own, of
Ossawatomie), Thomas (General), Sheridan, Wallace (General), St. John
(Prohibitionist, Republican governor of Kansas), Lane (Jim Lane, of
Kansas), McPherson and Sedgewick (both Union generals), Case, Dallas,
Boone, DeKalb, McDonough, Schuyler, DeWitt, Putnam, Kossuth, Hancock,
Palo Alto, Cerro Gordo (reminders of the Mexican War), Clayton (of the
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), Emmet, Fremont, Taylor (President), Warren
(General), Clinton (DeWitt), Audubon, Story (Chief-Justice), Buchanan,
St. Clair, Montcalm, Kosciusko, Steuben, Tippecanoe,--to be acquainted
with these names is to possess knowledge of the virtual makers of
America in the range of statesmanship and military achievement.

One other item completes this tabulation. The aborigine of America,
the Indian, has left "his mark" across and through this Nation. He
never, in any true sense, owned this continent. He hunted and fought
across it. He swept by, like gusts of winter wind. He staid here, he
did not live here. Possession implies more than occupancy; it implies
improvement, industry, habitations, cities, destiny, as worked out by
sweat of toil. But this American Indian, who, in honor, never
possessed the territory, and has left no ruins of cities built by his
cunning and perseverance, nor codes, nor literature, has left us names
of lake, and stream, and mountain, and city. This stolid Indian,
though you would scarcely think it of him, had, in common with other
nomad and untutored peoples, poetic instincts. Their names, like those
of the Hebrews, had meanings, and were picturesque and beautiful,
sometimes, oftentimes, bewitchingly so. Some words have a music,
liquid as the whip-poor-will's notes heard in woodlands climbing a
mountain side. Minnehaha, "laughing water"--does not the word seem
laughing, like a falling stream? I once heard a distinguished
philologist say that, of all the rhythmic words he had hit upon in any
tongue, Winona was most exquisite. Surely it is not musical, but
music. See the pomp of names, like an Indian war march begun:
Athabasca, Wyoming, Tahoe, Niobrara, Mohawk, Sioux City, Nemaha,
Hiawatha, Seneca, Chippewa, Chicago, Saskatchewan, Pepacton ("meeting
of waters"), Winnepeg, Cheyenne, Manitoba, Penobscot, Narragansett,
Chicopee, Manhattan, and a host besides, a numberless procession.
Indian names cling with peculiar tenacity to lakes and rivers; for
those hunters knew all waters, and hunted beside all streams and lakes