Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/418

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
402
COLONIZATION

CHAPTER XXV.


TREATMENT OF THE INDIANS BY THE UNITED STATES,—CONTINUED.


The Friends have for many years had schools for the education of the children in different States, and persons employed to engage the Indians in agriculture and manual arts, but they, as well as the missionaries, complain that their efforts have been rendered abortive by the continual removals of the red people by the government.

Scarcely was the war over, and American independence proclaimed, when a great strife began betwixt the Republicans and the Indians, for the Indian lands—a strife which extended from the Canadian lakes to the gulph of Florida, and has continued more or less to this moment. Under the British government, the boundaries of the American states had never been well defined. The Americans appointed commissioners to determine them, and appear to have resolved that all Indian claims within the boundaries of the St. Lawrence, the great chain of lakes, and the Mississippi, should be extinguished. They certainly em-