A blanket was to him a whole wardrobe." Moreover, the moral phases of such a bargain can not fairly be scrutinized by any fixed conception of the relative values involved. It was purely a bargain of friendly exchange for mutual convenience and welfare. The Indians did not understand, and could not have been expected to understand, that it meant a formal and everlasting alienation of their lands; on the other hand, they deemed that they were covenanting merely to admit the whites peaceably to rights of joint occupancy. The amount of consideration paid by the latter has no relevancy to the merits of the transaction, which was honorable to both parties, resting, so far as the Dutch were concerned, upon the principle of purchase and recompense instead of seizure and spoliation, and, on the part of the Indians, upon the basis of amicable instead of hostile disposition. The principle of reciprocal exchange established in the purchase of Manhattan Island was adhered to in all the progressive advances made by the whites northward. Westchester County was never a squatter's paradise. Its lands were not grabbed by inrushing adventurers upon the Oklahoma plan. De facto occupancy did not constitute a sufficient title to ownership on the part of the white settlers. Landed proprietorship was uniformly founded upon deeds of purchase from the original Indian owners. The rivalries between the Dutch and English, culminating in the overthrow of the former by conquest, were largely occasioned by antagonistic claims to identical strips of land -- claims supported on both sides by Indian deeds of sale. But the right to buy land from the Indians was not a. necessary natural right inhering in any white settler. The government, upon the well-known principle of the supreme right of discovery, assumed a fundamental authority in the disposal of lands, and hence arose the numerous land grants and land patents to specified persons, which were based, however, under both Dutch and English law, upon previous extinguishment of the Indian title by deeds of sale.