The Irish Penny Journal, Vol. 1 No. 06, August 8, 1840Various
History
The Irish Penny Journal, Vol. 1 No. 06, August 8, 1840
Various
Ireland -- Periodicals
The Blackfeet, the Crows (their inveterate enemies), the Crees, the
Assinneboins, occupying the country from the mouth of the Yellow Stone
River to Lake Winnipeg, the Ojibbeways or Chippeways, holding the southern
shores of Lake Superior, the Lake of the Woods, and the Athabasca; the
Flatheads, on the head-waters of the Columbia; and the Cherokees, removed
from Georgia to the upper waters of the Arkansas, are also important
tribes; as are the Muskogee or Creek Indians, recently transplanted from
Georgia and Alabama to the Arkansas, seven hundred miles west of the
Mississippi.
The Seminolees are also in process of removal to the Arkansas, as are the
Enchees, once a powerful tribe, but now merging into the above, and with
them forming one people. Most of these tribes, as well as others that we
have not room even to specify, have been reduced, by the different
scourges before alluded to, in a manner frightful to contemplate. The
Delawares, for example, have lost 10,000 by small-pox alone; and from a
large and numerous tribe, now reckon 824 souls only! The Senecas, Oneidas
and Tuskaroras, once forming part of that great compact known as the “Six
Nations,” are now a mere name. The Kaskaskias, the Peorias, and the
Piankeshaws, have fallen victims to the practice of drinking spirits, and
to the diseases this fearful habit engenders, so that all are now reduced
to a few individuals. Some tribes are totally extinguished;--as, for
example the hospitable and friendly Mandans, of whom even the traders
themselves report that no one of them was ever known to destroy a white
man. These afford a melancholy instance of the rapidity with which the
extermination before alluded to is effected. In the year 1834, when Mr
Catlin visited these warlike and spirited, yet kindly dwellers of the
woods, their number was 2000; three years after, they were infected by the
traders with small-pox; and this, with certain suicides committed by
individuals who could not survive the loss of all they loved, destroyed
the whole tribe, some forty excepted, who were afterwards cut off by their
enemies of a neighbouring tribe, so that at this moment not a Mandan
exists over the whole wide continent, where, before the baleful appearance
of the white man, his free ancestors ranged so happily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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