Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/104

84 its bounds one hundred thousand Indians, and that a fifth part of these were more or less connected with the missions, partially civilized, jobbing, begging, stealing, laboring on the farms of Europeans, gambling and drinking, and generally in stages of improvidence, dissoluteness, and imbecility. The wild Indians in the gold-bearing regions were ruthlessly dealt with by adventurers, explorers, and miners.

After futile efforts by Congress by appropriations through commissioners and agents, — of which the Indians were wickedly defrauded, being only the more ingeniously wronged, — in 1853 tracts of twenty-five thousand acres were defined as Reservations for them. The hope was to secure, by the aid of resident guardians and advisers, and on a larger scale, all that had been good in the farming and missionary methods of the Spaniards.

It would have been gratifying to our national pride, if, in closing the review of the harrowing history of the dealings of the Spaniards with the original tribes on our present domain, we could say truly, that the transfer of responsibility to our own Government had essentially modified or improved the condition of those representatives of the native stock which had, for three centuries, been under the ecclesiastical and colonial charge of the royal successors of Ferdinand and Isabella.