not in my mind admit of a doubt. For the reasons above mentioned
it may at first be necessary for our government to assert its
authority over them by a prompt and vigorous exercise of the
military arm.... The tendency of the policy I have indicated
will be to assemble these people in communities where they will
be more readily controlled; and I predict from it the most
gratifying results." Another well-informed army officer, Colonel
Richard Dodge, himself a hunter, a trailer, and a rider able to
compete with the savages in their own fields, penetrated to the
heart of the Indian problem when he wrote:

"The conception of Indian character is almost impossible to a man
who has passed the greater portion of his life surrounded by the
influences of a cultivated, refined, and moral society....
The truth is simply too shocking, and the revolted mind takes
refuge in disbelief as the less painful horn of the dilemma. As a
first step toward an understanding of his character we must get
at his standpoint of morality. As a child he is not brought
up....From the dawn of intelligence his own will is his law.
There is no right and no wrong to him.... No dread of
punishment restrains him from any act that boyish fun or fury may
prompt. No lessons inculcating the beauty and sure reward of
goodness or the hideousness and certain punishment of vice are
ever wasted on him. The men by whom he is surrounded, and to whom
he looks as models for his future life, are great and renowned
just in proportion to their ferocity, to the scalps they have
taken, or the thefts they have committed. His earliest boyish
memory is probably a dance of rejoicing over the scalps of
strangers, all of whom he is taught to regard as enemies. The
lessons of his mother awaken only a desire to take his place as