George E. Ellis

“ If the genius of Walter Scott has invested with a romantic glow the raids of cattle-lifters and freebooters on the Scottish borders, as the Highlanders rushed from their glens to plunder the Lowlanders, what may not the pens of ready writers for all time to come do with a region like that which we first called the West, with its tales of prowess and heroism, of lonely settlers and sparse garrisons, and of fierce struggles in which every creek and meadow and hill-top was the prize at stake between red men and white men! ”

“ He knew well the forces and attractions, as well as the enfeebling and demoralizing influences, of the white man's mode of life. In his own mind he had balanced well the life of civilization and of barbarism, and his savage instincts decided him to retain for his people the state of Nature. With a power of appeal — pointed with sarcasm, scorn, and invective — which proved him able to stir the wildest passions of his hearers, he bid them despise the plough and loom and all the implements of thrift and toil, and cling to their primitive customs. ”

“ Why these three centuries of warfare, this pushing and resisting, these endless collisions, waking the echoes of mountain and valley with the enginery of battle, crimsoning every water-flow with blood, and strewing forest and plain with the bleaching bones of the unburied dead? The only answer to be given is, that civilization has the restlessness and working energy of leaven. Over and over again has the Indian, alike in peaceful council and in the barbarities of his warfare, asked the white man, “Why will you not leave us to ourselves? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Of course in his stage and by his standard of intelligence the savage would make his estimates by contrast, would compare what he sees of the aspects and habits of civilization with his own wonted views and ways. With him all that he needs for life, occupation, resource, subsistence, is wholly free, — all at large, unclaimed, not even to be labored for, save for such effort and motion as in hunting, which is a form of pleasure. He goes to his free market in the wilderness for all supplies, as the thrifty farm-wife goes to hunt eggs in the hay-loft. ”

“ If the Indian could learn and see and know the secrets and shadows of a civilized state, in crowded cities and close communities, the less would he feel inclined to prefer it to his own tribal forest life.
We are apt quietly to take for granted not only what is most true, — the immense preponderance in gain and good of every kind in a highly civilized state over barbaric life in the wild woods, — but also to infer an absolute, complete, and exclusive blessing in the former. But civilization is not all gain and blessing, certainly not to every one living under it. ”

“ He is free, and he knows it; we are slaves, bound by chains of our own forging, — and he sees that it is so. Could he but fathom the depths of a great city, and gauge the pettiness, the paltry selfishness of the inhabitants, and see the deceit, the humbug, the lying, the outward swagger and the inward cringing, the toadyism and the simulated independence; could he but view the lives that might have been honorably passed, spent instead in struggling for and clutching after gold, and see the steps by which many a respected man has climbed to fortune, wet with the tears of ruined men and women ”

“ The beauty and grandeur and glory of natural scenery — of a horizon notched by mountain tops, of floating clouds with their varying shadows, of the gorgeousness of the tinted foliage — do not appeal to a vacant mind or to a rude sensibility. But the savage mind was not a blank towards Nature, nor merely in a state of listlessness. As the savage was in accord with Nature, he was in perfect sympathy with it, and held free intercourse with it. ”

“ One, two, three, even more years did the solitary apostle pursue his strange toil among fickle and capricious disciples without the sight of a white man. To soothe and soften their savage breasts, to save their doomed souls from a fate worse than the torturings which they inflicted on their victims, and to impart just so much of the teaching of the most elementary instruction in the faith as would justify the giving of Christian baptism, — this was his task. An Indian infant just passing out of life needed only the water-drop, moistening the sign of the cross, to rescue his soul for bliss. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The natives for the first time saw the rage and the weapons, of which up to that time they alone had been the victims, turned by the white men who had come among them from across the seas against each other's breasts, while new cursings and imprecations of scorn and malignity entered into the frenzies of the conflict.
The spirit of the reform in religion was drawing its fires over France, inflaming the madness of civil strife, glowing in the zeal of cruel bigots and in the fervent constancy of early converts. ”

“ The whole power of Great Britain — with competent and incompetent leaders, with councils of various degrees of wisdom and weakness — was engaged in that decisive campaign of a protracted strife of rivalry for supreme sway in the New World. I have already plainly expressed the shock which it gives to our idea of justice in the disposal of the issues on which the honor and destiny of empire depends, that France — after all her heroism of toil, enterprise, and exploration on this continent — should have no heritage here. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The English enterprise found its vigorous life and animating spirit in working towards democracy, civil liberty, and soul-freedom. The French came here as soldiers, priests, and free-traders, with the range of the woods for their goods, and the natives as hunters in their service. But they wholly lacked that sturdy class — the bone and sinew of a community planting itself for new empire on virgin soil — of patient toilers on a reclaimed farm, with rights of severalty for homesteads; individuals in their efforts and success, but members of a commonwealth for mutual help and security. ”

“ The siege and destruction of the lake and river forts, and then a ruthless rage of slaughter, havoc, and burning on the whole belt of frontier settlements, were the elements of that savage campaign against civilization. The forts at Detroit and at the present Pittsburg, on the forks of the Ohio, alone held out, and then only through sharp straits of peril and almost superhuman endurance, against the Indian foe, lurking everywhere with a lynx-eyed glare and a crimson ferocity. ”

“ It will be well, too, if such a man or such men may be of pure Indian blood, of unmixed native stock, with the virility and the nobleness of a wilderness birth, and that he accept without shame, ay, glory in, the tinge of his race. That the wilderness, with the help and without the bane of civilization, should produce one, two, three great leaders of men, peers of many members of our Congress, and of more than one of our Presidents, would be an easy accomplishment. May it not produce such men equal to our foremost and best? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The natural propensity of an Indian is to make himself more and more an Indian. He eats raw and bloody meat and entrails to stimulate his ferocity. He tortures himself, that he may enforce his daring and his power of enduring inflicted torture. He boasts and raves at the council-fire of his brutal and fiendish exploits. There are remnants of the six savage tribes which for nearly two hundred years, in the very heart of the State of New York, have preserved all the wild and heathen traits of their race, in spite of a considerable modification of nature among a part of them. ”

“ The word conquest, by the Spaniards, is a very tame one to apply to the method of their rapacity and fiendish inhumanity, as they disembarked on these virgin realms, and bore down upon its harmless native tribes as with the sweep of a vengeful malice and rage. Some other word of our capable language than conquest would more fitly define the riot and wreck, the greed and the diabolical cruelty, of those first invaders. And that more fitting word would need to be one of the most harrowing and appalling in its burden of outrages and woes. ”

“ Then came upon the scene that ablest and most daring and resolute savage chieftain known in our history. There have been three conspicuous men of the native race, — the towering chieftains of the forest, signal types of all the characteristics of the savage, ennobled, so to speak, by their lofty patriotism, — who have appeared on the scene of action at the three most critical eras for the white man on this continent. If the material and stock of such men are not exhausted, there is no longer for them a sphere, a range, an occasion or opportunity in place or time here. ”

“ And that is the reason why we have before us to-day, under open and impassioned debate, in the councils of Congress, in our Cabinet bureaus, and in the military posts on our frontiers, a very old question, — a century old, but as fresh to us as if it were of this year's origin. It is called the Indian Question. No one can appreciate, without much inquiry and search, the effort, labor, wise and honest purpose on the one hand, nor know how much of aimless and wasteful experiment, wild campaigning, and baffled legislation on the other, have been spent on that question. ”

“ As man develops his own higher powers, Nature changes steadily in these aspects and aptitudes for him. The savage conforms and adapts himself to Nature. Never does he indulge one fretting thought or feeling about its ways, or move a muscle or effort against it. He lives in tranquil subjection to Nature, and dies as her autumn fruits and leaves fail on her bosom. But every stage and step and process of development for civilization puts man out of harmony and into antagonism with Nature. He resists and thwarts and fights Nature. ”