ges have supervened it is
difficult to realize. This was then a dense, unsettled wilderness. The
wild deer was on every hill, in every valley. Limpid streams purled
rippling and gladly along pebbly beds, and fell babbling over great
rocks. These alone disturbed the profound silence, where solitude
brooded, and quiet was at home. These wild forests extended west to
Line Creek, then the dividing line between the Indian possessions and
the newly acquired territory now constituting the State of Alabama.
Upon this territory of untamed wilderness there wandered then fifty
thousand Indians, the remnant of the mighty nation of Muscogees, who
one hundred and thirty years ago welcomed the white man at Yamactow,
now Savannah, and tendered him a home in the New World. Fifty years
ago he had progressed to the banks of the Ocmulgee, driving before him
the aboriginal inhabitant, and appropriating his domains. Here for a
time his march was stayed. But the Indian had gone forward to meet the
white man coming from the Mississippi to surround him, the more surely
to effect his ultimate destruction and give his home and acres to the
enterprise and capacity of the white man.

Wandering through these wilds fifty years ago, I did not deem this end
would be so soon accomplished. Here now is the city and the village,
the farm-house and extended fields, the railroads and highways, and
hundreds of thousands of busy men who had not then a being. The
appurtenances of civilization everywhere greet you: many of these are
worn and mossed over with the lapse of time and appear tired of the
weight of wasting years. The red men, away in the West, have dwindled
to a mere handful, still flying before the white man, and shrinking
away from his hated civilization.

Is this cruel and sinful--or the silent, mysterious operation of the
laws of nature? One people succeeds another, as day comes after day,
and years follow years. Upon this continent the Indian found the
evidences in abundance of a preceding people, the monuments of whose
existence he disregards, but which, in the earth-mounds rising up over
all the land, arrest the white man's attention and wonder. He inquires
of the Indian inhabitant he is expelling from the country, Who was the
architect of these, and what their signification? and is answered: We
have no tradition which tells; our people found them when they came,
as you find them to-day. These traditions give the history of the
nations now he