Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/53

Rh squandered and consumed without the Indians deriving the least benefit, and the Government, in very many instances, utterly ignorant of the wrongs that were perpetrated. Had one-third of the money advanced by the Government been usefully and wisely applied, all those tribes might have been now in possession of the arts and enjoyments of civilization. I care not what dreamers and politicians and travellers and writers may say to the contrary. I know the Indian character, and I confidently avow, that if one-third of the many millions of dollars our Government has appropriated within the last twenty-five years, for the benefit of the Indian population, ' had been honestly and judiciously applied, there would not at this time be a single tribe within the limits of our States and Territories, but would have been in the complete enjoyment of all the arts and all the comforts of civilized life. But there is not a tribe that has not been outraged and defrauded; and nearly all the wars we have prosecuted against the Indians, have grown out of the bold frauds, and the cruel injustice, played off upon them by our Indian agents and their accomplices. But the purposes for which these vast annuities and enormous contingent advances were made, have only led to the destruction of the constitutions of thousands, and the increase of immorality among the Indians. We can not measure the desolating effects of intoxicating liquors, among the Indians, by any analogy drawn from civilized life. With the red man the consequences are a thousand times more frightful' Were Gen. Houston now living, he could have added to this statement from the London Examiner: "When Captain John Smith, and his swash-bucklering cavaliers landed in the ' Empire of Virginia,' the aborigines of the United States, judging from the traces which they have left behind, could not have been less than four or five millions in number. We question if, at the present moment, they number five hundred thousand. Driven from bank to wall, and from wall to ditch, they have contested every foot-breadth of the weary road over which they have had to retreat, to make way for the Anglo-Saxon flood. Disease, whiskey, misery untold, and villainous saltpetre have civilized them off of the face of the earth, once their own. Once, all the region east of the Mississippi, from Maine to Louisiana, was thickly peopled with the prosperous villages of those whom the old travellers called ' the savages.' No part of America now shows so thickly populated a country, or so joyous a savage race as those who there hunted in the woods, and paddled their birch canoes, or Mandan coracles. With the exception of a few all but civilized fragments of tribes in one or two of the States, there is not now one single Indian who owns to the name, in all that wide region. A swarthy, keen-eyed lawyer, pleading in the Supreme Court of New York, or a very dark-haired gentleman who sits next to you in a general's uniform at a State dinner in the White House, are, to the keenest ethnological eye, about the only signs of the now thickly peopled States, covered with cities and towns, having been once inhabited only by dwellers in wigwams, who fished the salmon, and hunted the bear and the deer, with no man to make them afraid."