RED AND WHITE ON THE BORDER 105 



side has to complain of bitter wrongs. Many of the frontiersmen are 

 brutal, reckless, and overbearing ; most of the Indians are treacherous, 

 revengeful, and fiendishly cruel. Crime and bloodshed are the only possi- 

 ble results when such men are brought in contact. Writers usually pay 

 heed only to one side of the story ; they recite the crimes committed by 

 one party, whether whites or Indians, and omit all reference to the equally 

 numerous sins of the other. In our dealings with the Indians we have 

 erred quite as often through sentimentality as through willful wrong-doing. 

 Out of my own short experience I could recite a dozen instances of white 

 outrages which, if told alone, would seem to justify all the outcry raised on 

 behalf of the Indian; and I could also tell of as many Indian atrocities 

 which make one almost feel that not a single one of the race should be left 

 alive. 



The chief trouble arises from the feeling alluded to in this last sen- 

 tence^ — the tendency on each side to hold the race, and not the individual, 

 responsible for the deeds of the latter. The skirmish between the cow- 

 boys and the Cheyennes, spoken of above, offers a case in point. It was 

 afterwards found out that two horse-thieves had stolen some ponies from 

 the Cheyennes. The latter at once sallied out and attempted to take 

 some from a cow camp, and a fight resulted. In exactly the same way I 

 once knew a party of buffalo hunters, who had been robbed of their horses 

 by the Sioux, to retaliate by stealing an equal number from some perfectly 

 peaceful Grosventres. A white or an Indian who would not himself commit 

 any outrage will yet make no effort to prevent his fellows from organizing 

 expeditions against men of the rival race. This is natural enough where 

 law is weak, and where, in consequence, every man has as much as he 

 can do to protect himself without meddling in the quarrels of his neigh- 

 bors. Thus a white community will often refrain from taking active steps 

 against men who steal horses only from the Indians, although I have 

 known a number of instances where the ranchmen have themselves 

 stopped such outrages. The Indians behave in the same way. There is 

 a peaceful tribe not very far from us which harbors two or three red horse- 

 thieves, who steal from the whites at every chance. Recently, in our 

 country, an expedition was raised to go against these horse-thieves, and 

 it was only with the utmost difficulty that it was stopped : had it actually 

 gone, accompanied as it would have been by scoundrels bent on plunder, 

 as well as by wronged men who thought all redskins pretty much alike, 

 the inevitable result would have been a bloody fight with all the Indians, 

 both good and bad. 



Not only do Indians differ individually, but they differ as tribes. An 



