A few, perhaps, had fled from other States to avoid the consequences of technical legal constructions which would sadly interfere with their unpuritanical ways. But these were not numerous. The early settlers, taken all in all, possessed many virtues and qualifications that entitled them to the honor which worthy actions and noble deeds guarantee to those who do them. They had come from widely different birth-lands, and brought with them habits that had made up their lives; and though each may have felt sure their own was the better way, they soon learned that honest people may differ and still be honest. And to govern themselves accordingly, each yielded, without sacrifice of principle, their hereditary whims and peculiar ways, and left the weightier matters of orthodoxy or heterodoxy to be argued by those who had nothing better with which to occupy their time than to muddle their own and other people’s brains with abstruse themes. The “early settlers” were eminently practical, and withal successful in moulding out of the heterogeneous mass of whims and prejudices a common public sentiment, acceptable to all, or nearly so. And thus, they grew, not only in numbers but in wealth, power, intelligence, and patriotism, until to-day there may be found on the once happy home of Pow-e-shiek a people rivalling those of any other State, surpassing many of them in that greatest and noblest of all virtues, “love for your neighbor.” No people in all this grand republic furnished truer or braver men for the holocaust of blood required to reconsecrate the soil of America to freedom and justice, than those whose homes are built on the ruins of Pow-e-shiek’s early hunting-grounds. Proud as the record may be, it shall yet glow with names written by an almost supernal fire, that warms into life the immortal thought of poets, and the burning eloquence of orators. We are proud of the record of the past, and cherish bright hopes of the future. But with all our patriotic exultations, memory of Pow-e-shiek’s sacrifices comes up to mingle sadness with our joy. Sadness, not the offspring of reproach of conscience for unfair treatment to him or his people by those who came after he had gone at the invitation of the Government, but sadness because he and his people could not enjoy what other races always have, the privilege of a higher civilization; sadness, because, while our gates are thrown wide open and over them is written in almost every tongue known among nations, “Come share our country and our government with us,” it was closed behind him and his race, and over those words painted, in characters which he understood, “Begone!” CHAPTER II. OVERLAND: BLOOD FOR BLOOD.