While the waves of applause which ripple around this popular and characteristic rhapsody, grow calm against the solid shores of historic truth, we turn to another American view equally characteristic. 2. _The Indian character as seen through official spectacles._ Extract from the Report of the Secretary of the Interior:— “The beneficent policy of repression, steadily pursued by our government towards the Indian tribes still surviving, cannot fail to strike every one but themselves. While sentimental Christianity continues to dwell upon the rapid extinguishment of their tribes, the archives of this department bear gratifying witness to the more rapid extinguishment of their titles. “There now remain in our borders—which were, it must be admitted, for the sake of argument, once theirs—but about three hundred thousand of these nomad wanderers. Our people must feel an especial gratification in the proud reflection, that it is their bounty which, now reaching forth the comforts of our abundance to these remnants of tribes, supplies at the reasonable rate of some $10.15 per caput, the wants of such as are spared by our efficient and active army corps of Indian destructives. “This bounty is distributed by honest agents, who never fail, while dispensing it, to impress upon the recipients a proper regard for the moral suasion of our well-mounted rifles. The small commissions reserved from these treaty-stipulated funds, by these agents, is too American not to be recognized with patriotic pride; and the especial thanks of Congress are due to these self-denying distributers for the amount which they kindly leave to be disseminated among the intended beneficiaries. “There is a natural jealousy among our people in those States and Territories where former laws injudiciously, but, as it fortunately proves, unsuccessfully located these Indian remnants, against the continuous occupation of tracts of lands called reservations, to which they have been from time to time removed. I cannot too strongly recommend that this jealousy and acquisitiveness be duly respected, and new reservations somewhere be speedily provided. Both Providence and our need of their territory plainly mark the Indians as the American Ishmaelites, against whom everybody’s hand is raised, and whose shifting tent can only be steadied up permanently against the sunset on the Pacific Ocean.” Some people seem to think that the Indian was created to keep before us a _décolleté_ style of dress, adapted to the freedom of our institutions,—a traveller’s costume, most convenient for the administration of medical assistance, in case of such railroad divertisements and steamboat pyrotechnic displays as often enliven our journeyings. [Illustration: AN INDIAN RESERVATION. (p. 81) ]