Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/71

Rh where in a dozen years or so, four-fifths of them died. But I have been told by one of the very few whom Robinson admitted to intimacy, that he was often heard to speak regretfully about the promises he made them on behalf of the Government, being so faithlessly kept.

He always considered the removal of these two tribes as his crowning achievement, and he speaks of it with a little pardonable bombast. "This," he writes, "is all that remains of both tribes. Tranquillity is, therefore, through the blessing of the Almighty, restored to the colony, and the people are treated as human beings ought to be treated. No restraint in any way has been placed upon them." But this tranquillity was not yet restored, for many tribes remained to be brought in, which he afterwards secured, who, by living more remotely from the settled districts than those just ensnared, had less opportunities of doing mischief than them, but still never neglected to do it whenever they got the chance.

The men he had just taken delivered to him several stand of arms that they had stolen in different enterprises. He says, "previous to leaving the natives' encampment the tribes despatched four of their females for spears, when they shortly returned with three large bundles, and the chief of the Big River tribe took me to a tier of hills, and surrendered to me six stand of firearms loaded, viz.:—three muskets and three fowling-pieces."

The attenuated remnants of these once powerful tribes, formerly numbering perhaps a thousand people, yielded, all told, only 26 individuals. Yet were they still as troublesome as in the days of their strength, and committed more murders and robberies, in their decay than they were known to have done at any former period. Like most of their race, they had not suffered much from the hostility of the colonists, nor even greatly from rival tribes, of whom they were generally the masters.

Without going into the general subject of the decay of this race in this place, I may venture a passing remark on the subject of their rapid and remarkable declension, which had been going on for some years before this time, as if the very plague had seized on them. Whole tribes (some of which Robinson mentions by name as being in existence 15 or 20 years before he went amongst them, and had probably never had a shot tired at them) had absolutely and entirely vanished. To the causes to which he attributssattributes [sic] this strange wasting away, as coming under his own personal observation, I think infecundity, produced by the infidelity of the women to their husbands in the early times of the colony, may be safely added. This, I believe, was not a