# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Introductory

INTRODUCTORY.
GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SUBJECT.
“Why do you, White Men, call us Indians?” This was a question asked many times, on many occasions, in widely distant places, by the aborigines of this country, when they began to converse familiarly with the new comers from across the sea. The question was a very natural one under the circumstances. The name “Indians” was a strange one to those to whom it was thus assigned. They did not know themselves by the title. They had never heard the word till the white men addressed them by it. Courtesy, in a wilderness as well as amid civilized scenes, would have seemed to allow that when nameless strangers met to introduce themselves to each other, each party should have been at liberty to name himself. But the savage curiously inquired of the white man, “Why do you call us Indians?” If, before giving an answer, the white man had asked, “What do you call yourselves?” he too would have received but little satisfaction. It does not appear that our aborigines had any one comprehensive name, used among themselves, to designate their whole race on this continent. They contented themselves with tribal or local titles.
Nor is it likely that every white man to whom the red man put the question, “Why do you call us Indians?” would or could have given the intelligible and true answer ​to it. The name applied to the aborigines of this continent perpetuates for all time the original illusion and lure under the prompting and impulse of which this continent was first brought to the knowledge of Europeans. There is myth, there is poetic legend, there may be something which looks like testimony, about visits by dwellers on the Old World to this so called New World, before the historic voyages of Columbus and his successors. But there is nothing which can stand the severest tests of evidence for those visits as matters of positive fact. At any rate, if there were such visits they bore no fruits, left no tokens of use or occupancy, and did not bring the dwellers on either hemisphere into intercourse. Nor did Columbus when on our soil, not even to the day of his death, know that he had opened a new continent, with a new race of men. The America that we know, as substantially two continents, — both of them together stretching to a greater length than Europe, Asia, and Africa, — floating between two vast oceans, was a realm that he never sought, nor ever dreamed of, nor knew that he had reached when he stood upon it.
Columbus held this globe of earth to be much smaller than it is, — to be in fact of the size which it would have been if America and the Pacific Ocean had been left out of it. What he had sought for, after fourteen years of importunate pleading for patronage from European monarchs, what he supposed he had found, as he lay upon his deathbed, was a sort of back-door entrance to the Indies. That gorgeous realm, — the slender positive knowledge of which to Europeans was heightened by all the inventiveness of human fancy and all the glow and craving of greed, investing it with fabulous charms and glitter as a vast mine of gold and gems awaiting the spoiler, — had been opened vaguely and invitingly to here and there a land traveller and a venturous mariner, on its western edge. It was a long and perilous route to it, either by land or sea. Columbus believed that by sailing westward upon the Atlantic he could ​strike it upon its rear coast, on its eastern shore. That is precisely what he thought he had done, first by touching some of its outlying islands, then on its main. And his constant questions on the spot were for Cathay, for the realm of Prester John, the treasures of Indian mines. He was looking, not for America, but for India. And he was, as he believed, not in a new world, but on an edge of the old familiar world. India it was to be all the way, and India it was at the end. On his fourth and last voyage, Columbus wrote from Veragua, to Ferdinand and Isabella, that he was within nineteen days' land journey of the Ganges. And so everything on his way and at the end of his way took a name from the lure and illusion under which he won a higher renown of glory than he knew. The islands which he first reached became, as they are now, the West Indies. The royal council in Spain which managed, or rather mismanaged, all that came of the great enterprise, became “The Council for the Indies;” and the aborigines on these superb domains of forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers were called, and, if ever they shall have all vanished away, will be known in history, as “Indians.”
It is to be noted, however, that the French, who so soon after followed the Spaniards by voyages to the southern and northern bounds on the mainland of our domain, did not adopt or use the word “Indians” as a name for the aborigines. I do not recall a single case of its use by any of the French explorers. They uniformly spoke and wrote of the natives as “les Sauvages,” — the savages. Occasionally a reference may be found in which a French writer will use the expression, “The Indians, as the English call the savages.”
Deferring to future discussion the leading topics which this large subject will present to us, as we follow up the subsequent relations between the people of the Old World and those of the New, we may occupy ourselves in these introductory pages with a general view of the field before ​us. We read with the historic interpretation of the past what nearly four centuries ago was veiled in the mystery of the unknown and the future. For what were possibilities then we have now realities. The most interesting and exciting questions now held under discussion about our aborigines are, whether the race is destined to absolute extinction, and whether irresistible processes are working to that result. A modification of the opinion that such must needs be the fate of the red man suggests to us, that the only condition which will arrest that result is such a transformation of his habits, mode of life, and even of his nature, that those who in three or four generations may represent the stock, in pure or mixed descent, will have wholly parted with the original and distinctive characteristics of the race. If such an extinction of an aboriginal people is to be realized, their history ought to be well searched and attested before they pass away.
Our knowledge of the natives of this continent must be taken strictly as beginning with the first contact with them by Columbus on the islands, and by himself and his followers on the main. Of the legendary and mythological Sagas of the alleged visit of the Northmen there is, as has been said, no contemporaneous record, and no extant monument or token. The one hundred and twenty white men who formed the company of Columbus were the medium for introducing the people of the Old World to those of the New. Columbus carried some of the natives to Spain on his first return voyage, and in 1508 the American savage was seen for the first time in France.
Those who now represent the native race on this continent are but little serviceable to the historian who seeks to investigate its antecedent state and fortunes. The fundamental questions for the archæologist are, whether man is autochthonic or exotic here, and whether in ethnic unity or diversity. Agassiz told us that geologically this continent was the first part of the globe fitted for human habitation, ​and there are scientists who claim that the isthmus was the cradle of the world's civilization. But Sir John Lubbock assures us that there are no physical or scientific tokens of human existence on the continent back of three thousand years. Of course it is not within the limited and appropriate design of these pages to enter into the substance and arguments of archæological science, as it opens its rich and profoundly interesting, though bewildering, discussions of prehistoric times and people on this continent. A half century ago the mounds and other earthworks in the great Western valleys engaged a curious interest, as tokens of the presence of a more advanced and intelligent representation of human beings than were those who were found in occupancy of the soil, and who were wholly ignorant of the builders or purpose of those mysterious works. But within quite recent years a far richer, yet still no less baffling and hardly more communicative, field of inquiry, research, and scientific theorizing has been opened to archæologists, and, strangely enough, on the mainland of the continent nearest to the islands first visited by the Spaniards. The pyramids and tombs of Egypt have found their rivals in the architectural remains of Palenque, in Chiapas, and in all the regions of the Isthmus and of Central America. It is claimed that these, and other tokens and relics associated with them, afford evidences of an ancient prehistoric civilization rivalling that of Europe in the Middle Ages. The assumption falls as yet far short of proof. In the interest of historical and archæological science, scholars are left only to the expression of their murmurs and regrets that the first representatives of European civilization and intelligence, when opening a new world and an unknown stock of their own race to intercourse and inquiry, should have manifested not even an ordinary curiosity about those questions concerning the American aborigines which modern inquirers pursue with such diligence. Some of these questions, we naturally infer, might have been relieved of a part of the mystery and ​obscurity which they have for us, had they drawn attention and investigation from the first and most intelligent of the Europeans who came into contact with the natives of the soil. But in this, as in so many other cases, it would have been easier to ask questions than to obtain satisfactory answers to them. It is utterly impossible for us now to reach anything more than proximate and conjectural estimates of the probable number of the aborigines, of their distribution over the continent, the density of the population in some favored spots, the extent of wholly lonely and uninhabited expanses, and the length of time during which any one tribe or confederacy of tribes had occupied the same regions. No satisfactory information is on record of anything more than the most trivial traditionary account of the fortunes of any tribe among them covering more than two generations previous to those then in life. Of course many of the questions which we are prompted to ask concerning the primitive and prehistoric races on this continent, as if it were a fresh and wholly independent field of inquiry, are problems equally for the dwellers on the old continents themselves, with all their histories and monuments. The theory of the development or evolution of the human race from a lower order of animal is to be subjected to the same tests, illustrated by the same analogies, and met by the same arresting difficulties and challenges wherever specimens of that race are found. It is to be observed also that the first white comers here seem to have assumed what has ever since been substantially taken for granted, — that, though diversities of climate and of natural features and products over the breadth and length of the continent might result in differences of resource and advancement among various tribes, all the aborigines were essentially homogeneous in type, character, and condition of life.
Let us for a moment seize and hold in our minds the gorgeous dream of wealth and glory by which this continent was opened to Europeans, and improve it by an added touch ​of fancy of our own. Suppose that this half of the earth, ocean-bounded, stretching from pole to pole, with all its wealth of material, its vast and mighty resources, its scenes and furnishings for the life, the activity, and the happiness of man, — suppose that, as concerned its human inhabitants, it had proved to be directly opposite to what it was. Suppose that it had been peopled by a superior race, advanced in civilization, refinement, art, culture, science, far at least, if not immeasurably, beyond the race whose curiosity and greed had for the first time bridged the way between them. It might have been so. Taking into view the general average civilization of Europe at that time, we know that it was but rude and rough, with many elements of barbarism, heavily burdened with ignorance and superstition, and convulsed year by year by local and extended wars. It might well have been that, folded within the depths of this continent, a people under the training and development of centuries, protected and fostered rather than disadvantaged by lack of commerce and intercourse with other peoples, should have enjoyed and improved this realm as we do now. Instead of the hordes of wild and naked savages, cowering in the forests, living by the chase, burrowing in smoky and filthy cabins, without arts, letters, laws, or the signs or promise of any advance in their generations, there might have been men and women enjoying and enriched by all that can adorn and elevate human existence. And these, when the ships of curious and craving adventurers touched their shores, or strangers trespassed on their well guarded domains, might have had the will and the knowledge, the skill and the enginery of battle and defence, to repel the invaders, to sink them in the sea, or leave them to starvation, keeping the ocean cordon inviolate around them. One other element must come into our supposition. It is that of religion. Whatever religion that race imagined for this continent might have had and believed, however pure and elevating in its influence, ​however firmly and devoutly held, so that the proffer to change it for another would be scorned and utterly withstood, — if that religion had not been in name or symbol Christian, it would at once have decided what must be the relations between the people and their visitors. As we shall see, the very axiom and conviction of right and duty for all European discoverers of that day was that those of every race and clime who were outside of the fold of the Roman Church were heathen, uncovenanted and damned, and must come into it or perish.
The fancy which I have ventured to suggest, — that the first European adventurers here might have found a continent and people advanced above their own in intelligence, civilization, and all the ministering resources of life, — may find a semblance approximating to reality in the reception which has been accorded to the Mongolians from China. Those immigrants have certainly found here a land preferable for their wants and uses above that which they have left. They certainly cannot congratulate themselves on the warmth of the welcome which they have received. Interested parties, those whose individual gains in commerce or labor are served by these destitute and hungry and humble people, — who thrive on stinted wages and refuse food, — have been pronounced public enemies for favoring the incoming of the Chinese. Among those directly concerned in the exciting question there is a bitter controversy whether this Mongolian race shall make further increase on our continent, and whether those already here shall not be driven out. It is easy by the imagination, helped by some ready statistics and calculations, to forecast deplorable consequences from such an unchecked immigration. We are told that there are more of wretched and starved millions of population in China to-day than there are of all whites and Europeans in the United States, and that, if the way were left open and free for them to come, with their habits of industry and thrift they would soon have predominance here. The ​future must provide for that, as for many other serious problems, social and political. We can only comfort ourselves with the fact that this continent, especially under Anglo-Saxon sway, has shown a wonderful power of digestion and assimilation of various peoples and nationalities. We have digested a large part of Ireland, and a considerable portion of Germany, — not, however, without some symptoms of a social and political dyspepsia. Dutch, Swedes, Scandinavians, French, Italians, have also furnished us with a stimulative and an alterative diet; and we must leave to the wisest councillors of our nation to dispose of the Mongolian element.
But, instead of finding in this New World a people in a measure advanced in civilization, and capable of defensive resistance to invasion, those who were the first of Europeans to introduce themselves to another division of their own human race encountered only such as we still call savages, or, at least, barbarians.
Even long after the lands discovered on this side of the Atlantic were known to form a new continent, no longer a part of India or Asia, America was regarded as simply an interposed barrier on the course westerly from Europe to the fabled realm. Not for more than a hundred years following upon the first voyage of Columbus was this continent sought or occupied solely for the magnificent ends which it has been realizing for nearly three centuries. The continent was bound to open a water-course to India, — a new and shorter route to its wealth and wonders. That shortened route, which even to this day we have not given over seeking, was then a beguiling and constraining lure, which turned all considerate thought aside from the inviting shores and the inner depths of this splendid realm for toil and harvesting. The Spaniards pursued the search for that Indian highway near the south of the present bounds of our nation, and in so doing beheld the Pacific Sea, and opened California and Oregon. French, English, and Dutch ​navigators have pounded at the barriers of Polar ice in the vain attempt to pierce a passage, and have left the names of capes and bays for their epitaphs.
The Spaniards might still ply their cupidity in drawing out the treasures from the mines of their El Dorado in Mexico and Peru, and the efforts of the less greedy pioneer navigators from the other nations of Europe might still be spent upon finding a northern route opened for them to India. But at last the thrift and practical sagacity, chiefly of the English adventurers, began to rest upon the value and promise of this upper section of the continent for itself alone. “Why go further? Why not stop here, and see what other forms of wealth and good beside gold and pearls may be found here?” These were questions then asked by those best able to answer them. From the moment that the capabilities and the attractions of the new realm fixed the thoughts and engaged the energies of wise and earnest men, these fair expanses began to open themselves — as, by a continuous course of adventure and exploration, they have been doing ever since — to the noblest uses of man. Nor from the first wiser, yet hardly chastened, view taken of them by those who looked on them for themselves alone, did they lack eyes and minds appreciative of their grandeur, their beauty, and their fascination. With almost the sole exceptions of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, who first beheld their bleak and sandy land-fall under the desolation of its wintry aspect, the first Europeans who came with a view to stay in some part of North America, visitors or colonists, so timed their voyages as to arrive at a destination or to skirt the shores in the beauty of the opening spring-time, the gay aspects of summer, or the golden glory of the autumn. The pages of their journals gleam and glow with their enthusiastic pictures of the lovely aspects of Nature here, and the winning charms which beckoned them on to trace her from the shore through the river and the lake up into the recesses of ​meadow, forest, and mountain. As we read the quaint epithets and the unskilled, though wonderfully expressive, terms and phrases — sometimes really gems of language — by which in short, strong touches they present the features of some new scene which first of civilized men they beheld, with all their senses quickened to joy, we become oblivious of the stern hardships and the ways of peril through which they had passed, and long that we too might share in the surprises and delights which they portray to us. After long and tempestuous voyages so unlike those by which we pass like shuttles across the ocean, — stived together in cramped vessels, seldom much exceeding, often not reaching, half a hundred tons burden; most generally with scurvy and ship-fever among them; weary of each other's company and the dreary monotony of days and nights, of storms and calms; subsisting upon odious food and stagnant water, while in vain craving something fresh and green, — the signs of bank and shoals and drifting weeds betokened the end of their sea course. Their compass was bewildered: they had no charts. Then the small boat must be put to service, with its watchful crew, to sound the way on, to search for a passage, between reefs and rocks, with eyes ever open for each whitened tuft of water that crowned a breaker. Meanwhile they tell us of the fragrant breathings that came from the wooded and bushy shore, and how they drank in the odorous airs from sassafras and piny groves, and how they filled their waterbutts at fresh springs, and gathered from shrub or bough or root the rich, green, juicy fruit or berry so racy in its flavor to the landed seaman. And then their pages fairly sparkle with tales of the vine-clad trees, the fields strewed with the white blossoms of the strawberry, the aroma of the juices of pine and fir and juniper, and all the luxurious vesture and charms of a teeming virgin soil. Nor were they insensible to the solemnities of the primeval forests, the depths of their solitudes, the sombreness and ​awe of their profound silence, broken only by the water-fall, the rushing deer, the rustling bough, the buzzing insect, the croaking frog. We shall soon read the charming description which Columbus gave of the scene that first opened on the eyes of the Spaniards. The first adventurers, landing at the mouth of James River, in the very glory and gush of summer beauty in 1607, were in an ecstasy of exuberant delight at the scene, its sights and odors for the senses. The oysters, says George Percy, brother of the Duke of Northumberland, “lay on the ground as thick as stones, many with pearls in them; the earth all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colors and kinds, as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England; the woods full of cedar and cypress trees, which issue out sweet gums like to balsam.” And the veritable John Smith, whose prowess may cover his whole posterity by name, averred that “Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.”
Governor Winthrop, reaching our own rude coast in June, 1630, wrote: “We had so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us; and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.”
While our domain is arraying itself in the garb and finish of civilization, with its cities and manufactories, there is one of its ancient glories which our near posterity will never behold. It is that of the endless forest shadowed with a deeper than a dim religious light, — a sombre and awful solitude, silent in the calm, but reverberating with Æolian blasts in summer or winter tempests.
What a boon was offered to humanity in the Old World when the veil that had hidden this New World was pierced and lifted! Here was opened for humanity a fresh, fair field, substantially we may say untried, untilled, unpenetrated, and, as the new comers chose to regard it, in larger part unpeopled. We who live upon it have not yet taken the inventory of our possessions; we know but little more ​than its surface, nor can we cast the horoscope of its future. This we do know, that while humanity was trying its experiments with rising and falling empires in the Old World, exhausting as it seemed the zest and the possibilities of life, jaded and weary and foul, and often sinking in despair, here was a hidden realm of virgin earth, of forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains, of fields and meadows, of mines and cataracts, with its secrets and marvels of grandeur and beauty, all glowing and beaming as with the alluring legend, “Try once more what you can do with, what you can make of, human life!” It was as when one turns from a melancholy stroll in a decayed town or ruined city, with its crumbling and mouldering structures, its sewers choked with foulness, and its festering graveyards whose inscribed stones only vary the tale of woe and vanity and falsehood, and mounts a breezy hill in our fairest regions of yet lonely space, and gazes upon the prospect.
Such was the boon and gift offered to humanity on the opening of this continent. Profoundly penetrating and solemn is the thought, that never again on this globe will this transcendent privilege and proffer be repeated. We have got the whole, in all its parts. Australia has discouraged the hope which beamed at its first welcome. Though it is the largest island on the globe, — itself a continent, — having an area of nearly three million square miles, only the skirts of its coasts appear to be profitable for cultivation, while the surveys of its interior, so far as they have with difficulty been made, reveal enormous deserts of sand and rock. We note that the British men of science, at the annual meetings of their Association, offer their measurements of the yet remaining capacities of the mines of coal and iron and other metals, and forecast the date when England must yield the power and glory of being the workshop of the world. It requires no abstruse mathematics to deal with the facts of a larger and more august problem. What shall men, in the steady increase of our race, do when all ​the desirable stretches of the habitable earth, on continent and island, are occupied? We know how festering diseases and a devitalized blood track the long abode of a crowd of men in one spot; we know how the life-stock in our cities is renewed by new comers from rural homes. What resources will humanity have for its long future refreshment and purification as it uses up, exhausts, and defiles its old scenes and seeks fresh fields and pastures new? The only meet answer we can give to that question is in the fidelity and economy with which we use man's last and largest continent.
It is not admitted, however, that men are less vigorous in an old country than in a new one. While we attribute to the length of their ages the decays of some Eastern people, Germany has not lost its power for producing men of noblest energy and talent, by any lapse of centuries. And it has even been affirmed that our race has physically deteriorated since its transfer here.
Notwithstanding the mystery which overhung the continent on its discovery, it was from the first delighted in and gloried over as a land of infinite possibilities. The wealth and prosperity which have been wrought from it may not answer in kind or form to the fashionings of the exalted imaginations of its hidden treasures, because there was a halo investing at first the vast unknown. It was at once found that everything here was on a magnificent scale of size and grandeur. What the Old World from which the adventurers came had only in miniature, in toy shapes, this continent presented in sublime magnitudes. Its rivers were bays, its ponds were seas, and its lakes were oceans. Where did the continent begin, and where did it end, and how was it to be opened? The early comers listened to and repeated some legendary and monstrous stories of the sort of men which were to be found deep in these forests. Columbus saw mermaids in the sea. Jacques Cartier, in Canada, had heard of men with the convenient accomplishment of living without a particle of any kind of food; ​and Lafitau reported another sort of people whose heads, if they really had any, were snugly buried between their shoulders, and others still who had but one leg.
This grand and majestic scale on which the objects and features of the continent were proportioned, gives a tone of expanse and of unbounded, vaguely-defined locality in the designation of vast territories. Such terms as “the head-waters” of one or more rivers, or their valleys, or a “stretch” of plains, are used as if defining the range for a pleasant walk, while months of toil and risk would be requisite for coursing them. One of the charms which will always invest the perusal of the journals of the old explorers, deep in the recesses of the continent, will be found in noting these large epithets of description and locality, and in comparing them with the reduced terms, the definite and detailed bounds and limits, by which we find it necessary to refer to them. The Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains represented once uniform and comprehensive lines of elevation, longitudinally continuous and compacted as barrier walls. They are distributed now into irregular ranges, distinguished by peaks and valleys, while skill and fancy are tasked to give them titles.
The new comers, however, knowing well what they came for and what they were in search of, very soon set upon the prizes for which they were seeking. It is curious to mark how, from the very first, different aims and objects, respectively characteristic of the Europeans of the three leading nationalities, were manifested and pursued here, and were followed down to our own times. The aim and greed of the Spaniard were for gold, silver, and pearls, the spoils of the heathen; not at all for laborious occupancy of ​the soil. The Frenchman was content with the fur-trade, in pursuit of which he needed the aid of the Indian, whom he was disposed therefore to treat with friendliness, and with whom he consorted on such equal terms as to be still represented, all over our north and west, by a race of half-breeds. The staple of the English stock, after some random ventures in Virginia, when they came to be represented by the Puritan element in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, though they had fallen upon the least kindly and the most rugged soil of the continent, accepted the condition of hard work and frugal ways, earning their living by codfish and corn. And that may be the reason why — the Spaniards having vanished with the age of gold, and the French with the wasteful fur-trade — the English, though the last comers, are the hard workers and the opulent on this land.
The red men will always have a tender, touching claim upon our sympathetic regrets in the fact that we succeed to their heritage. We fill the places from which they have vanished. The more enduring, the unchangeable features of the scenes of our life-time — the mountain, the valley, the river — are those which are forever identified with them. The changes and improvements which we have introduced are wholly ours, and would be simply indifferent or offensive to the wild forest rovers. However we may palliate or justify, with reasons or from the stress of necessity, their removal from before us, we cannot forget that they were once here; and that whatever was the sum or substance of the good of existence for them was found in the same aspects of Nature, under the same sun and moon and stars, on the same soil, as the same seasons passed over it, where we find our own. An ancient burial-ground, with its decaying memorials, does not lose the pathos of its suggestiveness for us in the reflection that the covered human dust is very ancient, and was of necessity deposited there.
There are occasions and places when the regretful ​remembrances of a vanished race come upon us with a depth of sympathy so true that we love to yield to it. When, under the fairer auspices of Nature, in our vacation or holiday moods, we visit spots in harmony with our ideals of the romance of savage life, we are easily beguiled into workings of remorse or pity for the wasted and extinct tribes who once roamed here before us. On the mountain slopes, with their deep, wild coverts, never yet disturbed by the woodman's axe, and where wild creatures still linger in their haunts, we feel that a few of the native stock might still find a refuge. In the shaded valleys, coursed by babbling brooks or rushing rivulets, on the green and pebbly shores of tranquil lakes, into which push out the sedgy and wooded tongues of land, circled with creeping vines and the mild fragrance of the wild-flowers, — we should meet without surprise the dusky loiterers whose moccasoned feet might tread noiselessly before us. By the summer seaside, on beach or cliff, where we pitch the canvas tent, in mimicry of the native wigwam, we may share in fancy the company of those to whom the scene on earth was the same three hundred years ago as it is to us to-day. Then, if ever, we are responsive to the feelings of compunction over the wrongs of the red men. We call them back as to their own outraged and stolen heritage. We reknit their untutored hearts to the scenes and objects which we feel they must have intensely enjoyed and loved, because they shared the human sensibilities which give to the sunlight and the breeze, to the lapping sea-wave and the aroma of the forest, their entrancing spell for us. The wealth of sentiment in them, unrefined and untutored as it was, was of the endowment of their nature. It must all have gone in concentrated, appreciative strength, to spend itself within the narrow range of their emotional being. Among the more engaging subjects of interest and curiosity which within quite recent years have been discussed by our more philosophic students, and which we shall have to note ​further on, is the inquiry as to the range and degree of what we call mental development among savages generally, or in any particular portion of them favored by condition and opportunity. On the whole it may he said that fuller observation, closer intercourse, and a keener study of them have greatly qualified the first impressions and the first judgments of them as wholly imbruted, stolid, vacant in mind, inert, without food and exercise of thought. The very closeness of their relation to Nature, its aspects and products, and the acuteness of their powers of observation, must have quickened them into simple philosophers.
It is on record, and there it must remain, that to the first comers from Europe, at every point of our mainland, and islands, the natives extended a kindly and gentle welcome. They offered freely the hospitality of the woods. Yet more: they looked on the whites with timid reverence and awe as superior beings, coming not so much from another region of this same earth as from some higher realm. It is to be confessed, moreover, that their visitors very soon broke the spell of their enchantment, and proved themselves human, with charms and potencies for working harm and woe. The white men cheaply parted with the marvel and glory with which the simple natives invested them, and became the objects of a dread which was simply horror. Relations of hostility and rancor were at once established, in a superlative degree, by the Spaniards, in their ruthless raids upon the natives, to whom they made the basest returns for an overflow of kindness, whom they tasked and transported as slaves, and on whom they visited all the contempt of their own superstition and all the ingenuities of torture. The expresses and the telegraphs of the children of the woods transmitted through the continent, as effectively as do our modern devices, the mingled impressions of bewilderment and rage, and opened the since unvaried and intensified distrust which the red man has of the white man.
We are often, sometimes very solemnly, forewarned of ​the judgment which later times and loftier standards of right than our own will pronounce upon our country for our treatment of the Indians. Occasionally, with prophetic burden, the stern seer into the future denounces a curse forever to rest upon this land, evoked by the silent, spectral forms of the vanished red men over whose hunting-grounds and graves in the hands of the spoiler no permanent blessing can ever be enjoyed. But, through any and all future time, — when, if it should be so, the red race has vanished, — two very different pleas in relief or vindication of the white man will be offered. We can anticipate those pleas, for they can be no other than are spoken earnestly and urgently in our own present time. One of them will urge, as it now urges, inevitable fate, irresistible destiny, as appointing absolute extermination and extinction for a race of men either incapable of, or wilfully hostile to, civilization. The other plea of defence will rest in firmly and eloquently insisting that the wisdom and conscience of the white man were thwarted, by circumstance or inherent obstacles, in all the humane and earnest and costly work which he attempted for the good of the red man.
In the broad sweep of historic retrospect, that has indeed been a direful and tragic work as regards the red man and the white man which has been wrought on this continent; sad and shocking it is, whether we contemplate it in the interests of a humane civilization, or in sympathy with the Indian. But with no intent to prejudice the whole issue, to plead for wrong, or to palliate iniquity, there are two stern facts of which we may remind ourselves. First: during the more than three centuries of struggle between Christian and heathen races on this continent, every wrong and outrage to humanity, all the woe and suffering involved in it, have been more than matched in the methods by which so-called Christians have dealt with each other in the Old World, by wars, massacres, persecutions, and all the enginery of passion and folly, and hate and vengeance. And, ​
second: if all the losses and inflictions — in pain, in actual visitations of every sort of distress and agony — could be summed up and brought into comparison, it would be found that the cost of getting possession of this continent has been and will yet be to the whites more exacting in toil and blood and in purchase-price than the defence of their heritage has been to the Indians. Sad and harrowing as has been the sanguinary conflict between a civilized and a barbarous race on this continent, how trivial has been the sum of its woes compared with those of contemporaneous passions on the other side of the ocean, in religious, civil, and dynastic wars, — wars of succession, seven years' wars, thirty years' wars, wars of the Netherlands, of the Fronde, of the League, of the Peninsula, of the Napoleons, of the Holy Alliance, of every European nation, — all Christian!
Yet if full vengeance settles the account of the wronged, vastly more in number of the whites than of the Indians, and by sterner and ghastlier methods of death, have fallen in the conflict. Nor has Christian civilization, in its restraints upon the exercise of arbitrary and vengeful power by the strong against the weak, withstood, down to our own times, the grossest acts of oppression and outrage when national or commercial aggrandizement or thrift was the object in view. When all the naval and military power and policy of Great Britain have been engaged to thrust opium down the throats of the Chinese at the point of the bayonet, and Sepoys have been blown from the mouth of cannon, we cannot deal with like enormities as stains upon merely the annals of the past.
The relations between the red and the white men on this continent, from their very first contact to this present year, may be traced historically in two parallel lines, reproducing, repeating, and illustrating in a long series the same facts which characterize each of them. First, we have in a continuous line a long series of avowed intentions, of sincere purposes, and of earnest, often heroic, designs, plans, and ​efforts to protect and benefit the savage; to secure his rights, to advance his welfare, to humanize, civilize, and Christianize him. Second, we have, in another unbroken but always steady series, a course of oppressive and cruel acts, of hostile encounters, of outrages, wars, and treacherous dealings, which have driven the savage from his successive refuges on plain or mountain fastness, in forests or on lake shores, till it would seem as if this unintermitted harassment must make certain his ultimate extinction.
How this second course and series of oppressive, cruel, and exterminating measures got prevalence and sway, and has effectually triumphed over the really sincere purposes and professions, over the earnest and costly efforts made to protect and benefit the savage, it is the office of a faithful and candid historian to explain.
Of course, it is of all things the most requisite that one should start on this inquiry in a spirit of perfect impartiality. Yet no one can pursue it far without yielding much or little to a bias that has prejudiced the inquiry for most who have engaged in it, and will be sure to present itself to all. That bias is the accepting what is called the inevitable, in the form of a theory about races, which assumes or argues the utter impossibility that two races of men can exist in harmony and prosperity together. It is enough to say that this theory is in no case to be assumed, but must be tested and verified on each occasion that suggests it.
As to these two parallel lines of facts which illustrate the relations between the red and the white man here, it may be observed that there is in our libraries and public archives a most voluminous collection of books and documents in which they are followed out. We have unnumbered journals and narratives, relations of individuals who, anticipating or sharing in each successive advance of frontier life, have written for us Indian chronicles. We have tales of adventure, stories of captives, reports of heroic missionaries, records of benevolent societies, and Government ​documents, — indeed, a perfect mass of partial and impartial guides.
It is but just that an adequate and emphatic statement should be made of the avowedly good intentions and purposes, and of the really earnest and costly schemes and efforts of the whites for the benefit of the aborigines from the very first intercourse between them. True, the insufficiency and failure of nearly all of these purposes and efforts, and the almost mocking futility of them when compared with the steady, grasping, and well-nigh exterminating progress of the whites over the continent, may seem to throw back upon these measures a character of insincerity and unreality. But it would be untrue, as well as unfair and uncharitable, so to judge. There were profound integrity, rectitude, and strong resolve in many of the professions of commiseration and intended right dealing towards the Indians. Benevolent and manly hearts have beat in tender sympathy for them. Benevolence, in its single rills and in the generous flow of its gathered contributions, has poured forth its kindly offices to them, and the sternly consecrated lives of patient and heroic men, roughened and perilled by all the dismal exigencies of the work, have been spent with the savages and for the savages, to secure for them the rights of humanity and the blessings of civilization and pure religion.
We may regard as mere empty forms the conditions and commands, looking towards the interests of the natives, introduced into the patents or charters with which the colonists from Europe were empowered to take possession of the country. We may ridicule the commissions and instructions given to governors and magistrates as to the treatment of the Indians, of which so little came in practice. The labors of philanthropists, humanitarians, and missionaries in their single efforts, or in their associated benevolent organizations, drawing bounties from all Christendom to benefit the savages, may sink into insignificance when compared ​with the cunning, the greed, the violence, the ruthless and unpitying vengeance, and the steady havoc of war which have made the red men yield all but their last refuges, on an almost boundless continent, to the white man. But none the less are there witnesses, memorials, and full confirmations of the fact that the Indian has had his friends and benefactors among the whites. Always, and with bright and gracious tributes for sincerity and gentle humanity, must the name of Isabella of Castile be reverently honored, because, while her own royal consort, her nobles, her people, and even many of her highest ecclesiastics, indifferent to the subject, — either from thoughtlessness over the first signs of a stupendous iniquity that was to follow, or from absorption in prospective ambitions or commercial interests, — connived from the first in the enslavement, oppression, and destruction of the natives of the New World, she was the first of women or of men to protest, as a Christian, against any spoiling of the heathen. Nor was it from a mere feminine tenderness that she pleaded and wrote with such constraining earnestness that the children of Nature, as we shall soon read, described so engagingly by Columbus, should be treated with all the more of Christian love and mercy because, not being Christians, this was the only way to make them Christians. Of all European sovereigns, Isabella alone wrought from the dictation of the heart, and not with merely mocking formalities of profession in behalf of the savages. To the close of her life, in deep afflictions and in bodily sufferings, and in dictating her last wishes and commands, that saintly queen pleaded for gentle pity and for Christian equity and love in behalf of her subjects of a strange race. One of her ecclesiastics caught her spirit; others of them gave their counsel for measures which thwarted her purposes.
The President and Council of the Virginia Plantation in 1606 were instructed “to kindly treat the savages and heathen people in those parts, and use all proper ​means to draw them to the true service and knowledge of God.”
In the patent for Nova Scotia, in 1621, James I. speaks of the countries “either inhabited or occupied by unbelievers, whom to convert to the Christian faith is a duty of great importance to the glory of God.”
In the charter of Massachusetts Bay, 1628, the colonists are warned to lead such good lives as “may win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind, and the Christian faith, — which in our royal intention and the adventurers' free profession is the principal end of this Plantation.”
In full accord with this royal form of instruction the Governor (Cradock) of the Bay Company, in 1629, writes to Endicott, its first resident officer here: “We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavoring to bring the Indians to the knowledge of the Gospel; which, that it may be the speedier and better effected, the earnest desire of our whole Company is, that you have a diligent and watchful eye over our own people, that they live unblamable and without reproof, and demean themselves justly and courteous towards the Indians, thereby to draw them to affect our persons and consequently our religion, — as also to endeavor to get some of their children to train up to reading and consequently to religion, whilst they are young: herein to young or old to omit no good opportunity that may tend to bring them out of that woful state and condition they now are in, — in which case our predecessors in this our land sometimes were, and, but for the mercy and goodness of our God, might have continued to this day.” Endicott was further instructed: “If any of the salvages pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our patent, endeavor to purchase their tytle, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion.”
In the charter given by Charles II., in 1681, to William ​Penn, we read of the “commendable desire to reduce the savage natives by gentle and just manners to the love of civil society and the Christian religion.”
It is observable, however, that in these and many other similar royal and public avowals and instructions as to the rightful claims of the natives upon the colonists, but little is said about remunerating the Indians or purchasing from them any territorial rights. It was always complacently assumed that the whites might quietly take possession. Whatever then was the intent or the degree of sincerity of these royal instructions, they all rested upon the assumption that the invaders might rightfully override, by a claim of superiority, the tenure of barbarians on the soil.
It is noteworthy also, that, from the very earliest settlement of the English colonists, the intent and effort to benefit the natives took the ambitious form of providing for them schools and even colleges, in which they should enjoy the highest advantages of education with the whites. While the issue was as yet uncertain, whether the English would maintain their hold as planters in Virginia, Sir Edwin Sandys, as treasurer of the Company, proposed, in 1619, to found a college in the colony for English and Indian youth in common. He received an anonymous gift of £500 for the education of Indian youth in English and in the Christian religion. Other gifts were added, and the prospect seemed promising and hopeful. By advice of the King and the Bishops £1,500 were collected in England. The Company appropriated for the purpose ten thousand acres of land at Henrico, near Richmond. But the massacre of the whites by the Indians, in 1622, soon after a beginning had been made in the work, effectually annulled it.
The first brick building on the grounds of Harvard bore the name of the Indian College. It was built by funds gathered in England. Its design was to furnish rooms ​for twenty Indian youth, who, on a level with the English, might pursue a complete academic course, for which they should be prepared by a “Dame's school,” and by “Master Corlet's Grammar School.” The attempt was earnestly made and carried through its various stages, with but slender and wholly unsatisfactory results. That work of marvellous toil and holy zeal, Eliot's Indian Bible, was printed in that consecrated college hall. The excellent Robert Boyle and the beloved and gentle Bishop Berkeley both bore labors and sacrifices in planning colleges for the Indians, — alike in vain.
Dartmouth College took its start as “Moors' Charity School for Indians,” for the education of their youth and of missionaries to them. The motto on the college seal is Vox clamantis in Deserto. A very remarkable list is still preserved of subscriptions made in its behalf from two hundred places in Great Britain, chiefly gathered by the preaching there of an ordained Christian minister, Sampson Occum, an Indian. President Wheelock gave his devoted labors to the school and college, and once had twenty-one Indian boys under instruction. But the missionaries sent forth from the college were not welcome or successful, and the whites soon monopolized the advantages of the institution. In each of these enterprises some malign agency came in to thwart all well-intended purposes.
In view of all these royal covenants and solemn avowals made in the interest of the red men, and of all these associated and individual efforts through costly outlays and devoted sacrifice to serve and help and save them, no one can fairly affirm that the European colonists from the beginning until now have failed to recognize the ordinary claims of a common humanity which the aborigines had upon them. We certainly have to take note of the fact that the best feelings and purposes towards the Indians were cherished in anticipation of what would and ought to be the relations of the whites as Christians, when brought ​into intercourse with them. Closer acquaintanceship, intimacy of intercourse, and indeed the results of the first friendly and helpful efforts of the whites, soon raised and strengthened a feeling of discouragement, which was very ready to justify itself when alienation and open hostility embittered the relations of the races. The conviction that it was very difficult to convert and civilize an Indian received from most of those who listened to its avowal the response that the labor was by no means compensated by the result. In other words, the strong persuasion was that the Indian was not worth converting. This was so manifestly allowed in the case of reprobates among the whites, as to sound like an axiom when said of the red men.
“Men without knowledge of God or use of reason,” is the royal description given of the Indians by Francis, in his commission to Roberval. The monarch does not appear to have been aware of the hopelessness of any effort to deal with those who in seeming only were men, while they lacked the endowment which distinguishes man from the brute. He might, however, have qualified his description of the Indian by affirming that it was the use, not the possession or the capacity, of reason which was wanting. Had he known some of those whom he thus described; had he been left to their guidance in the lakes and streams, the thickets and coverts of the wilderness, and noted their fertility of resource, their ingenuity in emergencies, and the skill with which they interpreted Nature, — he would have found at least that they had compensating faculties as well adapted to the conditions of their life as are the trained intellectual exercises of the masses of ordinary men. That monarch and his successors were well represented among the natives by those, whether priests or adventurers and traders, to whom we owe the best knowledge of the aborigines, in the early years of intercourse. The lack of reason, or even of its use, was not the special defect of an Indian in the view of a Frenchman.
​The fruitful subject of Christian missions to the Indians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, will be treated by itself. But brief reference must be made to the long, and up to this day continuous, series of efforts, beginning with the first European occupancy here, through incorporated and associated benevolent societies and fellowships; through consecrated bequests of funds; through public and private appeals generously answered; and through the heroic and self-sacrificing labors and sufferings of individuals who have shrunk from no extremities of pain and trial, — all given to civilize and Christianize the aborigines of this soil and their representatives. The advocates in our days of the peace policy with the Indians may trace their line of descent through an honorable roll of predecessors. There are funds sacredly kept, the income of which is now, year by year, distributed by the terms of old charters and trusts, for the secular and religious welfare of the Indians. Nor is it strictly true, as has often been said, that the Indians have no standing in our courts. Though the standing which they have may be hardly distinguishable from that of wards, idiots, lunatics, and paupers, it has at least secured to them many individual and common rights, with penalties on such as wrong them. There are regions now in some of our oldest States which were set apart for Indian ownership and residence in Colonial and Provincial times, with trust funds for their maintenance, independent of those which have been established by the national Government. Representatives of the race are still found in those places. To what experiences and results these few remnants of the aborigines on these spots have been brought, must be noticed further on in these pages.
In the minds of some among us, who most regret and condemn the general dealing of our people and Government with the Indians, there floats an ideal conception of what might have been, and what should have been, the relations between the two races from the first up to this day, — ​relations which would have withstood a giant injustice, and forbade countless atrocities, massacres, and wars. This conception, in the interest of right and reason and humanity, suggests that the stock and lineage of the original red men, with those of the colonizing white men, might easily have begun an amicable and helpful coexistence on this continent, and shared the heritage; and that they might, according to circumstances or their own wills, have become amalgamated, or kept themselves distinct. And the relations between the English residents and the natives in their East Indian dependencies are pointed to as affording some sort of a parallel.
By that facile method by which we often shape conditions which, as we assume, might have been and ought to have been realized, while we leave out of view the needful means for effecting them and the obstacles which interposed, we are apt to argue the case presented somewhat as follows: There was, and is, on this continent room enough for both races. The new comers were forlorn strangers, — guests. The aborigines were kindly hosts to these poor wayfarers. They might have lived peacefully together and prospered, the stronger party always keeping the grateful memory of early obligations. Left to their natural ways and development, the whites might have occupied the seaboard and the factory streams, gradually extending into the interior; the red men might have hid within the forest recesses, to conserve any of the good qualities of their race, without contamination, and gradually with the adoption of improving influences from the whites. Then all would have been fair to-day between the races. We might have had some splendid and noble specimens of the red men in our Congress, — an improvement on some who are there now. Thus would have been realized the hope and prayer of the good old Canonicus, the first and fast friend of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, “That the English and my posterity shall live in love and peace together.”
​Those who have most fondly painted this ideal of what might have been the relations between the two races on this continent, will even suggest what they regard as approximations to it in the peaceful connections, with results of a common prosperity, which have existed between colonists here from over the whole globe, with all languages and religions, with unlike habits and modes of life.
It may be said that it is not yet too late to put this deferred experiment to a trial. Some proximate attempts have indeed been made to realize it, and are still in progress, — as, for instance, in reserved localities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and New York, where representatives of Indian tribes have remained in peaceful relations with the whites by covenants, as has been stated, formed far back in our Colonial and Provincial epochs. But to have made these fragmentary and special provisions a rule for general application over our whole domain, would have called for an exercise of wisdom and humanity such as has asserted itself only since harsher methods had long been in practice, and penitential compunctions for them have provoked reproaches for the past. Even as the case stands now, while the humane sentiment of the age backed by the avowed purposes of the Government, — and something better than a mere feint of sincerity in effecting them, — are engaged to substitute peaceful and helpful measures in all our relations with what remains of the aboriginal stock, we are made to realize the difficulty of the process. It is enough to say that the Indians have lost, if indeed they ever had, the power of standing as an equal party with the whites in such an amicable arrangement, and must now accept such terms as may be dictated to them.
Historical students and readers of generations now on the stage, as they turn over the early New England annals, will find their interest engaged by the antique seals, with quaint devices, which were adopted for the formal attestation of their records by the colonists of Plymouth and ​Massachusetts Bay. The seal of Plymouth Colony, with the date 1620, presents on the quarterings of the shield four naked Indians, bowed on one knee, with forest trees around them. The seal is without a legend, but the savages each hold up what seems to be a blazing or a flaming heart, in petition or offering. We are without contemporary information as to the origin of this seal, the date of its adoption, or the intent of its device. But the noteworthy point for us is, that the seal, whatever it was meant to signify, was the invention of the white man, not in any sense an expression of the desire of the savages, or a solicitation from them for the white man's coming here.
Even more to the point are the device and legend on the seal of the Bay Colony. That was prepared and adopted in England, and sent over here, in silver, in 1629, with the first settlers. It represents a stalwart, muscular savage, naked, save as a few forest leaves shade him, standing among his pine-trees, an arrow in his right hand, a bow in the left, and on a scroll is inscribed, as coming from his lips, the Macedonian cry to the Apostles, — “Come over and help us!” It was an ingenious device of our fathers thus to represent the natives of the soil, in their forlorn state of bodily and spiritual nakedness and heathenism, plaintively appealing to the white man to come to their deliverance. The specimen Indian on the seal, well fed and muscular, does not look as if he needed any help, except in the matter of apparel; in that, indeed, his need is urgent. So it is pleasant to read that the first Indian whom the Plymouth Pilgrims met, — Samoset, — being in the costume of Nature, received from them the following articles of clothing, so far as they would go towards making up a respectable wardrobe: “A hat, a pair of stockings and shoes, a shirt, and a piece of cloth to tie about his waist.”
If any of the native stock here in later years, when their race was all wasting away from our coast, had the skill to interpret the devices on the colony seals, they must have ​thought that the white man's “help” had been but sorrow for them. The Dutch colonists of New York were more frank, at least, in avowing the main object of their coming, for they chose a beaver for their shield seal.
The deliberate judgment of that observing and thoughtful missionary Lafitau is summed up in these words: “The Indians have lost more by imitating our vices than they have gained by availing themselves of those arts which might have added to the comforts and conveniences of life.” Yet among the many radical differences of judgment which have found expression by intelligent and competent observers, and which cover most of the matters of fact, with comments upon them, in the whole survey of the relations between the whites and the Indians on this continent, we are to recognize this, namely, — the avowal of the opinion that the intrusion and agency of the whites have, on the whole, accrued to the benefit, the relief, the improvement of the native stock. It has been stoutly affirmed that no additional havoc or horrors have attended the warfare of civilized men against the savages, beyond those which, with their rude weapons, their fiendish passions, and their ingenuities of torture, they had been for ages inflicting on each other. And it has been boldly argued, that, though civilization mastered the Indians rough-shod, it has dropped on its way reliefs, implements, favors, and influences which have mollified and reduced barbarism, and added resources towards lifting them from a mode of life hardly above that of brutes.
It is within the life-period of the present generation that the whole development of the relations between the whites and the Indians — protracted through the preceding centuries — has been rapidly matured towards what is in immediate prospect as some decisive and final disposal of the issue. During those previous centuries, steady as has been the process of the displacement of the Indians, it was pursued under the supposed palliating condition that their ​removal, by being crowded on to more remote refuges, was provided for by an undefined extent and wealth of western territory of like features to the regions from which they were driven; and that in those impenetrated depths of the continent they might for indefinite periods pursue their wonted habits of barbarous life, subsisting by the chase. So long as this resource was left, the full problem of the fate of the Indian did not press as now for immediate solution. While the superb valleys of the affluents of the Missouri, the Platte, the Red River, the Mackenzie, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Sacramento were still untraversed wildernesses, it seemed as if tribes which never made any fixed improvements of the soil essential to and consequent upon their tenure of it, might even prove gainers by moving on and taking their chances with previous roamers over spaces large enough for them all. Circumstances have hurried on the active working of new agencies with a rush of enterprises to what must be a forced, or a deliberately chosen and wise, conclusion. As soon as the continent was opened on the Pacific ocean, with a more vigorous ardor than the languid dalliance of the Spanish navigators, there began an era which was as foreboding to the savages as it was quickening to the whites. Other agencies, all vitalized with the spirit of modern zeal and scheming, directed by scientific as well as by adventurous aims, and kindled by a revival of the same passion for the precious metals as that which blazed in the first discovery of the continent, accomplished in a score of years changes such as had been wrought before in no whole century. The discovery of rich mines and the search for more, the piercing advance of railways and telegraphs which came to meet each other in the centre of the continent, the occupancy of extensive ranches, the steady sweep onwards of emigrant trains turning the Indian trails into great highways, and the subtile instruments of Government engineers and explorers, — all combined to convert what had been known as ​the Great American Desert into regions as accurately surveyed and as adequately delineated on maps as are the features of land and water and geological formation of one of the old States. The single fact that within the last decade of years more than a million of buffaloes have been annually slaughtered for their hides, the carcasses being left to the wolves, has been a significant token that the extinction of the game would come to be a constraining condition of the fate of the red man. Meanwhile, alike on the northern and on the southern borders of our national domain, the pressure of the same quickening and goading enterprises has contemporaneously aided to encircle the former limitless range of the savages till they are, as it were, coralled in the centre of a circumscribed white occupancy. The breaking of the monopoly of the Hudson Bay Company, which from its first charter not only discountenanced colonization, but jealously forbade even the exploration of the depths of the wilderness in order that they might be reserved for the traffic in fur-bearing animals, has given place to an eager rivalry in British enterprise in settling and improving its territory, aided by largesses for opening its own transcontinental railway. Simultaneously our own Indian Territory on the south — so solemnly covenanted to the exclusive occupancy of the five so-called civilized tribes, as well as to remnants of others under treaty — is threatened with a gridiron system of railways. The demands of civilized intercourse and of commercial and passenger traffic are made inexorable. Nor do the hundred and twenty-nine loosely bounded spaces marked on the latest maps as Reservations answer to their titles. They are but mocking securities against steady encroachments by individuals or companies of such as covet them; and when the clash between the greed of the white man and the covenanted rights of the Indian ripens into an open feud and expands into an armed collision, the Government is ever ready for any breach of its faith which may be accounted to the issue of ​civilization against barbarism. The Indian tribes in what we call our national domain are now in the centre of a circle which is contracting its circumference all around them. Having passed through their successive relations of hosts, enemies, pensioners, and subjects of the white men, they are now the wards of the nation. The feeding, clothing, and the attempted process of civilizing them by fixed residence and labor, costly as the outlay is, is admitted on all sides to be less than the expense of fighting them.
In this general survey of the chief subjects which will come before us for fuller observation as we open them for relation or discussion in dealing with our large theme, we have glanced at topics several of which might well, for their interest and importance, form the matter of many separate volumes, — as indeed they have done. Just at this time, under the title of the “Indian Question,” our statesmen and philanthropists, our military men and our practical economists, have presented to them a subject of engrossing interest; and there is a strong pressure for a resolute and decisive dealing with it. The history of the past is reverted to only for its rebukes and warnings. What is in general terms impersonated as the conscience of the nation, — as if asserting itself for the first time in its full and emphatic authority, or lifting itself free of all the embarrassments of expediency and policy, — insists that time and opportunity favor the application of absolute justice, with reparation so far as is possible for the past, and wise and kindly protective benevolence at whatever cost for the future, in the relations between our Government and the remnant of the aborigines on our domain. But it is always difficult, if not impossible, to disengage an ancient grievance from its entail of follies, errors, and wrongs in the past, and to deal with it as if free of prejudiced and embarrassed conditions. In dealing with the present Indian question, it comes to us perplexed and obstructed not only by previous mistakes, but also by existing and impracticable covenants. New ​elements of complication are constantly presenting themselves to perplex the original problem as to what were to be the relations between a barbarous and a civilized people, — the former being in a supposed rightful possession of territory, while the latter, conscious of the power to secure and hold it, have found warrant for its exercise in arguments of natural reason or in interpreting the divine purposes. The substance and shape of the original problem have also been modified by physical and natural agencies, by the trial of experiments and the development of the resources of the country. A tribe of Indians seemingly contented with a treaty stipulation assigning to them a vast expanse of territory, supposed to be adequate to their subsistence in their own mode of life, find their hunting grounds encompassed by the encroachments of the whites on their borders, the game becoming scarce and threatening soon to disappear, while the old forest weapons lose their skill. So the Indians ask for the arms and ammunition of the white men, and for supplies of life which did not form conditions of the compact with them. They become restless on their reservations, even if not interfered with there. In the mean time enterprising white explorers come to the knowledge of the wealth in the streams and bowels of some of those reservations, and on the plea that these vast treasures were not known to exist when the mere wild land was covenanted to a tribe, and that they were not in the bargain, and more than all that they are useless to the Indians, the treaty is trifled with; and the Government, which is not as strong as the people, is forced to be a party to a breach of faith.
While, therefore, statesmanship and philanthropy are in our time forced to face the present Indian question as one for immediate disposal on urgent demands of wisdom and duty, of policy and of right, it is not strange that there should be a divergency of judgment, often manifested in clamor and discord and passion, as to the method and ​course of action which will be practicable, effectual, and satisfactory. As, in dealing with realities and with human nature as it is, we have to recognize the facts which make up the whole of the conditions of any given problem to be disposed of, we have again to note, as directly and sharply bearing upon the present urgency of the Indian question, the fact already referred to, and to be in the sequel more deliberately considered, that there is another element besides statesmanship and philanthropy, which manifests itself not always in the discussion of, but in pronounced opinion and in strong feeling concerning, this question. Of course it would be impossible to estimate the number or proportion of the people of our country who hold the opinion and who cherish the feeling now in view; but we know that there are very many among us, and that they are very sturdy and unflinching in their conviction, who hold that the iron sway of mastery, the complete domination over the Indians, even if their absolute extermination follows, is the only solution of the problem. While such a stern and relentless conviction as this underlies, it may be, the opinions of some members of Congress, of many of our leading military officers, and of agents and superintendents of Indian affairs, as well as of reckless and unprincipled frontiersmen and miners, it is easy to infer to what extent statesmanship and philanthropy will find their schemes baffled. There can be no doubt that this desperate forecasting of the destiny of our aboriginal tribes has, latently or in avowal, swayed the minds of a vast number in each generation here, and has by no means been confined to those violent, merciless fighters and desperadoes who have done their utmost to carry out the presumed decree of fate. The Spanish invaders, as we shall see, assumed to be the agents of that destiny; but none the less did Puritan ministers of New England find prophecy and divine aid in alliance with their own firelocks and swords in helping it on to fulfilment. So far as under the pressure of ​the Indian question to-day, the ultimate extinction of the Indian is with misgivings, regrets, or full and acquiescent persuasion, held to be its only solution, while the belief may embarrass and obstruct the wisest and most humane schemes, it can be forced into silence or falsified only when a protective, a benevolent, and a steadily effectual policy for the humane and rightful dealing with the Indians, in prolonged generations on this continent, is demonstrating its success.
We are now prepared to rehearse, in its graphic and signally significant details, the occasion, the scene, the actors, and the consequences marking the first introduction of themselves by men of the Old World to the wondering natives of this unveiled continent.