In the whole history of America, from the time when it first [108] became apparent that the occupancy of the country was the object of the whites, up to the present period, is there perhaps to be found a solitary instance, in which an attempt, made by the English to effect a settlement in a wilderness claimed by the Natives, was not succeeded by immediate acts of hostility on the part of the latter. Every advance of the kind was regarded by them, as tending to effect their expulsion from a country, which they had long considered as their own, and as leading, most probably, to their entire extinction as a people. This excited in them feelings of the most dire resentment; stimulating to deeds of cruelty and murder, at once to repel the encroachment and to punish its authors. Experience of the utter futility of those means to accomplish these purposes, has never availed to repress their use, or to produce an acquiesence in the wrong. Even attempts to extend jurisdiction over a country, the right of soil in which was never denied them, have ever given rise to the most lively apprehensions of their fatal consequences, and prompted to the employment of means to thwart that aim. An Indian sees no difference between the right of empire and the right of domain; and just as little can he discriminate between the right of property, acquired by the actual cultivation of the earth, and that which arises from its appropriation to other uses. Among themselves they have lines of demarkation, which distinguish the territory of one nation from that of another; and these are of such binding authority, that a transgression of them by neighboring Indians, leads invariably to war. In treaties of purchase, and other conventional arrangements, made with them by the whites, the validity of their rights to land, have been repeatedly recognized; and an infraction of those rights by the Anglo-Americans, encounters opposition at its threshold. The history of every attempt to settle a wilderness, to which the Indian title was not previously extinguished, has consequently been a history of plunder, conflagration and massacre.