Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/640

620 was so familiar in our most recent complications with the Indians, was a man of fine endowments; and though he adopted the comforts and many of the luxuries of the whites, he retained by preference much of his savagery. His eminent medical practitioners found him afflicted with “Bright's disease,” with his end not distant. He preferred, however, to meet that end under the hands of his Indian “medicine-men,” and to have his horses killed for burial with him.

We have also to recall the fact, which has presented itself to us in another connection, that the noblest specimens of the Indian race — who, as endowed with mental vigor, even with genius, chieftains, orators, patriots, and diplomatists, pleading with and for their people, have argued their cause with the whites for more than two centuries — have been the most resolute in opposition to civilization. If we look to them as the exponents of their own preference for nature, freedom, and the woods, we can hardly fail to infer that they speak from a profound instinct, a proud consciousness of a sort of manhood in them contemptuous of the drudgery, emulation, conventionalisms, and subserviences of artificial life. They have had reason to know that hollowness and falsehood underlie the white man's life and qualify his dignity and his happiness. Intercourse such as there has been between the two races has alienated the Indian from the white man, as it has also increased the early dislike of the whites for the Indians.

For to all the occasions of antipathy and hostility between the Indians and the whites — coming from the embitterment engendered by the wrongs of the stronger against the weaker, and the memory of savage strifes with their horrors and atrocities — is to be added another, already recognized in these pages. The contempt and disgust with which the English colonists very soon began to regard the natives have strengthened rather than yielded, and have manifested themselves in their intensest indulgence as the