No effort can save the red man from extermination that humanity or
Christianity may suggest. When deprived of his natural food furnished
by the forest, he knows not nor can he be taught the means of
supplying the want. The capacities of his brain will not admit of the
cultivation necessary to that end. And as he has done in the presence
of civilization, he will know none of its arts; and receiving or
commanding none of its results, he will wilt and die.
Here, on the very spot where I am writing, is evidence in abundance of
the facts here stated. Every effort to civilize and make the nomadic
Indian a cultivator of the earth--here has been tried, and within my
memory. Missionary establishments were here, schools, churches,
fields, implements, example and its blessings, all without effect.
Nothing now remains to tell of these efforts but a few miserable
ruins; nothing in any change of character or condition of the Indian.
And here, where fifty years ago, with me, he hunted the red deer and
wild turkey for the meat of his family and the clothing of himself and
offspring--to-day he would be a curiosity, and one never seen by half
the population which appropriates and cultivates the soil over which
he wandered in the chase.
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