"the west used to be all open space. with plenty of elbow room. where you never run into the same person twice."
-from a 50s cowboy movie

the love of possession is like a disease with them

....these tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement. They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear.

President Andrew Jackson, 1832


Behold my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!
Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this land.
Yet hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race- small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is like a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their building and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.
We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them; "First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland...."

Sitting Bull [Tatanka Yotanka], 1877
"Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing"

Ken Kesey, 1960s