the sixteenth century were versed in as much cruelty as the Amerinds had ever dreamed of; yet in the midst of it all there were men like Las Casas and Viceroy Mendoza, who had no sympathy with the barbarities practised, and whose characters bring relief in the broad and hideous blackness. Ship-loads of slaves were carried off each year, and the system of _repartimientos_ placed every Amerind in bondage. [Illustration: SOUTH PORTION OF THE TEWA PUEBLO OF TAOS, NEW MEXICO Adobé construction ] Opposition was punished in the most terrible ways possible to devise. In one instance the offenders, seventeen or eighteen caciques, were strangled and mangled by dogs kept for the purpose, the execution taking place in the public square, so that the struggles of the unfortunates might make a spectacle. Again the Spaniards invited some chiefs to a conference, as told by Brinton, in a large wooden building, which was then burned up with the chiefs in it. But it is not necessary to go back so far for examples of the treacherous brutality with which the whites have treated the Amerinds. Were it so, the cruelty and injustice might perhaps be regarded as merely circumstances of the period, but Beckwourth, in his _Narrative_,[6] relates an incident, also referred to by Washington Irving, quite as horrible as any that occurred in the sixteenth century. Beckwourth came upon some white trappers who had captured two Amerinds from a party of Arikarees who had stolen their horses. The Arikarees offered to return some, but not all, of the horses in exchange for the prisoners, but the trappers declared they would burn their captives alive if all the horses were not returned. The threat was disregarded. Thereupon the logs on the top of a huge fire were separated, the two helpless, chain-bound prisoners were dropped into the red furnace, and the flaming logs replaced. “There was a terrible struggle for a moment,” says Beckwourth, “then all was still.” And thus was another lesson of the mercy and justice of the White rendered unto the Red. [Illustration: SEATED FIGURE CARVED IN TRACHYTE From débris of hieroglyphic steps, Copan. Slightly larger than life size ] Nearer to us than this we have an incident even more diabolical, because without the provocation the trappers had. Horse stealing down to recent times in the West has always been liable to punishment by death, so the trappers might be somewhat excused on that ground in the minds of some, but in the year 1898, in the Indian Territory, two Amerinds were burned alive at the stake by a mob of whites. The accusation, too, was a mere suspicion, and it was later established that the Amerinds were perfectly innocent. After such deeds we may well pause when our inclination is to vaunt the superiority of the white men over the red.