Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/646

626 numbers of domestic animals, his well-furnished house, and his well-filled larder and wine-cellar.

Some of the conditions which have been found most favorable, if not also indispensable, to the slow work of civilizing a body of Indians, are the following: —

1. They must be planted by themselves, at least twenty miles remote from any white community.

2. They must have a large, scattering place, — not a village, — with broad, separate lots, fertile, close to wood and water. Thus they must be kept away from the pernicious influences and the humiliating presence of the whites, and be prevented from huddling together, as in their old camp life.

3. All intermarriage and like intercourse between the whites and the Indians must be forbidden. The Indians never rise, and the whites are always debased by it.

4. Each Indian settlement should be a centre for a single tribe, not on a frontier, between two nations.

5. The place to be wholly free of wild animals, with a slight allowance for game, but always near good fishing.

6. Farmers with implements, to reside — two, not more — in each settlement; and missionaries, to defer their efforts till they are asked for and welcomed, as teachers of morality and the virtues, without sectarian doctrines.

7. Government to exercise a firm, though kind and friendly, oversight over all their interests.

It might be supposed that the vast numbers of half-breeds among the Indians would have some of the white man's capacity for taking care of themselves. They will, if we leave them to their own way of doing it. But in some cases they are far more troublesome than real Indians. The traits and characteristics of the red man prevail in them over those of the whites. This is true even when one parent is English or Scotch, but more especially so when one parent is French. The half-breeds intensify Indian qualities. In the woods and lodges they do not show any