Indians have been humiliated and crushed. A savage reduced to the will, and to dependence on the support or charity, of a white man is indeed a forlorn and repulsive spectacle. There is about him none of the sad repression of spirit of the caged lion, but rather the mean aspect and submission of the whipped cur. A savage loses all that made and manifested his manhood when he parts with his own way of life, with his fellows and surroundings, and becomes a dependent upon civilization; for in his mature years he will never be a helper or a sharer in civilization.
Remnants of the Indian tribes lingered long in our old colonies and towns. There were thirteen hundred of them left in Connecticut at the opening of our Revolution. There are a thousand of them now in Maine. Here and there in our country towns, as has been stated, are patches of land still pledged to them, and there are trust funds secured for their benefit. They generally present types of reversion, not merely to savagery, but to stages behind or below it. It has been said that the utmost result reached in the attempts to civilize an Indian, has been the turning of a wild animal into a tame brute. The Indian regards civilization as a form of duress and imprisonment, in indoors or local confinement, in decencies, in clothing, dwellings, intercourse, and toil. There are vastly more white men who agree with him in this than of his own race who disagree with him. If the Tartar is underneath the skin of a Russian, so in many of us is the craving for the wild license of Nature.
After King Philip's War, such of the remnants of the tribes as were too spiritless to seek affiliation with the River and New York Indians were kept under jealous watch, especially by the frontier settlements. Their condition was poor and mean, and their character answered to it, as shown in their craven and sullen demeanor. They never could commend themselves as friends or as desirable acquaintances of our farmers and thrifty householders. “Vermin”
