As a young rancher in the Dakota Territories, Roosevelt had barked, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” By the time he became president, his views had tempered, and he, like Rondon, believed that the country’s “aim should be [the Indians’] ultimate absorption into the body of our people.”
