Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/255

Rh involved in our treatment of the Indians proceeded upon this opinion or belief, — that they are in fact simply a part of the vermin and wild beasts which must be exterminated in order that the territory may be habitable by civilized man. There are infinitely varied degrees of frankness and fulness in which that radical and sweeping opinion may be held or expressed. Those who have successively encountered the perils and massacres of frontier life (pioneers and Indian fighters) for two and a half centuries, the rank and file of our armies at Northern and Western posts, have, with very rare exceptions, boldly and sternly avowed their belief that Indians are tigers, wolves, and wild-cats, and as such in the sight of man and God must be exterminated. Those who have had most to do with the Indians are almost unanimously of that belief; and very many men who are not cruel, nor vindictive, nor careless of their words or judgments, have accorded in it. Statesmen, magistrates, and various functionaries who have had responsible and practical relations with the Indians have with milder terms, and perhaps with some qualifying or softening clauses, expressed their conviction that the savage is more a beast than a man. This opinion is now held as literally and as firmly by vast numbers among us as it ever was; subject, however, from some of them to the qualification that the savage is such a peculiar sort of a beast, that, while there is any possibility of his being domesticated, his slaughter ought to be deferred.

A few, a very few, of those who with means of a like sort for knowing the Indians have listened to this classification of them with noxious vermin have, with degrees of earnestness in their protest, remonstrated against it. The humane, the philanthropist, the Christian missionary have sternly denied the assumption, and have censured with withering denunciations the course of power or policy which has proceeded upon it in dealing with the Indians