Such is the great valley of the Mississippi and Missouri, over almost every part of which I have extended my travels, and of which and of its future wealth and improvements, I have had sublime contemplations. I have viewed man in the artless and innocent simplicity of nature, in the full enjoyment of the luxuries which God had bestowed upon him. I have seen him happier than kings or princes _can_ be; with his pipe and little ones about him. I have seen him shrinking from civilized approach, which came _with all its vices_, like the _dead of night_, upon him: I have seen raised, too, in that _darkness, religion’s torch_, and seen him gaze and then retreat like the frightened deer, that are blinded by the light; I have seen him shrinking from the soil and haunts of his boyhood, bursting the strongest ties which bound him to the earth, and its pleasures; I have seen him set fire to his wigwam, and smooth over the graves of his fathers; I have seen him (’tis the only thing that will bring them) with tears of grief sliding over his cheeks, clap his hand in silence over his mouth, and take the _last look_ over his fair hunting grounds, and turn his face in sadness to the setting sun. All this I have seen performed in Nature’s silent dignity and grace, which forsook him not in the last extremity of misfortune and despair; and I have seen as often, the approach of the bustling, busy, talking, whistling, hopping, elated and exulting white man, with the first dip of the ploughshare, making sacrilegious trespass on the bones of the valiant dead. I have seen the _skull_, the _pipe_, and the _tomahawk_ rise from the ground together, in interrogations which the sophistry of the world can never answer. I have seen thus, in all its forms and features, the grand and irresistible march of civilization. I have seen this splendid Juggernaut rolling on, and beheld its sweeping desolation; and held converse with the happy thousands, living, as yet, beyond its influence, who have not been crushed, nor yet have dreamed of its approach. I have stood amidst these unsophisticated people, and contemplated with feelings of deepest regret, the certain approach of this overwhelming system, which will inevitably march on and prosper, until reluctant tears shall have watered every rod of this fair land; and from the towering cliffs of the Rocky Mountains, the luckless savage will turn back his swollen eye, over the blue and illimitable hunting grounds from whence he has fled, and there contemplate, like Caius Marius on the ruins of Carthage, their splendid desolation.