Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/289

Rh this continent. It may well be believed that there is hardly a single square mile of now occupied territory on its once virgin soil which is not stained with the life-current of the common humanity of the red man and the white man, in their deadly strifes. If there be any such spaces where the veins of the red men have not flowed, the whites, in their own feuds and wars, have supplied the stains. Over all these busy realms of thrift have floated the wails of human agony. But the region where the concentrated and direful rage of passion and savagery waxed most fiercely is now one of the fairest and most favored in our land. There in Florida, “the Land of Flowers,” whither the invalid and the feeble, the worn and the weary, from our Northern cities, flee from wintry airs and storms to seek recuperative vigor, are the scenes of the most appalling record in our history. A lavish luxuriance of verdure and of beauty has re-wreathed those scenes in peace. Prolific Nature, covering its stately forests with vines and mosses, duplicates its own growths. Rapid and lazy streams, impenetrable glades, abounding creeks and bays, oozy marshes, make the region, like many of its own animal products, as it were amphibious. There the opening enterprises of European civilization on this continent first spent and exhausted themselves in the devastation and havoc alike of scenery and of humanity. Christians were represented there, after the first sundering of their former unity, in a collision which swelled and fired all the alienations of passion and hate. The natives for the first time saw the rage and the weapons, of which up to that time they alone had been the victims, turned by the white men who had come among them from across the seas against each other's breasts, while new cursings and imprecations of scorn and malignity entered into the frenzies of the conflict.

The spirit of the reform in religion was drawing its fires over France, inflaming the madness of civil strife, glowing in the zeal of cruel bigots and in the fervent constancy of