ntinent
by his red brother, never has such disaster and destruction overtaken
these poor wild, wandering sons of nature as at the moment in which we
write. Of yore it was the pioneers of France, England, and Spain with
whom they had to contend, but now the whole white world is leagued in
bitter strife against the Indian. The American and Canadian are only
names that hide beneath them the greed of united Europe. Terrible deeds
have been wrought out in that western land; terrible heart-sickening
deeds of cruelty and rapacious infamy--have been, I say? no, are to this
day and hour, and never perhaps more sickening than now in the full blaze
of nineteenth-century civilization. If on the long line of the American
frontier, from the Gulf of Mexico to the British boundary, a Single life
is taken by an Indian, if even a horse or ox be stolen from a settler,
the fact is chronicled in scores of-journals throughout the United
States, but the reverse of the story we never know. The countless deeds
of perfidious robbery, of ruthless murder done by white savages out in
these Western wilds never find the light of day. The poor red man has no
telegraph, no newspaper, no type, to tell his sufferings and his woes. My
God, what a terrible tale could I not tell of these dark deeds done by
the white savage against the far nobler red man! From southernmost Texas
to most northern Montana there is but one universal remedy for Indian
difficulty--kill him. Let no man tell me that such is not the case. I
answer, I have heard it hundreds of times: "Never trust a redskin unless
he be dead." "Kill every buffalo you see," said a Yankee colonel to me
one day in Nebraska; "every buffalo dead is an Indiaan gone;" such
things are only trifles. Listen to this cute feat of a Montana trader. A
store-keeper in Helena City had some sugar stolen from him. He poisoned
the sugar next night and left his door open. In the morning six Indians
were found dead outside the town. That was a cute notion, I guess; and
yet there are other examples worse than that, but they are too revolting
to tell. Never mind; I suppose they have found record somewhere else if
not in this world, and in one shape or another they will speak in due
time. The Crees are perhaps the only tribe of prairie Indians who have as
yet suffered no injustice at the hands of the white man. The land is
still theirs, the hunting-rounds remain almost undisturbed; but their
days are numbered, and already the