community. It would
be a cause for gratification, if it could be said truly that these are
increasing, or that there was any decided progress in the general
character of the tribe. But, from all the evidence that can be
gathered, it does not appear that, for the last twelve or fourteen
years, there has been much, if any improvement in their moral and
social condition,"[13]

The situation in the Hassanamisco Tribe shows how the Indians in some
of these reservations became extinct. Interbreeding with both races
they passed either to the blacks or to the whites. "But little trace
of Indian descent is apparent in the members of this tribe," said J.
M. Earle in 1861. "It is most marked in the few who have mixed chiefly
with the whites, yet some of these have no perceptible indications of
it, and have become identified with the white race. The remainder of
the tribe have the distinguishing marks of African descent and mixed
African and white, of various grades, from the light quadroon and
mulatto, to the apparently nearly pure negro, and, in every successive
generation the slight remaining characteristics of the race become
less apparent."[14]

Referring to the Yarmouth Indians the investigator informs us that
these had tended to go almost altogether over to the white race. "With
this exception," said he, "nearly all of his descendants have
intermarried with whites, down to the present day, so that they are
substantially merged in the general community, having their social
relations with white people, with the exception of one or two
families."[15] It was observed that in all the families, in which both
heads are living, there were only two in which one of them was not
pure white, and those having the Indian blood were usually so little
colored, that it would hardly be noticed by one not acquainted with
the fact. Some of them had but one sixteenth part of Indian blood. Of
the two widows found there in 1861 one was the wife of a white man.
The other was a Marshpee Indian whose husband belonged to the Yarmouth
tribe and she associated with the people of color.

Discussing the Middleborough Indians, the same report said: "They have
been, for some time, commingled with them in the same community,
generally under as favorable circumstances, in most respects, as the
other colored population of the State, to which they assimilate and
have not been subjected to the peculiar present disadvantages under
which those labor who are re