- They preserved fruits, etc., with syrup, wild honey, etc.
In the face of these achievements, who can doubt that the red man could have assimilated the civilization of the whites? Evidently there was no real effort on the part of the colonists, even of the hypen-religious Puritans, to find a reasonable basis on which the two races could work out a common destiny. The spirit of exploitation was rampant and the weaker, less advanced Indians went down before the superior shrewdness and unscrupulous ruthlessness of his Caucasian adversary. The history of the white man's dealings with the red man is a record of his cruelty, exploitation and dirty chicanery that bourgeois historians try hard to conceal, its last monumental infamy being the destruction of the buffalo during the seventies, by which act the Indians of the West were forced upon the reservation and reduced from freemen to that curious position of a "ward of the government"—"neither man nor boy; just hobbledehoy."
