Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/53

Rh by being crowded on to more remote refuges, was provided for by an undefined extent and wealth of western territory of like features to the regions from which they were driven; and that in those impenetrated depths of the continent they might for indefinite periods pursue their wonted habits of barbarous life, subsisting by the chase. So long as this resource was left, the full problem of the fate of the Indian did not press as now for immediate solution. While the superb valleys of the affluents of the Missouri, the Platte, the Red River, the Mackenzie, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Sacramento were still untraversed wildernesses, it seemed as if tribes which never made any fixed improvements of the soil essential to and consequent upon their tenure of it, might even prove gainers by moving on and taking their chances with previous roamers over spaces large enough for them all. Circumstances have hurried on the active working of new agencies with a rush of enterprises to what must be a forced, or a deliberately chosen and wise, conclusion. As soon as the continent was opened on the Pacific ocean, with a more vigorous ardor than the languid dalliance of the Spanish navigators, there began an era which was as foreboding to the savages as it was quickening to the whites. Other agencies, all vitalized with the spirit of modern zeal and scheming, directed by scientific as well as by adventurous aims, and kindled by a revival of the same passion for the precious metals as that which blazed in the first discovery of the continent, accomplished in a score of years changes such as had been wrought before in no whole century. The discovery of rich mines and the search for more, the piercing advance of railways and telegraphs which came to meet each other in the centre of the continent, the occupancy of extensive ranches, the steady sweep onwards of emigrant trains turning the Indian trails into great highways, and the subtile instruments of Government engineers and explorers, — all combined to convert what had been known as