All That Glitters Is Ours

<p>U.S. General Pope in 1878 stated that it was absolutely imperative that Indian Nations realize the United States' premeditated and calculated determination to dispossess the savage and occupy his lands and that it is certain that the larger part of the country claimed by him will in some manner pass into the possession of the white race. The insatiable drive for a continental empire resulted in the iron triangle of the federal government the military and big business working in concert to steal Indian mineral lands. They knowingly and willfully unleashed the pioneer vigilantes to commandeer Indian resources. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs J.Q. Smith wrote in 1876: Wherever an Indian reservation has on it good land or timber or minerals the cupidity of the white man is excited and a constant struggle is inaugurated to dispossess the Indian in which the avarice and determination of the white man usually prevails. Every art trick and device of the unscrupulous land pirate is resorted to admonished Colonel Preston. Yet it was brutal warfare massacres disease and starvation that decimated Indian populations leaving them destitute to be replaced by industrial tycoons timber barons mineral magnates and capital investors profiting from the savage's minerals in the bowels of the Earth.</p>