The white man by formal compact purchases from the Indian some certain district, and solemnly binds himself to respect the Indian’s remaining rights within certain prescribed limits, to keep trespassers from entering the now diminished territory, and to ensure it to him and his tribe for ever. But this does not stop the insatiate adventurer, who again crosses the newly-defined limit.[41] The government seems powerless to compel its citizens to respect its treaty obligations or to punish their infraction. The exasperated Indian kills some of the trespassers. Would it be astonishing that he should do so, even if he had been reared under the influences of Christianity instead of those of barbarism? Troops are now sent against the Indians. After the sacrifice of a greater or less number of brave soldiers the hostile tribe is subjected, compelled to return to a quasi-peaceful condition, and to consent to a further reduction of its territorial limits. Before the ink is dry with which the so-called treaty is written the adventurer again crosses the newly-designated boundary. Thus the process goes on _ad infinitum_, or until the Indian, driven from the last foot of his ancestral earth, starving, naked, the cries of his suffering women and children ringing in his ears, is compelled to accept any terms which will give him food and covering. THE INDIANS ON THE RESERVATIONS. The Indian is now taken to a reservation. Even his removal may be a transportation job by which some politicaster in New York or Boston or friendly Philadelphia, who never saw a hostile Indian, and who invests no money in the enterprise, makes a fortune. From this time on he is a means of money-making for a crowd of sharpers. A scanty supply of bad beef at a high price, a little coffee and sugar of the lowest grade, with sometimes indifferent flour, compose his ration. If he happens to be where he can occasionally kill a buffalo, a deer, or a wolf, his squaw dresses the skin, and he takes it to the trader’s store, where he barters it for a little sugar, coffee, or pemican to add to his meagre ration. He gets in exchange for his peltries what the trader chooses to give him. For a calf-robe or a wolf-skin he may get a few cupfuls of the coarsest sugar, or a tin cup worth about ten cents in New York. For a fair calf-robe the trader will ask _three dollars_! “We make every white man rich who comes to our country,” said Sitting Bull to Gen. Miles in the council which preceded the fight on Cedar Creek, in Montana, last October. The remark was not without truth, so far as Indian traders and reservation rings are concerned.