The days of beads and looking-glasses

Washington reached the conclusion you’d expect: treaty or no, the Sioux would have to give way. Allison’s task was to persuade them to surrender the hills in return for compensation, and that, to him, meant fixing a price and telling ’em to take it or leave it. He didn’t doubt they would take it; after all, he was a Senator, and they were a parcel of silly savages who couldn’t read or write; he would lecture them, and they would be astonished at his eloquence, pocket the cash without argument, and go away. It didn’t seem to weigh with him that to the Sioux the Black Hills were rather like Mecca to the Muslims, or that having no comprehension of land ownership, the idea of selling them was as ludicrous as selling the wind or the sky. Nor did he suspect that, even if their religious and philosophic scruples could be overcome, their notion of price and value had developed since the days of beads and looking-glasses.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.233, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, treaty.

Not the best position

      You begin to understand, perhaps, the impossibility of red man and white man ever understanding each other—not that it would have made a damned bit of difference if they had, or altered the Yankees’ Indian policy, except perhaps in the direction of wiping up such intractable bastards even faster that they did. They knew they were going to have to dispossess the redskins, but being good Christian humbugs they kept trying to bully and cajole them into accepting the theft gracefully—which ain’t quite the best position from which to make treaties with unreliable savages who are accustomed to rob rather than be robbed, and who don’t understand what government and authority mean, anyway.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.170, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, dispossess.