The Land of the Miamis. Barce Elmore
legs were scattered about over the prairie. The warriors of this tribe, stripped to the skin, except breech-cloth and moccasins, and with bodies painted with red stripes, went into battle with the rage of mad-men and demons and committed every excess known to human cruelty.
Looking at the Potawatomi in the true light, and stripped of all that false coloring with which he has been painted, and the facts remains that he was every inch a wild and untamed barbarian. And while we must admire him for his native strength, his wonderful endurance through the famine and cold of the northern winters, and his agility and ingenuity in the chase or on the warpath, it is not any wonder that the children of that time, as Judge James Hall relates, "learned to hate the Indian and to speak of him as an enemy. From the cradle they listened continually to horrid tales of savage violence, and became familiar with narratives of aboriginal cunning and ferocity." Nor is it any wonder that when General Harrison crossed the Wabash at Montezuma and gave an order to the advance guard to shoot every Indian at sight, that the rough frontiersman, John Tipton, entered in his diary, "Fine News!"
CHAPTER VIII
OUR INDIAN POLICY
– The Indian right of occupancy recognized through the liberal policy of Washington and Jefferson.
By the terms of the definitive treaty of 1783, concluding the war of the revolution the territory northwest of the river Ohio passed forever from the jurisdiction of the British government, over to the new born states of the United States. By the first article of that treaty, the thirteen former colonies were acknowledged to be free, sovereign and independent powers, and Great Britain not only relinquished all her rights to the government, but to the "proprietary and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof." At the time of that treaty, the northwest territory was occupied by a number of powerful and warlike tribes of savages, yet no reservation of any kind was made in their favor by the English negotiators. The Iroquois confederacy of New York, and more particularly the Mohawks, had stood out stoutly on the side of the king, but they were wholly forgotten in the articles of peace. Of this action, Joseph Brant, the Mohawk leader, in his communications with Lord Sidney, in 1786, most bitterly complained, expressing his astonishment "that such firm friends and allies could be so neglected by a nation remarkable for its honor and glory." Yet if Brant had been better acquainted with the policy and usage of European nations, he would have known that England had granted away not only the sovereignty, but the very soil of the territory itself, subject only to the Indian rights of occupancy. In all the ancient grants of the crown to the duke of York, Lord Clarendon and others, there passed "the soil as well as the right of dominion to the grantee." France, while adopting a liberal policy toward the savages of the new world, claimed the absolute right of ownership to the land, based on first discovery. Spain maintained a like claim. The war for supremacy in the Saint Lawrence, the Mississippi and the Ohio valleys between Great Britain and France, terminating in the peace of 1763, was a war waged for the control of lands and territory, notwithstanding the occupancy of the Indian tribes. If a country acquired either by conquest or prior discovery, is filled with a people attached to the soil, and having fixed pursuits and habitations, the opinion of mankind would seem to require that the lands and possessions of the occupants should not be disturbed, but if the domain discovered or conquered is filled with a race of savages who make no use of the land, save for the purpose of hunting over it, a different solution must of necessity result. There can be no admixture of races where the one is civilized and the other barbarous. The barbarian must either lose his savagery and be assimilated, or he must recede. The North American Indian was not only brave, but fierce. In the wilds and fastnesses of his native land, he refused to become either a subject or a slave. No law of the European could be formulated for his control; he obeyed only the laws of nature under which he roamed in freedom. He knew nothing of fee or seisin, or the laws of conveyancing, as his white brother knew it. He knew only that the rivers and the forests were there, and that he gained his subsistence from them. With him, the strongest and the fiercest had the right to rule; the right to hunt the buffalo and elk. The European put fire arms into the hands of the Iroquois warrior, and that warrior at once made himself master of all north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, without regard to the prior claims of other tribes. To expect that a savage of this nature could be dealt with under the ordinary forms and conventions of organized society, was to expect the impossible. To him, the appearance of a surveyor or a log cabin was an immediate challenge to his possession. Today he might be brought to make a treaty, but on the morrow he was filled with a jealous hate again, and was ready to burn and destroy. On the other hand, to leave him in the full possession of his country was, as Chief Justice Marshall said: "To leave the country a wilderness." To stop on the borderland of savagery and advance no further, meant the retrogression of civilization. The European idea of ownership was founded on user. The inevitable consequence was, that the conqueror or discoverer in the new world claimed the ultimate fee in the soil, and the tribes receding, as they inevitably did, this fee ripened into present enjoyment. When Great Britain, therefore, owing to the conquests of George Rogers Clark, surrendered up to the United States her jurisdiction and control over the territory north and west of the Ohio river, she did, according to the precedent and usage established by all the civilized nations of that day, pass to her grantee or grantees, the ultimate absolute title to the land itself, notwithstanding its savage occupants, and the right to deal with these occupants thenceforward became a part of the domestic policy of the new republic, with which England and her agents had nothing to do. "It has never been doubted," says Chief Justice Marshall, "that either the United States, or the several states, had a clear title to all the lands within the boundary lines described in the treaty, subject only, to the Indian right of occupancy, and that the exclusive power to extinguish that right was vested in that government which might constitutionally exercise it." These facts should be kept in mind when one comes to consider the equivocal course that England afterwards pursued.
But how were the savage wards occupying these lands, and thus suddenly coming under the guardianship of the republic, to be dealt with? Were they to be evicted by force and arms, and their possessory rights entirely disregarded, or were their claims as occupants to be gradually and legitimately extinguished by treaty and purchase, as the frontiers of the white man advanced? In other words, was the seisin in fee on the part of the states, or the United States, to be at once asserted and enforced, to the absolute and immediate exclusion of the tribes from the lands they occupied, or was a policy of justice and equity to prevail, and the ultimate right to the soil set up, only after the most diligent effort to ameliorate the condition of the dependent red man had been employed? The answer to this question had soon to be formulated, for on March 1st, 1784, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Hardy, Arthur Lee and James Monroe, delegates in the Continental Congress on the part of the State of Virginia, in pursuance of the magnanimous policy of her statesmen, executed a deed of cession to the United States, of all her claim and right to the territory northwest of the Ohio, the same to be used as a common fund "for the use and benefit of such of the United States as have become, or shall become, members of the confederation or federal alliance of the states." The only reservations made were of a tract of land not to exceed one hundred and fifty thousand acres to be allowed and granted to General George Rogers Clark, his officers and soldiers, who had conquered Kaskaskia, Vincennes, and the western British posts under the authority of Virginia, said tract being afterwards located on the Indiana side of the Ohio, adjacent to the falls of that river, and known as the "Illinois Grant," and a further tract to be laid off between the rivers Scioto and Little Miami, in case certain lands reserved to the continental troops of Virginia upon the waters of the Cumberland, "should, from the North Carolina line, bearing in further upon the Cumberland lands than was expected," prove to be deficient for that purpose. The cession of Virginia was preceded by that of New York on the first day of March, 1781, and followed by that of Massachusetts, on the 19th day of April, 1785, and that of Connecticut on the 14th of September, 1786, and thus the immense domain now comprising the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, with the exception of the reservations of Virginia, and a small reservation of the state of Connecticut in northeastern Ohio, passed over to the general government, before the adoption of the federal constitution, and before George Washington, the first president of the United States, was sworn into office, on the 30th day of April, 1789.
But the wisdom and the broad national views of the leading Virginia law-makers and statesmen, had already, in great measure, pointed the