Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/259

Rh if wrong and outrage have predominated in that treatment, — everything which the whites have sincerely, humanely, and intelligently intended for their benefit has invariably been a bane and an injury to them, — depriving them of their wild virility, and reducing them to a mean, abject, and grovelling incompetency or idiocy. Under the influences of civilization which have come the nearest to taming the Indian, it is affirmed that he always exhibits those reversionary characteristics shown by that species of dog among the Esquimaux which is a domesticated wolf: he exchanges a howl for a bark. More than this, intelligent and humane observers have remarked that the same influences and means which advance the white man in steady progress and accumulating good, have a deteriorating and pernicious effect upon the Indians. The enormous amount of materials and helps for improving the condition of the Indians which our Government, for instance, has supplied, — implements and tools for husbandry and domestic thrift, stock-cattle, goods of every kind, — have been wasted on unappreciative and swinish receivers, and have simply resulted in pauperizing them and making them more lazy. The cooking-stoves, frying-pans, and other like utensils which have been sent into the Indian country by the hundred thousand to prompt the squaws to improve their housewifery, and which careful white matrons pride themselves upon burnishing and keeping for a lifetime, rust out from filth and neglect in a few days of use.

It was then through force of the reasons following that the whites, as soon as they became acquainted with the facts about the Indians, justified themselves in taking possession of the wild territory occupied by them: —

1. They found the native tribes in a state of internecine conflict, fighting with, subduing, and exterminating each other.

2. They satisfied themselves that no one tribe on the locality on which for the time being it happened, so to