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Show 30 REPORT OF THE BOARD OF INDIAN COMMISSIONERS, know what patient, persevering effort, generation after generation, marrying the ages together, can accomplish. We are educated by a thousand years into the consciousness of the sacredness of law. These are very great powers. Now we stand side by side to- night with the rude tenants of the forest; men with few ideas, scanty traditions, rude arts. They come to ns with only three elements of humanity. One is the inde-structible sense of right and justice, which we never found a race so demoralized that they did not possess it. In their case these are added to an eloquence to assert their rights, and a courage to defend them, which places the Indian side by side with the Saxon and the Greek. No race ever outdid him. There is a class of men in our country that gather up the tradition of Indian violence, from Massachusetts Bay back to Colo-rado, and try to fire the heart with revenge. Why, fellow- citizens, if, from Philip of Pokanoket down to Black Kettle on the far plains and prairies, the Indian had not resisted us inch by inch for every acre of land that we stole from him, I should be ashamed of the soil that fed him and the sun that looked down upon him. What is to give our children courage? This same climate and this same sun. Is our race in the next thousand years to run out into cowardice, into pigmy thoughts, into standing coward and at bay ? No. The Indian who taught us what this American continent can make of manhood has written that record in a resistance that neither the omnipo-tence of civilization nor the overwhelming numbers of forty millions of people could ever reduce into yielding to ns tamely. I thank him. I am only primd of my country as a continent, because the race that preceded us was no race to yield up tamely their rights. I should be ashamed to be the successor of some of the roues that go- out in history. Why, you know, fellow- citizens, that the darkest page in human record is. the contact between civilization and the aborigines. The contact of civilization with barbarism is the scandal of history. The civilized man approaches his victim, demor-alizes him with his vices and then crushes him under his feet. And if we were to measure the justice or the merit of civilization by the fringe which comes in contact with barbarism, as we advance we should have to cover our faces and put our hands-upon our lips, for it is a record of infamy from the earliest stage which history has-recorded down to the present day; and the only and the brightest spot in that section of our history is that the Englishman, with all his art, with all his wonderful superi-ority, with all the omnipotence of his warlike machinery, with his overwhelming numbers, has never yet met the Indian and frightened him anywhere. You say, these representatives of three hundred thousand men, they can only appeal to our pity. From Massachusetts Bay back to their own hunting- grounds, every few miles is written down in imperishable record as a spot where the scanty, scattered tribe made a stand for justice and their own rights. Neither Greece, nor Germany, nor the French, nor the Scotch, can show a prouder record. And instead of searing it over with infamy and illustrated epithets, the future will recognize it as a glorious record of a race that never melted out and never died away, but stood up manfully, man by man, foot by foot, and fought it out for the land God gave him, against the world, which seemed to be poured out over him. I love the Indian, because there is something in the soil and climate that made him, that is fated in the thousand years that are coming to mold us, and I hope we shall always produce heroes as persistent as Philip and Moketavata, the Philip Sidney of the prairies. Now, one word more. Do you know the history of a single aboriginal race, brought in contact with a great civilized wave, that has ever behaved any better ? , Can you show me a finer record on any continent ? When the barbarians of India met Alexan-der of Macedon, and the Macedonian king hurled in their faces the same reproach that the press of America does at the Indian, " You defend yourselves savagely!" tho haughty chief replied, " Sir, if you knew how sweet freedom was, yon would defend it even with axes !" That is what the Indian says to us. No matter what be the mas-sacre; no matter what be the weapon ; no matter what be the ruthlessuess with which I assert my right against your uncounted millions. If you knew ho\ v sacred justice was and how sweet liberty, you would recognize that I was right in defending it even with these stern methods. But still there is another word to be said. Every fair- minded man that approaches the Indians comes back wr ith the same testimony. Every gentle heart, be it in the bosom of man or woman, every fair- minded man, be he soldier or citizen, comes back with the same record. The ordinary ruffian paints him black ; he has to in order to excuse himself. But ask Jesse Fremont, after her years of residence, with no man within reach but an Indian, in her lonely home, where the general left her week after week and mouth after month, and nothing but women under the roof! " They told me," said she, " to lock every door, to leave no article of property outside my walls. I never drew a lock, I never'brought in an article from the lawn, and I never had an unkind word, nor the triflingest article stolen in that whole two years." You go from the women to the Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, Bishop Whipple, twelve years at the head of that diocese, and within its girth the representative of some of these tribes and their neighbors. I was his guest for a day. Said he : " I have traveled on foot and in the saddle over every square mile of my diocese. I knowr every Indian settle- |
