Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/353

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It is to be remembered that our aborigines were the first of the class of human beings called “heathens” which our English ancestors had ever known or seen. The theory about them was that they were a wrecked and doomed portion of the race of Adam, under a curse, — the spoil of the Devil for eternity. The human form, with a mere fragment of the intellectual and moral endowment of our race, could secure at best only pity for such creatures. It was among the rough frontiersmen of the West that the saying originated, that the Indian has no more soul than a buffalo. Our ancestors allowed him a soul, though under the circumstances it was a questionable endowment. It may fairly be inferred from the estimate our fathers made of the natives, that they believed that existence had no intrinsic value for an Indian. Taking into view also the fact that the whole history of humanity on this globe gives us but a succession of wars of races, the strong against the weak, the lighter color against the darker color, the civilized against the barbarous, we have to add to it also another, — that the claim to possess, under divine mercy, a true and pure religion, has been made the pretext for visiting what is called the divine wrath upon all who are left in the darkness of heathenism.

Our colonial period covers a series of woful and racking experiences to the native tribes, uniformly disastrous to them and beyond measure demoralizing to them as regards any form of permanent good which they might have derived from intercourse with the whites. All the tribes that had any dealings with the Europeans, hostile or friendly, and even some distant tribes that had as yet been unmolested in their forest recesses, were from the first parties to all the fierce strifes waged by the white men of rival