t of
the country, not because they are rendered helpless by the force of
their location, nor because they have any traditional friendship for the
whites, nor because they do not experience suffering enough to impel a
warlike people to a struggle for life, but because they are not fighting
Indians. Actual outrage might drive some of these tribes to resistance;
but, under the slow wasting-away of their means of subsistence, and the
gradual pressure of the settlements, they are, and are likely to remain,
wholly passive, accepting their fate, and sinking to the lowest point of
human misery without a single heroic effort. Some of these tribes have
been "put upon" by their more warlike neighbors through many
generations, driven from their original hunting-grounds, and harassed
even in the mountains where they have taken refuge, until their spirit
has been utterly crushed, and they have become as submissive as the
Southern negroes. This is true of large numbers of the Indians of
Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Southern California. They have neither the
individual courage nor the instinct of confederation entitling them to
be reckoned among the potentially hostile tribes.

Still, again, we count out several powerful tribes, able to bring five
hundred or a thousand warriors each into the field, which, by reason of
traditional friendship and their frequent alliance with our troops in
campaigns against hostile Indians, are sure to remain the friends of the
government under any tolerable treatment. Indeed, neglect and abuse seem
insufficient to alienate these allies. Their faith once pledged, and
friendship cemented by sacrifices and sufferings, they cling to the
fortunes of the whites with romantic fidelity. Such are the
Arickarees,[C] Mandans, and Gros Ventres of the Upper Missouri; such
the Pawnees of Kansas; such the Flatheads, Kootenays, and Pend
d'Oreilles, whose boast is that their tribes never killed a white man;
such, in a degree, the Crows of Montana. These tribes, and others of
less consequence, are not only sure, in the event of kindly treatment by
the government, to remain its fast friends, but they may be relied upon
in the future, as in the past, to do much to check the audacity of their
hostile neighbors, and, in the last resort, to furnish re-enforcements
of the most effective and economical sort to the troops operating
against predatory bands.

Having excluded all tribes and bands of the character, or in the
positio