If the Indians really owned Kentucky in 1775, then in 1776 it was the property of Boon and his associates; and to dispossess one party was as great a wrong as to dispossess the other.

To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent--that is, to consider the dozen squalid savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thousand square miles as owning it outright--necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattle-man.

Take as an example the country round the Little Missouri.

When the cattle-men, the first actual settlers, came into this land in 1882, it was already scantily peopled by a few white hunters and trappers.

The latter were extremely jealous of intrusion; they had held their own in spite of the Indians, and, like the Indians, the inrush of settlers and the consequent destruction of the game meant their own undoing; also, again like the Indians, they felt that their having hunted over the soil gave them a vague prescriptive right to its sole occupation, and they did their best to keep actual settlers out.