Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/374

354 for the reader only by the arrest of the pen when to be told more would be unendurable.

How far the Indian tribes with which in our turn we have to deal are to be regarded in blood and lineage, in descent or affiliation, as representatives of those with whom the European colonists came into these protracted conflicts, may be an intricate question for examination. There has been a series of such conflicts on successive strips or regions of the continent, and corresponding changes in the names of the tribes encountered and vanquished. The Indians with whom the first colonists came into collision may all be supposed to have seen the salt water, as living near the seaboard where they met the invaders. Their names have dropped from speech and their tribes are regarded as extinct, whether because they have wholly perished, or because what remnants of them remain in descent have been adopted or merged in other tribes. At all events we hear nothing nowadays of Pequots, Mohicans, Narragansetts, Pamankeys. In the second century of the colonies such familiar names as the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Delawares, the Shawanoes, and the Miamis, with the Ottawas and the Ojibways, engross our attention. Now with each new year of Western enterprise some of the old names of tribes drop out of use, and new ones appear in Government records and in the papers, as the Arapahoes, the Comanches, the Apaches, the Snakes, the Blackfeet. Whether these tribes last made known to us are affiliated with those of our earliest acquaintance, or have been disclosed to us as reserved and original sections of the same old race of red men, independent in lineage and position, certain it is that they are the same sort of men in all their marked characteristics, — in nature, habits, traits, ways of life, method of warfare, jealousy and hatred of the whites, and steadfast dislike of civilization. The exceptions to this statement are few and quite recent. The savages roaming near the passes and plains of the Rocky Mountains