Photographed by the Harriman Expedition, 1899 Permission of E. H. Harriman ] [Illustration: SHELL SPIDER GORGETS From mounds in Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee Pl. LXI.—Second Ann. ] In the West the history of the Amerind is linked mainly with that of but two other races, the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon, while in the East it is intimately bound up with the wars and history of the Dutch and French as well. All the struggles of these European races for supremacy affected the Amerind, and in the East he is found sometimes on one side, sometimes on another.[402] He did not for some time discover that his doom was in the European regardless of kind. At first, too, the Amerind extended the law of hospitality to the newcomers, and the Europeans would have starved to death in some instances had it not been for the timely aid of the race in possession of the soil, and whose reward was subsequent destruction. The Amerinds at last tried to combine, as in the conspiracy of Pontiac, against their increasing foe, and had they been able to throw aside some of their peculiar regulations and form a wide-spreading and close confederacy, they could have compelled the Europeans to halt on the Atlantic slopes of the Appalachian chain for a long period. “In our ignorance,” says Simon Pokagon, chief of the Pokagon Pottawatomies, “we did not comprehend the mighty ocean of humanity that lay back of the advance waves of pioneer settlement. But being fired by as noble patriotism as ever burned in the hearts of mortals, we tried to beat back the reckless white man who dared to settle within our borders—and vast armies were sent out to punish us. We fought most heroically against overpowering numbers for home and native land; sometimes victory was ours, as when, during the last decade of the eighteenth century, after having many warriors killed, and our villages burned to the ground, our fathers arose in their might, putting to flight the alien armies of Generals Harmer and St. Clair, hurling them in disorder from the wilderness across our borders into their own ill-gotten domain.”[403] But the whites who had already come to America, however much they might have desired to leave the Amerinds alone, were powerless to prevent other whites, in search of better fortunes, from dispossessing them, and so impelled by the pressure of European population, numbers came and numbers came again and again, and yet still others behind them. The result, the final result, was inevitable. The Amerind was doomed when Columbus first saw the Western land, and nothing that the Amerind could have done would have greatly changed the final course of events. Tecumseh made an heroic effort to unite his people in a stubborn stand against the enemy, but the difficulty was that there were not enough Tecumsehs. The powerful league of the Iroquois, that once promised to dominate the whole continent, began its decline with the very first