Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/266

246 Indians. But we should not much relish a dish which a squaw might have cooked for us under that name; we should have missed the butter and the salt, of which the Indians knew nothing. Fish too, caught in a rude way from full waters, was a resource at some seasons.

We must remember, too, that the Indians used the fur-bearing animals only for their own moderate needs, and did not require any such number of them as would threaten their extermination. The rapacity and commercial spirit of the Europeans at once turned the skins of the bear, the deer, the beaver, the fox, the marten, the otter, and the buffalo into articles coveted for traffic. From the first colonization a wasting raid has been made upon these animals by the whites, utterly exhausting the near supply, and compelling the Indians — for their own needs and for barter sale — to move deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Much of their land which the whites have occupied had been abandoned by the Indians, and much more has been readily sold by them as useless for their purposes. Indeed soil, forest, valley, and meadow and stream, represent quite different capacities and values to the red man and the white man. And if no violent dealing were spent on the Indians, the steady wasting of their old game would put a period to their way of life.

We have also to take into account the fact, that vastly the larger portion of the Indians now on the continent, even the wildest of them, have become, in different degrees, dependent upon help and resources for subsistence furnished to them by the whites. I have already made mention of the fact, that, among the vast variety and divergency of views which have found expression concerning the whole relations between the Europeans and the Indians on our northern continent, the bold opinion has been advanced that the savages have on the whole found a balance of advantages and benefits from our intercourse with them. If there is a shadow of truth to warrant that eccentric assertion as