Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/288

268 the southern and northern borders of our domain. We are concerned with these enterprises solely as they bear on our single subject, — the relations of Europeans with the aborigines. The story is essentially the same in all its chief incidents and colorings from whichever of the nationalities of the Old World the intruders came. We have feeble companies of sea-worn adventurers sounding their way for a harborage, bewildered by the strangeness of their experience, but wrought to fever-heats of passion for adventure or rapidly acquired wealth; we note the same kindly reception and hospitable entertainment by the amazed and awe-stricken savages; and we have to repeat the humiliating record of treacherous returns in fraud and outrage by the whites. In each and every case, too, we find the whites availing themselves of intestine feuds and hostilities among the native tribes in every locality, to form alliances setting Indian against Indian; putting themselves, often unnecessarily, into fierce antagonism with one party, and beginning the entail of the successive calamities brought on the lower by the superior race. It is well for us repeatedly to recognize the disturbed, acrimonious, and embittered relations which the Europeans found existing among the aborigines, as the fact has always been alleged as palliating the intervention of the whites as only introducing one new party to the conflict.

It seems to have been but a wanton provocation, or at least an unwise anticipation of a vengeful jealousy from the Spaniards, when, as the only nationality of the Old World, they were flushed with their pride of monopoly in the new continent, that the first French enterprise for transatlantic colonization should have led its adventurers into the very jaws of the proud pioneers of American empire. Had the French made their first attempts in the North, as they did less than a half century afterwards, it is probable that they would have spared the record of history the narration of what is, on the whole, its most blood-curdling episode on