Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/117

Rh have no certainty that at any previous time they really exceeded this count, though La Hontan and others multiplied it almost ten times. The old Iroquois were represented in 1876-77 by seven thousand in the United States, and the same number in Canada. The number is the same today. The so-called, civilized tribes in the Indian Territory, as counted in 1809, were 12,395. The Indian Bureau in 1876 numbered them at twenty-one thousand. They have doubled in forty years. The Indians who have fared the worst in decrease of numbers have been those of California and Oregon.

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. Mr. Lecky in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century” condenses from his authorities such a view of the condition of the common people in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland a century and a half ago, as puts them to a disadvantage, merely as to the means and resources of subsistence, in comparison with North American Indians. The people, wildly ruled in clans, were thieves and cattle-lifters, kidnappers of men and children to be sold as slaves; they were ferocious barbarians, besotted with the darkest ignorance and the grossest and gloomiest superstitions; they scratched the earth with a crooked piece of wood for a plough, and a bush attached to the tail of a horse for a harrow, wholly dispensing with a harness; their food was milk and oatmeal mixed with blood drawn from a living cow; their cookery, their cabins were revoltingly filthy, causing disgusting cutaneous diseases; they boiled their beef in the hide, roasted fowls in their