Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/126

106 Indian chose the ways of his white brother, rather than those in which he had been born and bred? In no single instance has this been true."

Custer proceeds to argue that a few tribes, wasted and exhausted by wars with other tribes and the whites, and by contact with civilization and disease, and unable to cope with more powerful tribes which are always overbearing and domineering, must either become the vassals and tributaries of their enemies, or reluctantly accept the alternative of a sham conformity with the whites. He says: —

The tribe must "give up its accustomed haunts, its wild mode of life, and nestle down under the protecting arm of its former enemy, the white man, and try, however feebly, to adopt his manner of life. In making this change the Indian has to sacrifice all that is dear to his heart; he abandons the only mode of life in which he can be a warrior and win triumphs and honors worthy to be sought after; and in taking up the pursuits of the white man he does that which he has always been taught from his earliest infancy to regard as degrading to his manhood,—to labor, to work for his daily bread; an avocation suitable only for squaws. . ..

"To those who advocate the application of the laws of civilization to the Indian, it might be a profitable study to investigate the effect which such application produces upon the strength of the tribe as expressed in numbers. Looking at him as the fearless hunter, the matchless horseman and warrior of the Plains, where Nature placed him, and contrasting him with the reservation Indian, who is supposed to be revelling in the delightful comforts and luxuries of an enlightened condition, but who in reality is grovelling in beggary, bereft of many of the qualities which in his wild state tended to render him noble, and heir to a combination of vices partly his own, partly bequeathed to him from the pale face, — one is forced, even against desire, to conclude that there is an unending antagonism between the Indian nature and that with which his well-meaning white brother would endow him. Nature intended him for a savage state; every instinct, every impulse of his soul inclines him to it. The white race might fall into a barbarous state, and afterwards, subjected to the influence of