Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/129

Rh plunged her lovely hand and rounded arm into the bowels of the beast, and found and cut off some eight or ten feet of the 'marrow gut.' Winding it about her arm, she stepped on one side, and, giving the entrail a shake, inserted one end in her beautiful mouth. Looking at me with ineffable content and happiness expressed in her beaming countenance, she slowly, and without apparent mastication, swallowed the whole disgusting mass. I returned sadly to my tent, my ideal shattered, my love gone; and I need hardly add that this one Indian love-affair has satisfied my whole life."

The military gentlemen, honored officers of our army, from whose works I have drawn these extracts, are well entitled to be regarded as representatives in good judgment, and as speaking from abundant knowledge and experience, of their own profession in that strong conflict of opinion which we must recognize in later pages between it and the advocates of an exclusive peace-policy with the Indians. General Custer and Colonel Dodge, humane and well-balanced men, present to us in harrowing descriptions and with all too vivid illustrations the atrocities of Indian warfare. The former tells the story of such tragedies as the "Philip Kearney Massacre" and the "Kidder Massacre." Remembering that he fell in the flower of his years, — after his patriotic career and eminent services to his country,—in a deadly and equally overwhelming disaster, we give just weight to his testimony. Clearly, and for reasons which he states with full force, he did not believe that the Indian could be lifted into the state of civilization, refinement, and full humanity. But we must not by anticipation prejudice this great issue.

In the abounding literature which we have gathered and are to leave to posterity, concerning the red man and his experiences with the white man, there is a large variety of stern and sober history, of poetry and romance, of engaging and instructive, of repulsive and revolting matter,