" (p. 371). Now the contest is ended. The white men have the land.
The Cherokees have a little patch of territory; government support; free
schools and the right to accept the sovereignty of the nation that has
conquered them.

The theory upon which the whites proceeded in taking the Indian lands is
thus stated by Leupp,--"Originally, the Indians owned all the land;
later we needed most of it for ourselves; therefore, it is but just that
the Indians should have what is left."[10]

4. _The Triumph of the Whites_

The early white settlers had been, in almost every instance, hospitably
or even reverentially welcomed by the Indians, who regarded them as
children of the Great White Spirit. During the first bitter winters, it
was the Indians who fed the colonists from their supplies of grain;
guided them to the better lands, and shared with them their knowledge
of hunting, fishing and agriculture. The whites retaliated wi