herited from their ancestors were lost. They became in their own estimation a degraded, dependent race. The Government, availing itself of their weakness and want of energy, succeeded by bribes and menaces in obtaining the best portions of their country, and eventually in driving them from the land of their birth to a distant home in an unknown region.
“This distressing chapter of aboriginal history began at the treaty of Greenville, in 1795, and terminated in less than fifty years. The writer of these notes witnessed its commencement, progress, and close.”—Burnet’s Notes on North-west Territory.
NES PERCÉS AND FLAT-HEADS IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
“They were friendly in their dispositions, and honest to the most scrupulous degree in their intercourse with the white men. * * * Simply to call these people religious would convey but a faint idea of the deep hue of piety and devotion which pervades the whole of their conduct. Their honesty is immaculate; and their purity of purpose and their observance of the rites of their religion are most uniform and remarkable. They are certainly more like a nation of saints than a horde of savages.”—Captain Bonneville's Narrative, revised by W. Irving.
“I fearlessly assert to the world, and I defy contradiction, that the North American Indian is everywhere in his native state a highly moral and religious being, endowed by his Maker with an intuitive knowledge of some great Author of his being and the universe—in dread of whose displeasure he constantly lives with the apprehension before him of a future state, when he expects to be rewarded or punished according to the merits he has gained or forfeited in this world.
“I never saw any other people who spend so much of their lives in humbling themselves before and worshipping the Great Spirit as these tribes do, nor any whom I would not as soon suspect of insincerity and hypocrisy.
“Self-denial and self-torture, and almost self-immolation, are continual modes of appealing to the Great Spirit for his countenance and forgiveness.
“To each other I have found these people kind and honorable, and endowed with every feeling of parental, filial, and conjugal affection that is met with in more enlightened communities.”—Catlin’s North American Indians.
Mr. Catlin spent eight years among the Indians more than forty years ago. He travelled among the wildest of them, lived
