by a branch), had not responded so promptly to the new condition of affairs, but its growth had been steady, and its population had not been burdened with the same class of loafers who for so long a time held high carnival in Tombstone, Deming, and elsewhere. Prescott had always boasted of its intelligent, bright family society—thoroughly American in the best sense—and the boast was still true.
There is no point in the southwestern country so well adapted, none that can compare with Prescott as the site of a large Indian school; and when the time comes, as I am certain it is to come, when we shall recognize the absurdity of educating a few Indian boys and then returning them back to their tribes, in which they can exert no influence, but can excite only jealousy on account of their superior attainments—when by a slight increase of appropriations, the whole race of Indian boys and girls could be lifted from savagery into the path to a better life—Prescott will become the site of such a school. It is education which is to be the main lever in this elevation, but it is wholesale education, not retail. This phase of the case impressed itself upon the early settlers in Canada, who provided most liberally for the training of, comparatively speaking, great numbers of the Algonquin youth of both sexes. In Mexico was erected the first school for the education of the native American—the college at Patzcuaro—built before foot of Puritan had touched the rock of Plymouth.
Prescott possesses the advantages of being the centre of a district inhabited by numbers of tribes whose children could be educated so near their own homes that parents would feel easier in regard to them, and yet the youngsters would be far removed from tribal influences and in the midst of a thoroughly progressive American community. The climate cannot be excelled anywhere; the water is as good as can be found; and the scenery—of granite peaks, grassy meads, balmy pine forests, and placid streamlets—cannot well be surpassed. The post of Fort Whipple could be transferred to the Interior Department, and there would be found ready to hand the houses for teachers, the school-rooms, dormitories, refectories, blacksmith-shops, wagoners' shops, saddlers' shops, stables, granaries, and other buildings readily adaptable to the purposes of instruction in various handicrafts. Five hundred children, equally divided as to sex, could be selected from the great tribes of the Navajos, Apaches, Hualpais, Mojaves, Yu-
