We believe the time has now come for organizing an entirely new system of treatment for all Indians within our frontiers. We have heretofore dealt with them as independent tribes, on the international system, sending commissioners to sign treaties and soldiers to enforce them. But their Territory is now peopled on the west as well as the east, by converging lines of white population, while whites are patrolling through their entire limits, settling in all their borders and rapidly building up the remaining Territories into States. Our national jurisdiction over the entire soil, once nearly a myth, is now a reality, while their national independence, once a reality, is now falling into a myth. Hence we should no longer treat with Indians as nations but as subjects, the dependent paupers of the republic, owing allegiance to the government, and punishable by it for their crimes. The first step should be to acquire the entire Indian country, and hold it by lines of fortified posts along the Platte, Republican, Smoky Hill, Arkansas and Red Rivers and the other tributaries of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri. The posts might be from 50 to 100 miles apart, securing the safety of travel and settlement, and ultimately the subjugation and separation of the different Indian tribes. In connection with these posts there should be a sufficient system of patrolling the country by light cavalry, free from baggage trains. This would hold the Indians well in hand, and render it in our power to enforce military law where necessary.
    The Indians should be allotted to these respective posts, placed under charge of the Post Commander, and subjected to thorough military control, to the exclusion of other Indian agents, commissioners, traders, &c. Our officers are generally men of character, whom the Indians soon learn to respect and trust, and when that is learned their confidence is unbounded. On the contrary, the whole class of white Indian traders are, as a rule, unprincipled vagabonds, who have no business with the Indians but to debauch and cheat them, and too often the Commissioners and Indian Agents are their tools or partners in their mischievious and swindling speculations.
    Having thus subjected the entire Indian country to military control, all annuities and payments being made through the U. S. paymasters, and all wrongs heard and redressed in U. S. military tribunals, the rights of the Indians should be maintained and respected with a hand so firm and kind that the Indian would feel that we are his friends. That the Indians are easily susceptible to this kind treatment is proven by the success of Major (now Maj. General) Thomas in Texas; and by the case of Major Wynkoop last year, as well as by the uniform current of Indian history. While it is probable that the Indians can never sufficiently overcome their contempt for tilling the soil to make very good farmers, yet as this contempt is shared by some of the "first families" of the South, we should treat it mildly. Indians in South America and Mexico, and so far as the experiment has yet been tried, upon our Western borders, have great fondness for raising horses and cattle, and if allowed an opportunity and protected in the pursuit, would make tolerably successful herdsmen. Certainly the old system of first treating with them grandiloquently as independent nations, and then slaughtering them as if they were unreasoning wolves on whose heads the Government had set a bounty, should no longer prevail. They are not independent powers, nor have they any very reliable ability to secure among their own number obedience to a treaty. They cannot be reached by warfare, as their mod [sic] of retreat eludes all pursuit, while their line of advance ignores all mercy. The remedy is, therefore, not to exterminate, but to govern them.

Source:

Unknown, "Our Indian Policy," Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, Wednesday, 13 September, 1865, Page 2.