No treaties are made with the buffalo. He is swindled by no agents, post-traders or secretaries at war. He addresses no pathetic remonstrances to his Great Father, and expresses no sense of his wrongs by taking scalps or inflicting worse horrors still. School-houses, temperance societies, small-pox and whiskey are not for him. Yet does he move toward annihilation, as we have said, in singularly close lock-step with the Indian. His problem, like the other, is being settled by the settler. Were the red man edible, the parallelism in destiny would be more complete. As it is, the quadruped will disappear before the biped native. Individuals of the latter will be absorbed into the bosom of civilization, as the remnants of the Senecas, the Oneidas and the Pamunkeys have long since been. As a race, the Indians' best hope is euthanasia. Even that is desperately uncertain. The Cherokees, Creeks and Choctaws, with their minor associates in the Indian Territory, are, though not increasing in numbers, living in peace and something like industry. Yet they are at the mercy of any vagabond who should take it into his head to "salt" with gold-dust or silver-ore any ravine in the midst of their country. No law and no army would avail to repel the rush. They would go the way of the Sioux of the Black Hills, and would have only the choice of drifting out of existence on the outskirts of white society or of being washed high and dry over the frontier. Where are the sixty thousand Indians who at the time of the transfer of California were so comfortably coddled under the wing of the missions? They have been the victims of no recorded war, and the agents never had a chance at them. They have gone, however, with a rapidity unexampled anywhere east of the mountains. Solutions of the Indian problem are endless, and the writer of the book named at the head of these paragraphs has his shy at it. His plan is new chiefly in blaming all round--traders, Quakers, Indians, government and frontiersmen. If we can venture to centralize his invective, we should lay it specially on the heads of the class the Indians term "squaw-men"--the whites who have Indian wives and are established among the lodges. Of these he gives us a conjectural census--a hundred agencies and reservations and ten squaw-men to each. From this thousand are drawn all the interpreters; and not a solitary interpreter, Colonel Dodge insists, can be relied upon. They are, every man of them, in league with the agents and traders against the government and the Indians. The two last named--parties of the first part, as we should style them--never come together and never understand each other. The colonel's cure is remitting the whole thing to army control. But that, we need not say, has been tried, with results by no means brilliant.