Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
History
Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- 19th century; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages around the world
Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion on the Indian
question. Rifle and revolver are their only policy. The New Englanders,
who are all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings with the
red men, are not similarly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of
the nature of the Indian, call out for agricultural employment for the
braves; those who know nothing of the Indian‘s life demand that
“reserves” be set aside for him, forgetting that no “reserve” can be
large enough to hold the buffalo, and that without the buffalo the red
men must plow or starve.
Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all but a total
failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies
living at St. Mary‘s mission, the Delawares existing at Leavenworth; but
in all these cases there is a large infusion of white blood. The
Canadian Hurons are completely civilized; but then they are completely
French. If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will
suddenly return to his untamed state. An Indian girl, one of the most
orderly of the pupils at a ladies’ school, has been known, on feeling
herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let down her back hair,
paint her face, and howl. The same tendency showed itself in the case of
the Delaware chief who built himself a white man‘s house, and lived in
it thirty years, but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the
dining-room, in disgust. Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who
visited Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young Englishman, who
came out soon after, told the President that he was going West, he gave
him a letter to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas. The
Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal
friendship, slept upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his
own hand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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