Red men

“ 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. ”

“ The red men have borne many and great injuries; they ought to suffer them no longer. My people will not; they are determined on vengeance; they have taken up the tomahawk; they will make it fat with blood; they will drink the blood of the white people. ”

“ The noble red men, as they were called by the Eastern philanthropist, were as treacherous to the whites as an ocean squall to the navigator. No pen or picture has or can fully describe the cruelty of their nature. ”

“ The idea had dawned upon his master mind that the sovereignty of the wilderness rested with the red men. His intelligent casting of the horoscope of the lowering future for his race led him to seek boldly and consistently to sap the very roots of the threatening calamity for them, by advising them to be no longer dependent on the white man's goods or to cherish any lurking partiality for the white man's habits of life. ”

“ To watch their games, and hear their shouts of exultation, in any of their villages, to sit down in their lodges and listen to their jokes, repartee, anecdote and laughter, would effectually banish this erroneous opinion so generally held in regard to the Red Men. With no anxieties for the future—no necessities goading them, it is natural that they should be a merry people, and most of their life be spent in sports and games. ”

“ Price’s Left Wing sailed into the prairie and passed below the horizon. To know what it next did you must, like Ballard or Hewley, pass below the horizon yourself, clean out of sight of the dome at Washington to remote, untracked Idaho. There, besides wild red men in quantities, would you find not very tame white ones, gentlemen of the ripest Southwestern persuasion, and a Legislature to fit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I shall try to see with their eyes and hear with their ears for a while and I shall discover, in that way, perhaps, a new world—one that will be lost forever when the Red Men are made to adopt all the tricks and manners of civilized life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hardy and enterprising men there are who annually visit us from Europe (gentlemen, nobles) , who, well aware what they must leave behind them, come here and seek the farthest wilds of the red men, in rocky fastnesses or in valleys amid dreary plains, and conform themselves to all the rough and repulsive and filthy conditions of life among the Indians, — in clothing, bed, and board, in the tramp, the hunt, the chase, the dreary winter desolation with the thermometer deep below zero. ”

“ It will be said, as it has often been said, that here it is the selfishness of the white man which speaks; that it is for his interest, and for his wordly advantage, that the red man should be removed out of his way, and be thrust back from the extending limits of civilisation—even like these forests, which fall before us, and vanish from the earth, leaving for a while some decaying stumps and roots over which the plough goes in time, and no vestige remains to say that here they have been. ”

“ I thought I would say so much in favour of the red men, and here let me advise you to mark your feelings from this time, and see if you do not feel better when you feed them, than when you take up the sword to fight them. ”

“ Red men love to hear such traditions. It is wonderful that so many as ten tribes should be LOST, at the same time, and no one know what has become of them! My brother asks us if WE know what has become of these ten tribes. How should poor red men, who live on their hunting-grounds, and who are busy when the grass grows in getting together food for their squaws and pappooses, against a time when the buffalo can find nothing to eat in this part of the world, know anything of a people that they never saw? ”

“ This ingenious refuge in recognizing and arguing, — as among the many fundamental differences between the white men and the red men, in their knowledge, privileges, opportunities, and consequent duties, — that there might well be a very broad distinction between the religions suited to their respective conditions, very often presents itself in related conversations of some of the more acute savages with the missionaries. ”

“ Of the white men such a pitch of lofty and self-sacrificing virtue, of humane philosophy and christian benevolence, that the future welfare of the wronged people they have supplanted shall be preferred above their own immediate interest—nay, their own immediate existence: of the red man, that he shall forget the wild hunter blood flowing through his veins, and take the plough in hand, and wield the axe and the spade instead of the rifle and the fishspear! ”

“ But in the last resort, knowing themselves to be of a nobler stock than the red men, privileged too with a higher intelligence, and above all armed with deadly weapons in comparison with which the bows and the stone hatchets of the Indians were as toys, it was enough for the white man to feel that he was able to hold his ground. ”

“ He counselled them to accept of the glory of the coming day when the red men would mingle with the white race, accepting their teachings and civilizations and finding therein peace, plenty and contentment. ”

“ As I looked at the men gathered at some of the railroad stations in the western desert and thought of the Red Men whose fate it is to meet such representatives of civilisation and Christianity, I could not but be filled with pity for the unfortunates and with wonder at "the dispensation" under which they live. 206 The faces are fine and bold enough, bearded to the cheek or shaved in the American fashion, with bold staring eyes, which "look square" in your own, with a general expression "Do you want a fight?" ”

“ Several trustworthy persons, most familiar by long and intimate converse with the red men, have testified that the Indians have a very suggestive superstition on this subject, though there is no evidence that it is universal among them. They are said to believe that if a body — whether of white or red man, friend or foe — is deprived of the scalp-lock before burial, the soul that animated the body is forbidden all entrance upon the Happy Hunting Grounds, all share in the life hereafter. ”

“ The red men are rarely betrayed into a panic. Accustomed from earliest youth to war, with all its wiles, they are always prepared for a stampede. It is the system they themselves follow, and are ever expecting to be practised against them. ”

“ Had the natives, with or without concert, and with a prescience of what was to be their fate from the intruders, availed themselves of their opportunity, the miserable plight of the white men would have made their ruin easy. But in most of these cases of the extremity of the whites they owed their safety and relief as much to the animosities of warring tribes as to the pity and kindness of the red men. ”

“ The elevation, if not the security from extinction, of the race of red men depends upon its furnishing masters and guides from its stock. A race that cannot itself contribute its redeemers will never be redeemed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But throughout Siberia, China, central Asia, India, and Europe they left behind much of their stock blended with the other colored races.
When the red man crossed over into America, he brought along much of the teachings and traditions of his early origin. His immediate ancestors had been in touch with the later activities of the world headquarters of the Planetary Prince. But in a short time after reaching the Americas, the red men began to lose sight of these teachings, and there occurred a great decline in intellectual and spiritual culture. ”

“ They also called them red men, because they were about the color of a copper cent that has been carried a while. These red men did not have many tools and other things to make it easy to work and to live. They had no horses, cows, pigs, sheep or chickens, so they had to catch wild animals for food. They had no guns nor rifles, but made spears and bows and arrows with which to kill their game. They had no iron. Their arrow points and spear heads were of sharpened stone, as was a heavy tool they made something like our hatchet. It was a very dull, poor hatchet. They had no cloth to make clothes. ”

“ A body, tall, angular, and ill-shaped, scarred with cicatrised wounds, and bent with age; a face seamed with the traces of evil passion; eyes deep sunken in their sockets, and sparkling like coals of fire—an aspect more fiend-like than human! All this agrees with the descriptions I have had of the Red-Hand chief. Assuredly it is he. Our enemies, then, are the Arapahoes—their leader the dreaded Red-Hand.
“Heaven have mercy upon us! These men will have none!” Such was the ejaculation that escaped my lips, on recognising, or believing that I recognised, the foe that was before us. ”

“ INDIAN ARROW HEADS, &c.
By far the most numerous relics of the Red Race, now found in those parts of our country from which it has disappeared, are the small stones with which they headed their arrows. Being made of the most durable substances, they have generally remained in the soil, unaffected by time and the changes of season. They most abound in those rich meadows which border some of our rivers, and in other spots of peculiar fertility, though of less extent, where the pasture, or other attractions, collected game for the Red men. ”

“ There is somewhat of the grotesque in the aspect of a European intruder, of another stock, coming from across the sea, meeting the native red men, regarding them as an impertinence or an anomaly, and putting the question, “Who are you? ”

“ Doubtless one misleading element of our notions of the red men, as they first appear in our history, comes from the early use of the names, the titles, and the state of royalty as attached to forest chieftains, the formalities and etiquette to be observed with them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let him call the white man’s increase from a little beginning, the red man’s decrease from a great,—the white man’s victories, the red man’s defeats,—the white man’s flourishing, the red man’s fading; and he will have the history of the red men, and the reasons of their sad history, in this country. ”

“ If we seek in a general view of the mode of life and resources of the red men, in some favored localities, to find any radical disadvantage or disablement which put them below all communities of the whites which we call civilized, we can readily convince ourselves of our error by comparing the state of our Indians at the time of the settlement of this continent with that of communities of whites in Europe at the same time. ”

“ Whether these tribes last made known to us are affiliated with those of our earliest acquaintance, or have been disclosed to us as reserved and original sections of the same old race of red men, independent in lineage and position, certain it is that they are the same sort of men in all their marked characteristics, — in nature, habits, traits, ways of life, method of warfare, jealousy and hatred of the whites, and steadfast dislike of civilization. ”

“ The opening of our Revolutionary War was the occasion of yet another of the aggravated issues in which, by a long series, the interests of the white and red men have clashed ever since their first contact on this continent. In all the conflicts for possession and empire on our soil the rival European colonists — as we have had already many evidences — sought, and always with success, to secure their respective supporters and allies from the Indian tribes whom they could influence, and also to set those tribes against each other in quarrels of their own. ”