MY FIRST TRIP TO THE ROCKIES 177 



A week later we went fifty miles further south 

 to Snake River, through a country then swarming 

 with antelope, in order to make our first acquaintance 

 with a tribe of Indians. The Ute tribe were then 

 peaceable, and were located in a reservation near 

 Snake River. A year or two after they became 

 restless, and finally attacked some settlers, and had 

 to be suppressed by force of arms. 



I have always regarded the Red Indian tribes of the 

 Rockies with some compassion. They, the rightful and 

 hereditary owners of the North American continent, 

 have been conquered and supplanted by the Anglo- 

 Saxon race by right only of the stronger hand and of 

 the higher intelligence. It is, we must presume, the 

 inevitable and fore- ordained result of the survival of 

 the fittest of the operation of the Divine law that has 

 decreed that man shall subdue and replenish the earth. 



With all his fine natural qualities for such qualities 

 he certainly possesses, such as virility, courage, and 

 some sense of honour and fidelity to his word the 

 Red Indian appears to have been incapable of initiating 

 and developing any of the mechanical and industrial 

 arts and sciences, and he has no faculty of administra- 

 tion. These, doubtless, are the capabilities that enable 

 the dominant white races of the earth to carry out 

 the Divine decree. The Red Indian of North America 

 possessed only two ideas of life fighting and hunting. 

 He never cultivated the soil. The making of rail- 

 roads, the building of factories, and the general 

 development of industrial and commercial life, were 

 not contained in his philosophy. 



If Columbus had never discovered America, the 

 indigenous Red Indian would still have been living in 

 happy, uncivilized ignorance, hunting buffalo and elk 



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