U.S. General Pope in 1878 stated that it was absolutely imperative that Indian Nations realize the United States' premeditated and calculated determination to dispossess the "savage" and occupy his lands and that "it is certain that the larger part of the country claimed by him will, in some manner, pass into the possession of the white race." The insatiable drive for a continental empire resulted in the iron triangle of the federal government, the military and big business working in concert to steal Indian mineral lands. They knowingly and willfully unleashed the pioneer vigilantes to commandeer Indian resources. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs J.Q. Smith wrote in 1876: "Wherever an Indian reservation has on it good land, or timber, or minerals, the cupidity of the white man is excited, and a constant struggle is inaugurated to dispossess the Indian, in which the avarice and determination of the white man usually prevails." "Every art, trick, and device of the unscrupulous land pirate is resorted to," admonished Colonel Preston. Yet it was brutal warfare, massacres, disease, and starvation that decimated Indian populations, leaving them destitute, to be replaced by industrial tycoons, timber barons, mineral magnates, and capital investors profiting from the "savage's" minerals in the bowels of the Earth.