no The Winning of the West 



and knows by experience that the white borderers 

 are not easy to rule. As a consequence, the official 

 reports of the people who are not on the ground are 

 apt to paint the Indian side in its most favorable 

 light, and are often completely untrustworthy, this 

 being particularly the case if the author of the re- 

 port is an Eastern man, utterly unacquainted with 

 the actual condition of affairs on the frontier. 



Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, 

 when he hears that the whites have settled on In- 

 dian lands, can not realize that the act has no re- 

 semblance whatever to the forcible occupation of 

 land already cultivated. The white settler has 

 merely moved into an uninhabited waste; he does 

 not feel that he is committing a wrong, for he knows 

 perfectly well that the land is really owned by no 

 one. It is never even visited, except perhaps for a 

 week or two every year, and then the visitors are 

 likely at any moment to be driven off by a rival 

 hunting-party of greater strength. The settler ousts 

 no one from the land; if he did not chop down the 

 trees, hew out the logs for a building, and clear the 

 ground for tillage, no one else would do so. He 

 drives out the game, however, and of course the In- 

 dians who live thereon sink their mutual animosi- 

 ties and turn against the intruder. The truth is, the 

 Indians never had any real title to the soil ; they had 

 not half as good a claim to it, for instance, as the 

 cattlemen now have to all eastern Montana, yet no 

 one would assert that the cattlemen have a right to 

 keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. Set- 



