The Punkapog Tribe of Indians formerly dwelt on a tract of land in Canton, Norfolk County, containing five thousand acres, granted them by the General Court of Massachusetts. Before 1861, however, they had lost all of this property, the last of it being sold by the guardian, about 1841, in pursuance of a resolve of the legislature. "The full-blood Indians of the tribe," says the report of 1861, "are all extinct. Their descendants, who, like those of all the other tribes in the States, are of various grades of mixtures, of Indian, white, and Negro blood, number, so far as is ascertained one hundred and seventeen persons."[12] According to the survey made in 1861 the moral condition of the Indians was rather low and it was a regret that the people of color exhibiting generally more moral stamina should be degraded by living among them. Accounting for this condition of Affairs a contemporary said of the low moral condition of the Fall River Indians in 1861: "The prejudice of color and caste, and the social proscription to which the colored people are subjected, has a twofold unfavorable effect upon them; first to detract from their self-respect and so to weaken the moral instincts, and then to throw them into the association of the more dissolute and degraded of other races, where they fall an easy prey to immoral habits. There are, however, in this tribe as well as the others, instances of those who rise above all the evil influences with which they are encompassed and maintain a good standing, as worthy and respectable members of the community. It would be a cause for gratification, if it could be said truly that these are increasing, or that there was any decided progress in the general character of the tribe. But, from all the evidence that can be gathered, it does not appear that, for the last twelve or fourteen years, there has been much, if any improvement in their moral and social condition,"[13] The situation in the Hassanamisco Tribe shows how the Indians in some of these reservations became extinct. Interbreeding with both races they passed either to the blacks or to the whites. "But little trace of Indian descent is apparent in the members of this tribe," said J. M. Earle in 1861. "It is most marked in the few who have mixed chiefly with the whites, yet some of these have no perceptible indications of it, and have become identified with the white race. The remainder of the tribe have the distinguishing marks of African descent and mixed African and white, of various grades, from the light quadroon and mulatto, to the apparently nearly pure negro, and, in every successive generation the slight remaining characteristics of the race become less apparent."[14]