248 The Winning of the West 



elates; and to dispossess one party was as great 

 a wrong as to dispossess the other. To recognize 

 the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and 

 forests of this continent that is, to consider the 

 dozen squalid savages who hunted at long inter- 

 vals over a territory of a thousand square miles 

 as owning it outright necessarily implies a similar 

 recognition of the claims of every white hunter, 

 squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattleman. 

 Take as an example the country round the Little 

 Missouri. When the cattlemen, the first actual 

 settlers, came into this land in 1882, it was already 

 scantily peopled by a few white hunters and trap- 

 pers. The latter were extremely jealous of intru- 

 sion; they had held their own in spite of the In- 

 dians, and, like the Indians, the inrush of settlers 

 and the consequent destruction of the game meant 

 their own undoing ; also, again like the Indians, they 

 felt that their having hunted over the soil gave them 

 a vague prescriptive right to its sole occupation, 

 and they did their best to keep actual settlers out. 

 In some cases, to avoid difficulty, their nominal 

 claims were bought up ; generally, and rightly, they 

 were disregarded. Yet they certainly had as good 

 a right to the Little Missouri country as the Sioux 

 have to most of the land on their present reserva- 

 tions. In fact, the mere statement of the case is 

 sufficient to show the absurdity of asserting that the 

 land really belonged to the Indians. The different 

 tribes have always been utterly unable to define their 

 own boundaries. Thus the Dela wares and Wyan- 



