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Show 10 ([1970 reprint], pp. 279-281), discussed "How We Bought the United States," and explained that regardless of the things we were taught as schoolboys, what we secured through treaties, cession, and purchase from European and other American nations was not land, but dominion, the right to govern. He included in a footnote on page 280 a quotation from Thomas Jefferson on the acquisition of land from the Indians: That the lands of this country were taken from them by conquest, is not so general a truth as is supposed. I find in our historians and records, repeated proofs of purchase, which cover a considerable part of the lower country; and many more would doubtless be found on further search. The upper country, we know, has been acquired altogether by purchases made in the most unexceptional form. If the rulers of Europe or the Americas had the right to convey title as a result of discovery to Indian land, why do we belabor the idea that we bought it all from the "true owners," the Indians? With the close of King Philip's War in August, 1676, "the independent power of the Indians of New England (with the exception of Maine) was terminated. Thereafter most Indian-white relations in the interior of southern New England were conducted on an individual rather than a tribal basis" (Washburn, Indian in America [1975], p. 132). We also tend to forget that after acquiring the land from the Indians, by purchase or by conquest, the American colonies had been left largely to their own devices in the management of Indian relations in their particular area until the mid-eighteenth century. The Cyrus Thomas introduction to Indian Land Cessions in the United |