American Continent, from the shores of the Pacific to the western line of Hudson's Bay. In the frozen habitat of their hyperborean ancestors, the Tinneh, as all accounts agree, are perfectly good-natured, lively, and not at all hard to get along with.
But once forced out from the northern limits of the lake region of British America—the Great Slave, the Great Bear, and others—whether by over-population, failure of food, or other cause, the Tinneh appears upon the stage as a conqueror, and as a diplomatist of the first class; he shows an unusual astuteness even for an Indian, and a daring which secures for him at once and forever an ascendency over all the tribes within reach of him. This remark will apply with equal force to the Rogue Rivers of Oregon, the Umpquas of northern California, the Hoopas of the same State, and the Navajoes and Apaches of New Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora, all of whom are members of this great Tinneh family.
In the Apache the Spaniard, whether as soldier or priest, found a foe whom no artifice could terrify into submission, whom no eloquence could wean from the superstitions of his ancestors. Indifferent to the bullets of the arquebuses in the hands of soldiers in armor clad, serenely insensible to the arguments of the friars and priests who claimed spiritual dominion over all other tribes, the naked Apache, with no weapons save his bow and arrows, lance, war-club, knife and shield, roamed over a vast empire, the lord of the soil—fiercer than the fiercest of tigers, wilder than the wild coyote he called his brother.
For years I have collected the data and have contemplated the project of writing the history of this people, based not only upon the accounts transmitted to us from the Spaniards and their descendants, the Mexicans, but upon the Apache's own story as conserved in his myths and traditions; but I have lacked both the leisure and the inclination to put the project into execution. It would require a man with the even-handed sense of justice possessed by a Guizot, and the keen, critical, analytical powers of a Gibbon, to deal fairly with a question in which the ferocity of the savage Red-man has been more than equalled by the ferocity of the Christian Caucasian; in which the occasional treachery of the aborigines has found its best excuse in the unvarying Punic faith of the Caucasian invader; in which promises on each side have been made only to deceive and to be broken; in which the
