Three Quiet Days 



103 



the case, the probability that the Indian, offended by one white 

 man, childUke, thereafter conceives all whites his natural enemy, 

 and his quite human resentment of the usurpation of his hunting 

 grounds by a strange people, do not exist. By his own account, 

 scout and fighter in several Indian wars, witness of every refine- 

 ment of aboriginal cruelty, 

 Mr. Frohman was emphatic 

 in confirmation of the old 

 aphorism of the plains, that 

 "the only good Injun is a 

 dead one," and to him the 

 slaughter of an Indian was of 

 less consequence than the kill- 

 ing of a partridge. Passing 

 over the stated inference, 

 drawn from his own remarks, 

 that the Indian was not to 

 be considered a human being 

 at all, Mr. Frohman frankly 

 could not account for the 

 fact that the Canadian Gov- 

 ernment had had no such 

 trouble with its Indians as 

 had the United States, and 

 that the history of settlement 

 in the Canadian west showed 

 no such record of massacres 



and uprisings as did the western states. To the statement that 

 entire communities in Canada were of Indian nationality, farming, 

 operating factories, electing town officers and voting at parlia- 

 mentary elections, taking the responsibility of citizenship as fully 

 as their white neighbors, he responded: "There must have been 

 some white blood in them." 



Mr. Frohman, with a companion, a dentist with a taste for 

 hunting, had just come down from the hills with his winter supply 

 of elk meat, the hindquarters of one carcass in which weighed two 

 hundred and fifty pounds, and the forequarters thickly lined with 

 the whitest and purest fat, hard and firm. "Just over the first 

 joint above the knee, and three inches forward, and you'll get 

 8 



''Ben'' 



