thers by adoption; but when, some ten
years later, the Miami Indians were moved West; a bill was introduced
into Congress by a Mr. Bidlack, securing to Maconaqua and her heirs a
tract of land a mile square, embracing the home in which she had so long
lived. But she pined after her red kindred, and in 1847 died from sheer
weariness of the new conditions of her existence, and was buried near
the confluence of the Wabash and the Missisinewa Rivers.

This incident is here related not merely for the sake of the pathos
which it holds, but for the purpose of noting a curious contrast between
the sons of the wilderness and the children of civilization. The case of
Frances Slocum is typical; many a captive has been led away by the red
men, and has afterward become so completely Indianized that he or she
would stubbornly refuse to return to the life of the white race, and, if
forced to do so, would pine and die for lack of the breath of the
forests and plains. Yet never has there been known an instance where a
red man became reconciled to life among the whites; always, when not
forcibly detained captive, they fled back to the free life which had
been theirs, even if they had known it but as children; if kept in
captivity, they broke their chains by death. So that when we vaunt our
civilization we must remember that it has no charms for those who have
known the life of the woods, and thus we learn some at least of the
reasons why we have failed to produce from the Indian a finished product
of the civilization of our day.

Uncongenial as it may be to our pride of race to admit the fact, it
would seem certain that the Indian character has power of persistence
over that of the Caucasian. Many were the white captives whose blood
flowed in the veins of succeeding generations of red men, but that blood
was never powerful even to modify the traits which were the inheritance
of the Indian. It is most likely that the first white child ever born on
our shores--that Virginia Dare whose story has been so often told that
it is needless here to recapitulate it--was carried captive to the tents
of the Indians and in time became the wife of some brave, and that her
blood is in the veins of some of the survivors of the red men; but it
had no power to make itself known in any persistence of trait. It is
certain that a half-breed, whatever the circumstances of his education,
almost invariably shows the dominance of the Indian nature over the
white.