OCR Text |
Show A SHORT TALK WITH THE READER The romance and weird fascination which belong to immense solitudes and untenanted wilds are fading away and, in a few years, will be as if they were not. The in tangible and the immaterial leave no memories after them. The march of civilization is a benediction for the fu ture, but it is also a devastation before which savage na ture and savage man must go down. Unable or unwilling to adapt himself to new conditions and to the demands of a life foreign to his nature and his experience original man of North America is doomed, like the wild beast he hunted, to extinction. For centuries he stubbornly contested the white man's right to invade and seize upon his hunting grounds; he was no coward and when compelled, at last, to strike a truce with his enemy, he felt that Fate was against him, yielded to the inevitable and all was over. In the Baca-tete mountains, amid the terrifying solitudes of the Sierras of Northern Mexico, the Yaquis last of the fighting tribes is disappearing in a lake of blood and when he is submerged the last dread war- whoop will shriek his requiem. It will never again be heard upon the earth. The lonely regions of our great continent, over which there brooded for unnumbered ages the silence which was before creation, are disappearing with the vanishing Indian; a new vegetable and a new animal life are sup planting the old now on the road to obliteration. The ruin is pathetic, but inevitable. |