If, therefore, we do not induce them to engage in agricultural avocations we shall in a few years have before us the alternative of exterminating them or fighting them perpetually.

That they are destined ultimately to extinction does 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.