CHAPTER IV.
INDIAN TENURE OF LAND AS VIEWED BY EUROPEAN INVADERS
AND COLONISTS.
We are in the habit of speaking of our sweep of territory
on this continent as our “national domain.” Its area,
excluding Alaska, is estimated at a little more than three
million square miles, or 1,936,956,160 acres. We may
form a comparative view of this extent by reminding
ourselves that the acreage of England and Wales together is
37,531,722. Adding the areas of Ireland and Scotland, we
have an acreage for the United Kingdom of 76,842,965, or
less than one twenty-fifth part of the territory governed
by the United States on this continent. But Great Britain
on the main and on the American islands has the control
of territory exceeding our own by some sixty-two million
acres.
By the last census we have a population rising fifty millions. Of these, about forty-three millions are whites, more than six millions have negro blood, and there are less than three hundred thousand Indians, sixty or seventy thousand of whom are regarded as tamed and civilized, while a hundred thousand more are somewhat advanced in that process, being clothed, according with the ways of the whites, with some of our implements and resources. Less than fifty thousand of the natives are now regarded as violently hostile; though many more of them, partially subdued and brought to terms, are restless, subject to outbreaks, and require constant and watchful restraint and oversight. All
