“The Indians are children. Their arts, wars, treaties, alliances, habitations, crafts, properties, commerce, comforts, all belong to the very lowest and rudest ages of human existence. Some few of the chiefs have a narrow and short-sighted shrewdness, and very rarely in their history a really great man, like Pontiac or Tecumseh, has arisen among them; but this does not shake the general truth that they are utterly incompetent to cope in any way with the European or Caucasian race. Any band of school-boys from ten to fifteen years of age are quite as capable of ruling their appetites, devising and upholding a public policy, constituting and conducting a State or community, as an average Indian tribe. “I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more allowance for the dislike, aversion, and contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince any one that the poetic Indian, the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow, is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to human nature, — a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion save by the more ravenous demands of another. As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the Reservations of the Delawares, Pottawattomies, etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on earth, and saw their owners sitting round the doors of their lodges in the height of the planting season, and in as good, bright, planting weather as sun and soil ever made, I could not help saying, ‘These people must die out — there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree.’ ”
Mr. Greeley would have reconciled himself to the extinction of the Indian race by the working of natural and irresistible forces, incident to their own condition and qualities, stimulated in their processes of decline and decay, without any further agency of the white man to effect its extermination other than his proximity as destructive to the Indians.
What then is to be said as to the conditions and pros-
