The American Missionary — Volume 32, No. 10, October, 1878Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 32, No. 10, October, 1878
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
In war or peace the Indian is cruel in revenge; but we cannot
forget the massacres of Memphis. The victim in his grasp is
tortured; but we remember the Chisholm and Hamburg horrors, and
those in the negro parishes outside of New Orleans. He destroys
without mercy, and devastates without remorse; but the Pittsburgh
riots, the New York mobs, and the Commune of San Francisco, belong
to the white race. He has burnt a few of our hamlets and settlers’
cabins. We have swept him and his household and his camps,—the
only houses and cities that he can call his own—with canister and
grape, the hail of iron and lead and fire. Having no commissariat,
he has starved his prisoners. Without transportation or fortress
for their safe keeping, he often raises the black flag and slays
them at sight. But again and again, at the outset of battle, the
order has moved along our line, “Take no prisoners!” Cold as
steel, we have made a jest of his life, and hailed him good only
when dead. We have steadily driven him from one hunting ground to
another, over the rivers and beyond the lakes, hemmed him in from
the gulfs and the oceans, crowded him off the prairies into rugged
mountains, compelled him to sell his native lands, and have let
loose the dogs of war upon him, because, forsooth, he has had the
manhood to resist our march of doom against his race. If he has
counted us the aggressors and the outlaws, we have hurled back upon
him the fiercest invective known to human speech. If he, in the
wild delirium of madness, has outraged and mutilated his captive,
we have, in fiercer and more fiery passion, counselled, if not
plotted, his extermination.
Progress in Civilization.
Proofs press upon the eye and ear of agents and employees that he
does more and better with the means in his hand for the support
of himself and family than other men would. I visited ten Indian
families at their homes on the S’Kokomish reservation, on the
15th of August, and saw twenty more of their frame-boarded houses
enclosed within their small claims. About thirty of the Indians,
having finished haying, were away from home, most of them hunting
in the mountains, or fishing at the weirs. Those at home had neat,
well swept rooms, usually a sitting-room, bed-room and kitchen.
Almost every one had a cooking stove, with its furniture, and
crockery on the table, or in the cupboard a few chairs or benches,
a clock in every house (often two), occasionally a rocking-chair
and bureau, always one or two bedsteads, with beds and blankets,
and often covered with a neat quilt of the wife’s taste and make.
Cards and pictures were hung on the walls, and some of their
photographs, also. They were dressed in comfortable clothes, and
were glad of a call and a kindly greeting. They are adopting the
manners of their white teachers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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