echo of the approaching wave of
Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree
country.

It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific. First the White
man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor; then the greedy hunter,
the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison; then the settler and
exterminator--every where it has been the same story.

This wild man who first welcomed the new-comer is the only perfect
socialist or communist in the world. He holds all things in common with
his tribe--the land, the bison, the river, and the moose. He is starving,
and the rest of the tribe want food. Well, he kills a moose, and to the
last bit the coveted food is shared by all. That war-party has taken one
hundred horses in the last raid into Blackfoot or Peagin territory; well,
the whole tribe are free to help themselves to the best and fleetest
steeds before the captors will touch one out of the band. There is but a
scrap of beaver, a thin rabbit, or a bit of sturgeon in the lodge; a
stranger comes, and he is hungry; give him his share and let him be first
served and best attended to. If one child starves in an Indian camp you
may know that in every lodge scarcity is universal and that every stomach
is hungry. Poor, poor fellow! his virtues are all his own; crimes he may
have, and plenty, but his noble traits spring from no book-learning, from
no school-craft, from the preaching of no pulpit; they come from the
instinct of good which the Great Spirit has taught him; they are the
whisperings from that lost world whose glorious shores beyond the
Mountains of the Setting Sun are the long dream of his life. The most
curious anomaly among the race of man, the red man of America, is passing
away beneath our eyes into the infinite solitude. The possession of the
same noble qualities which we affect to reverence among our nations makes
us kill him. If he would be as the African or the Asiatic it would be all
right for him; if he would be our slave he might live, but as he won't
be that, won't toil and delve and hew for us, and will persist in
hunting, fishing, and roaming over the beautiful prairie land which the
Great Spirit gave him; in a word, since he will be free we kill him. Why
do I call this wild child the great anomaly of the human race? I will
tell you. Alone amongst savage tribes he has learnt the lesson which the
great mother Nature teaches to her sons through the voices of the night,
the for