" The stronger tribes perceived quite as clearly as did
the Governor the ruinous effects of contact between the two
peoples, and the steady destruction of the border warriors became
a leading cause of discontent. Congress had passed laws intended
to prevent the sale of spiritucus liquors to the natives, but the
courts had construed these measures to be operative only outside
the bounds of States and organized Territories, and in the great
unorganized Northwest the laws were not heeded, and the ruinous
traffic went on uninterrupted. Harrison reported that when there
were only six hundred warriors on the Wabash the annual
consumption of whiskey there was six thousand gallons, and that
killing each other in drunken brawls had "become so customary
that it was no longer thought criminal."
Most exasperating, however, from the red man's point of view was
the insatiable demand of the newcomers for land. In the years
1803, 1804, and 1805 Harrison made treaties with the remnants of
the Miami, Eel River, Piankeshaw, and Delaware tribes--
characterized by him as "a body of the most depraved wretches on
earth"--which gained for the settlers a strip of territory fifty
miles wide south of White River; and in 1809 he similarly
acquired, by the Treaty of Fort Wayne, three million acres, in
tracts which cut into the heart of the Indian country for almost
a hundred miles up both banks of the Wabash.
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