George E. Ellis

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 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 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. ”

“ Night and day the slender garrison, often weak from scant fare and exhausted by sleeplessness, would need to watch every moment lest an arrow, winged with flaming tow, should fire their combustible defences, or they should expose head or limb to foes armed now with the white man's weapons as well as their own, and skilled already in some of the arts and guile of their enemies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The energy and activity of thought which civilized man gives to brooding and restless questioning and speculation, went with the Indian to feed some forest musings, some sylvan imaginings, and to furnish him the material of dreams and omens which entered into the traditions of his tribe and traced or clouded its history. A large part of the life of a savage was in solitariness, and except when he knew himself to be exposed to risks from lurking foes he was never lonely, timid, or suspicious. He relied on his own resources of strength, patience, and security. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ We can well understand, as we read the records and heed the traditions of that wasted border, that for years afterwards white men (who alone survived in their families, orphaned or solitary by those dire woes) lived only for revenge, to prowl in the woods like wildcats, and deal the death-blow to every one of the red race — man, squaw, or pappoose — that they could bring within range of the rifle or under the keen edge of the knife. A thousand families were broken up, with here and there survivors, trying, through a treacherous wilderness, to find their way back to the settlements. ”

“ It may well be believed that there is hardly a single square mile of now occupied territory on its once virgin soil which is not stained with the life-current of the common humanity of the red man and the white man, in their deadly strifes. If there be any such spaces where the veins of the red men have not flowed, the whites, in their own feuds and wars, have supplied the stains. Over all these busy realms of thrift have floated the wails of human agony. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Steel-clad warriors, a single score of them, would overmatch thousands of those poor savages when they were driven to any show of resistance. The horse on which the warrior was mounted was to the Indian a more terrific monster than Milton has fashioned from all the shapes of demons for his hellish phalanxes; and it was the horse, not the man upon it, which secured to Cortes the conquest of Mexico. The fierce Spanish blood-hound, also, comes into the horrid warfare to track the wretched victims of greed through the swamps and mountain thickets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The blame, I say, is with them in the opening of the strife. But as it advanced, and in their dread consternation as it strengthened in extent and horror and success; as their frontiers were desolated, and fire, massacre, and torture came nearer and nearer to their centre, — the yell, the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, and the torch working up the nightmare of every man, woman, and child in their scattered settlements, — we can no longer interpose our scruples as to acts or apprehensions of the exasperated and almost desperate colonists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And day by day, and year by year, as the savage visited the white man's cabin or framed house, his fenced fields and flower-gardens, he saw something new and cunning and useful, not costly, nor ostentatious, nor intricate, nor perplexing, but simple, contrived, adapted to make more out of everything than the savage had done. So tentative, elemental, and easy of imitation have been the signs and processes by which civilization has offered itself to our Indians on the frontiers for nearly three hundred years. ”

“ Nothing that we call, in these days, emancipation of the reason, intelligence, strength of mind, scientific vigor, or discernment of truth, has ever wrought with such a potent and unyielding sway over the inward essence and the outward conduct of a human being as has the faith of a Jesuit. The courage of the soldier, the dauntlessness of the hero, are but fragments of the sum of his prowess and self-mastery. ”