Hampton Sides Quotes

The decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.

These tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and continual contact with our citizens. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement. They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

It is presumed that humanity dictated the original policy of the removal and concentration of the Indians in the West to save them from threatened extinction. But today, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire West, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination than ever before in the history of the country

No acid ever worked more mechanically on a vegetable fiber than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached, the nearest Indian tribes withered away.

Where others send invading armies, the Americans send their colonists … Texas will be lost to this republic if adequate measures are not taken.

Coercion alone will remove them [the Indians] to the western country allotted for the Indians.

To-day, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire west, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination than ever before in the history of the country.

The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas.

Governor Isaac Stevens of the Washington Territory said there were a great many white people in our country, and many more would come; that he wanted the land marked out so that the Indians and the white man could be separated.

Major North has had for years complete power over these Indians and can do more with them than any man living.

If Pocahontas had been given the foresight to see what devastating consequences her actions and belief in the possibility of peace would have brought upon her people, I wonder if she would have avoided befriending the English or not.

As to the Indians, the guiding principle was, promise them anything just so long as they get out of the way.

General Howard informed me, in a haughty spirit, that he would give my people 30 days to go back home, collect all their stock, and move onto the reservation.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.

The Sioux would be much opposed to the passage of so large a body through their country, and would probably resist it on account of the emigrants destroying and frightening away the buffaloes, which were then diminishing in numbers.

Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites

That our title to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable; that no portion of the same ought to be ceded to England or any other power, and that the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest and practicable period are great American measures, which this convention recommends to the cordial support of the Democracy of the Union.

A Century of Dishonor

A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts, and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary for their comfortable subsistence.

The red man must leave the land of his youth and find a new home in the west. The armies of the white are without number, like the sand of the sea, and ruin will follow all tribes that go to war with them.

I ordered the [Indian] prisoners to be tomahawked in front of the garrison.

Why does not the Great Father put his red children on wheels, so he can move them as he will?

The whites didn’t really steal the land, because the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves

The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex”..