Is it nothing forsooth for a nomadic race of buffalo slayers and maple sugar makers and cranberry pickers to rise from the dust and learn to love the wise institutions of a free government? To lay aside the old hickory bow of the original red man and take up the improved breech-loader? To take kindly to mixed drinks and Sabbath school picnics and temperance lectures and base-ball matches? To live contentedly about the agencies, playing poker for the whiskies during the cold and cruel winter? Then when the glad song of the robin awakes the echoes in spring, and the air is filled with a thousand nameless odors, among which may be detected the balmy breath of the government sock, to hie him away to the valleys with his fishing rod and flies (and other curious insects), or to spend the glorious days of midsummer at the camp-meeting or the horse-race? We can never know how his poor heart must burn to kick off his box-toed boots and throw aside his dress coat and suspenders, and gallop over the green hills and kick up his heels and whoop and yell, and tear out the tongues of a few white women and be sociable. They are indeed the nation's wards, a little frisky and playful at times, to be sure, but we must overlook that. There can be no reason nor justice in forbidding these freeborn descendants of these mighty races the inalienable right to lock up their front doors at the agency and put the key in their pockets, and light out, if they wish to, across the country, spreading gory desolation along their trail, eating the farmers' hard earned store, pillaging his home, murdering his household, burning his crops, riding their war horses over his watermelon vines, eating his winter preserves, scalping the hired man and wearing away the farmer's red-flannel undershirt wrong side to, and wrong side up if they want to. And if any ignorant upstart of the frontier, who feels a little sore over the loss of his family, undertakes to defraud these wild, free sons of the forest of any or all of their rights, let the lop-eared, slab-sided, knock-kneed, crosseyed, spavined, lantern-jawed, sway-backed, mangy, flannelmouthed poet of the educated and refined East write poetry about him till he is glad to apologize. ORIGIN OF BEAUTIFUL SNOW, |The following letter is from Captain Jack relative to the expedition under his charge, sent out for the purpose of bringing in the murdering group of Utes, against whom the government seems to maintain a feeling, it not of enmity, at least of coolness, and perhaps unfriendliness. The Indian is not generally supposed to be a humorist, or inclined to be facetious; but the letter below would seem to indicate that there is, at the least, a kind of grim, rough, uncouth attempt on his part to make a paragrapher of himself.