MY FIRST TRIP TO THE ROCKIES 179 



Let us go on fighting them, and in the end we shall 

 kill them all, and the land will be ours.' 



The imported black man and the invading yellow 

 man African negro and heathen Chinee have come 

 to America to stay. These men work under the 

 white race, and so thrive, prosper, and increase. 

 But no one ever heard of a Red Indian hotel-porter 

 or railroad-car conductor, or cook, or washerman, or 

 farmer. ' The only good Indian,' says the western 

 trapper, ' is a dead Indian.' And in some sense 

 hard, matter-of-fact, cruel sense, no doubt the saying 

 is true. The continent owes its development to the 

 white race, supplemented by the subservient labour 

 of the black and the yellow. The native red man 

 takes no serious hand in the business, and is being 

 civilized off the face of his own land. He even 

 catches the white man's diseases, and so dies whole- 

 sale. Whole tribes of red men have been decimated, 

 and even exterminated, by small-pox and measles, 

 caught from the whites. When taken ill, they 

 thought themselves to be possessed by evil spirits, 

 and so their medicine-men banged drums and howled 

 over them to frighten the evil spirits away. 



The Red Indian of British Columbia is to some 

 extent an exception to the general process I have 

 endeavoured to describe. In Victoria, for example, 

 there are some prosperous Indian traders. Perhaps 

 the congenial fur trade of the Far North- West enables 

 them to thrive. On the whole, I am inclined to think 

 that John Bull has treated his Indians better than 

 Uncle Sam. When the pioneers of white civilization 

 first crossed the Missouri River some startling tales 

 were told, which go a long way to explain why the 

 Red Indians formerly made it a point of honour to 



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