“Through the wide regions that were once the inheritance of my people--and for ages they roved as free as the wild winds--resounds the axe of the white man. The paths of your forefathers are polluted by the their steps, and your hunting-grounds are every day wrested from you by their arts. Once on the shores of the mighty ocean, your fathers were wont to enjoy all the luxuriant delights of the deep. Now, you are exiles in swamps, or on barren hills; and these wretched possessions you enjoy by the precarious tenure of the white man’s will. The shrill cry of revelry or war, no more is heard on the majestic shores of the Hudson, or the sweet banks of the silver Mohawk. There where the Indian lived and died, free as the air he breathed, and chased the panther and the deer from morning until evening--even there the Christian slave cultivates the soil in undisturbed possession; and as he whistles behind the plough, turns up the sacred remains of your buried ancestors. Have you not heard at evening, and sometimes in the dead of night, those mournful and melodious sounds that steal through the deep valleys, or along the mountain sides,’ like the song of echo? These are the wailings of those spirits whose bones have been turned up by the sacrilegious labors of the white men, and left to the mercy of the rain and the tempest. They call upon you to avenge them--they adjure you, by motives that rouse the hearts of the brave, to wake from your long sleep, and, by returning to these invaders of the grave the long arrears of vengeance, restore again the tired and wandering spirits to their blissful paradise far beyond the blue hills. * * The answering voices heard from the caves and hollows, which the Latins call echo, the Indians suppose to be the wailings of souls wandering through these places. “These are the blessings you owe to the Christians. They have driven your fathers from their ancient inheritance--they have destroyed them with the sword and poisonous liquors--they have dug up their bones, and left them to blanch in the wind, and now they aim at completing your wrongs, and insuring your destruction, by cheating you into the belief of that divinity, whose very precepts they plead in justification of all the miseries they have heaped upon your race.