Curious as is the question of the descent of the American tribes, it has no bearing on the future of the country – unless, indeed, in the eyes of those who assert that Delawares and Utes, Hurons and Pawnees, are all one race, with features modified by soil and climate. If this were so, the handsome, rollicking, frank-faced Coloradan “boys” would have to look forward to the time when their sons’ sons should be as like the Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the Indians they expelled – that, as the New Englanders are tall, taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of the next age should be flat-faced warriors, five feet high. Confidence in the future of America must be founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of race.
Kamtchatkans or Polynesians, Malays or sons of the prairies on which they dwell, the Red Indians have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely be one of pure blood alive within the United States.
In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests gradually mingle with the whiter inhabitants of the coast, and become indistinguishable from the remainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti, the French intermingle with the native race: the Hurons are French in everything but name. In Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation will never be brought about. The pride of race, strong in the English everywhere, in America and Australia is an absolute bar to intermarriage, and even to lasting connections with the aborigines. What has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening in New Zealand and on the plains. When you ask a Western man his views on the Indian question, he says: “Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of war, or thin ’em out by whisky; but the thinning process is plaguy slow.”
There are a good many Southerners out upon the plains. One of them, describing to me how in Florida they had hunted down the Seminoles with bloodhounds, added, “And sarved the pesky sarpints right, sah!” Southwestern volunteers, campaigning against the Indians, have been known to hang up in their tents the scalps of the slain, as we English used to nail up the skins of the Danes.
There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Americans than with ourselves. In 1840, the British government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand in a proclamation which set forth with great precision that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the aborigines in the possession of their lands. The Maories numbered 200,000 then; they number 20,000 now.
Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion on the Indian question. Rifle and revolver are their only policy. The New Englanders, who are all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings with the red men, are not similarly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of the nature of the Indian, call out for agricultural employment for the braves; those who know nothing of the Indian‘s life demand that “reserves” be set aside for him, forgetting that no “reserve” can be large enough to hold the buffalo, and that without the buffalo the red men must plow or starve.
Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all but a total failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies living at St. Mary‘s mission, the Delawares existing at Leavenworth; but in all these cases there is a large infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are completely civilized; but then they are completely French. If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will suddenly return to his untamed state. An Indian girl, one of the most orderly of the pupils at a ladies’ school, has been known, on feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The same tendency showed itself in the case of the Delaware chief who built himself a white man‘s house, and lived in it thirty years, but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the dining-room, in disgust. Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visited Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young Englishman, who came out soon after, told the President that he was going West, he gave him a letter to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas. The Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal friendship, slept upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his own hand.
The English everywhere attempt to introduce civilization, or to modify that which exists, in a rough-and-ready manner which invariably ends in failure or in the destruction of the native race. A hundred years of absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under every advantage, seen the success of our repeated attempts to establish trial by jury in Bengal. For twenty years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost universally professed themselves Christians, have attended English schools, and learnt to speak the English language, and to read and write their own; in spite of all this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to reduce almost the whole race to a condition of degraded savagery. The Indians of America have, within the few last years, been caught and caged, given acres where they once had leagues, and told to plow where once they hunted. A pastoral race, with no conception of property in land, they have been manufactured into freeholders and tenant farmers; Western Ishmaelites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its legendary life begins, they have been subjected to homestead laws and title registrations. If our experiments in New Zealand, in India, on the African coast have failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended the hurried American experiments. It is not for us, who have the past of Tasmania and the present of Queensland to account for, to do more than record the fact that the Americans are not more successful with the red men of Kansas than we with the black men of Australia.
The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject for civilization than the red man; the Ute is not even gifted with the birthright of most savages, the mimetic power. The black man, in his dress, his farming, his religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the white. In the Indian there is none of this: his ancestors roamed over the plains – he will roam; his ancestors hunted – why should not he hunt? The American savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative; the African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties of the mind. Just as the Indian is less versatile than the negro, so, if it were possible gradually to change his mode of life, slowly to bring him to the agricultural state, he would probably become a skillful and laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the Western soil; as it is, he is exterminated before he has time to learn. “Sculp ’em fust, and then talk to ’em,” the Coloradans say.
Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Washington to treat with hostile tribes upon the plains. The Indians invariably continue to fight and rob till winter is at hand; but when the snows appear, they send in runners to announce that they are prepared to make submission. The commissioners appoint a place, and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends, come down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the Indians are kept in food and drink; whisky even is illegally provided them, with the cognizance of the authorities, under the name of “hatchets.” Blankets, and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to them as necessary to their existence on the plains; but when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep up through the snow-drifts on the prairies, they take their leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war-path, plundering and scalping all the whites.
Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem as though the white man and the red cannot exist on the same soil. Step by step the English have driven back the braves, till New Englanders now remember that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in Hampshire. King Philip‘s defeat by the Connecticut volunteers seems to form part of the early legendary history of our race; yet there is still standing, and in good repair, in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a frame-house which in its time has been successfully defended against Red Indians. On the other hand, step by step, since the days of Cortez, the Indians and half-bloods have driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian at Vera Cruz, but he was shot by full-blooded Indians at Queretaro.
If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians that remain, it must be worked out in the Eastern States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed back the Indians westward: if they would rescue the remnant from starvation, they must bring them East, away from Western men and Western hunting-grounds, and let them intermingle with the whites, living, farming, along with them, intermarrying, if possible. The hunting Indian is too costly a being for our age; but we are bound to remember that ours is the blame of having failed to teach him to be something