they have
prized highly their old hunting-grounds, and felt a warm and lively
attachment to their beautiful village-sites, and regarded with especial
veneration the burial-places of their fathers, their whole history
attests; but of their own weakness in war, before the arms and numbers
of their enemies, they must have been convinced at a very early period:
and they were neither so dull in apprehension, nor so weak in intellect,
as not soon to have perceived the utter hopelessness, and felt the mad
folly, of a continued contest with their invaders. Long before the
settlement of the whites upon this continent, the Indians had been
subject to bloody and exterminating wars among themselves; and such
conflicts had generally resulted in the flight of the weaker party
toward the West, and the occupancy of their lands by the conquerors.
Many of the tribes had a tradition among them, and regarded it as their
unchangeable destiny, that they were to journey from the rising to the
setting sun, on their way to the bright waters and the green forests of
the "Spirit Land;" and the working out of this destiny seems apparent,
if not in the location, course, and character of the tumult and other
remains of the great aboriginal nations of whom even tradition furnishes
no account, certainly in what we know of the history of the tribes found
on the Atlantic coast by the first European settlers.

It seems fairly presumable, from our knowledge of the history and
character of the North American Indians, that had they been left to
the promptings of their own judgments, and been influenced only by the
deliberations of their own councils, they would, after a brief, but
perhaps most bloody, resistance to the encroachments of the whites, have
bowed to what would have struck their untutored minds as an inevitable
destiny, and year after year flowed silently, as the European wave
pressed upon them, further and further into the vast wildernesses
of the mighty West. But left to their own judgments, or their own
deliberations, they never have been. Early armed by renegade white men
with European weapons, and taught the improvement of their own rude
instruments of warfare, and instigated not only to oppose the strides
of their enemies after territory, but to commit depredations upon their
settlements, and to attempt to chastise them at their very thresholds,
they drew down upon themselves the wrath of a people which is not slow
to anger, nor easily appe