our posterity; and forasmuch as the natives have formerly committed sundry insolences and outrages upon several Plantations of the English, and have of late combined themselves against us, etc.”
It is to be remembered that our aborigines were the first
of the class of human beings called “heathens” which our
English ancestors had ever known or seen. The theory
about them was that they were a wrecked and doomed
portion of the race of Adam, under a curse, — the spoil of the
Devil for eternity. The human form, with a mere fragment
of the intellectual and moral endowment of our race, could
secure at best only pity for such creatures. It was among
the rough frontiersmen of the West that the saying
originated, that the Indian has no more soul than a buffalo.
Our ancestors allowed him a soul, though under the circumstances
it was a questionable endowment. It may fairly be
inferred from the estimate our fathers made of the natives,
that they believed that existence had no intrinsic value for
an Indian. Taking into view also the fact that the whole
history of humanity on this globe gives us but a succession
of wars of races, the strong against the weak, the lighter
color against the darker color, the civilized against the
barbarous, we have to add to it also another, — that the
claim to possess, under divine mercy, a true and pure
religion, has been made the pretext for visiting what is called
the divine wrath upon all who are left in the darkness of
heathenism.
Our colonial period covers a series of woful and racking experiences to the native tribes, uniformly disastrous to them and beyond measure demoralizing to them as regards any form of permanent good which they might have derived from intercourse with the whites. All the tribes that had any dealings with the Europeans, hostile or friendly, and even some distant tribes that had as yet been unmolested in their forest recesses, were from the first parties to all the fierce strifes waged by the white men of rival nation-
