26 C. F. COAN
guilty of this same offence. The arms of the interior Indians were procured from the Hudson's Bay Company in large measure, but it is rather absurd to blame the company for having furnished the savages with arms. The fur trading period was common to all the northern parts of the continent, and only as a part of the natural course of events did the fur traders put guns into the hands of the Indians, although in some cases the guns were largely obtained by theft, as in the case of the mountain Snake Indians. 60 The Klikitat and the Yakima Indians were described by Robert Newell, October 13, 1849, as "friendly, warlike and well armed." 61 When the treaties had been made and the settlers began moving into the country, along with a transient American population of miners, these Indians became unfriendly, warlike and well armed. Under such circumstances conflict was inevitable, or prac- tically so. There were only two means of preventing trouble, namely; the presence of a strong military force that would inspire the Indians with a fear for the Americans so complete that the Indians would realize the futility of resistance ; or a change in the attitude of the Indians through peaceful nego- tiations. The military force was not large enough to affect the conduct of the Indians, and the treaty method failed to prevent the conflict. The result was the Yakima Indian War, which did not end until the country had been occupied by a strong military force.
George Gibbs believed that the primary cause was not any immediate offences or policies, but that at the base of the whole trouble was the land problem. On January 7, 1857, he wrote, in concluding a letter on the subject of the Indian War, as follows:
"What I have meant to show was that the war sprung partly from ill-judged legislation, partly from previous un- ratified treaties, and partly from recent blunders. Much is due to the natural struggle between the hostile races for the sovereignty of the soil. The land is at the root of the war. Many outrages have been committed since it begun, it is true, but it was not private wrongs that led to it. The numerous
60 Swan, The North-west Coast, p. 384.
61 Lane to the Secretary of War Oct. 13, 1849, C. I. A., A. R., Nov. 27, 1850 (Serial 595, Doc. i), p. 159.
