5. _Conquering the Conquered_ The work of conquering the Southwest was not completed by the termination of the war. Mexico ceded the territory--in the neighborhood of a million square miles--but she was giving away something that she had never possessed. Mexico claimed title to land that was occupied by the Indians. She had never conquered it; never settled it; never developed it. Her sovereignty was of the same shadowy sort that Spain had exercised over the country before the Mexican revolution. The new owners of the Southwest had a very different purpose in mind. No empty title would satisfy them. They intended to use the land. The Indians--already in possession--resented the encroachments of the invaders, but they fared no better than the Mexicans, or than their red-skinned brothers who had contended for the right to fish and hunt along their home streams in the Appalachians. The Indians of the Southwest fought stubbornly, but the wars that meant life and death to them were the merest pastime for an army that had just completed the humiliation of a nation of the size and strength of Mexico. The Indians were swept aside, and the country was opened to the trapper, the prospector, the trader and the settler. The Mexican War was a slight affair, involving a relatively small outlay in men and money. The total number of American soldiers killed in the war was 1,721; the wounded were 4,102; the deaths from accident and disease were 11,516, making total casualties of 5,823 and total losses of 15,618.[32] The money cost of the Mexican War--the army and navy appropriations for the years 1846 to 1849 inclusive--was $119,624,000. Obviously the net cost of the war was less than this gross total,--how much less it is impossible to say.