66 REVIEWS — THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



Daniel perislied amid a band of his Indian converts, massacred by the- 

 pagan Iroquois ; and many successive martyr missionaries suffered at 

 the stake, or were put to frightful tortures, while engaged in their 

 self-denying labours. When at length a miserable remnant of the 

 Huron nation alone survived the exterminating warfare of their fero- 

 cious enemies, they were gathered together by the missionary priests, 

 and settled in the neighbourhood of Quebec, where their descendants 

 of mixed blood still survive. But our modern " missionary," the 

 A.bbe Domenech, in his "Map showing the actual siiuation of the 

 Indian tribes and the country described," represents the Hurons 

 as still in occupation of the region, from whence the last of them 

 disappeared while the Cardinal Richelieu still ruled the destinies of 

 France and her colonies. Had our Abbe actually visited the country 

 of the savage Hurons, he would have done so in a comfortable railway 

 car, and handed his well-furnished valise to mine host's baggage- 

 porter ; in which case he might have questioned the propriety of 

 including it within any one of his " great deserts." 



"The Red Men are melting like snow before the sun," was'the- 

 touching simile of a Miami orator. Whole nations have been utterly 

 exterminated, and the last remnants of others are rapidly following in 

 their wake. Yet still the aborigines assert their claim to a broad and 

 ample domain. Amid all the fictitious romance associated with the 

 name of the Red Indian, we fear that neither Canadian philanthropists 

 nor British Christians are fully alive to their claims on us, or to the 

 numbers still surviving to advance such claims. If we assert the indis- 

 putable rights of conquerors and colonists, to our American posses- 

 sions, do these rights involve no corresponding duties ? In the 

 United States, including the Confederate Southerners, with Texas and 

 New Mexico, the Indians number about 500,000 ; in and around the 

 settled British Provinces they cannot be less than 10,000 ; and 

 throughout British North America, exclusive of the Esquimaux, they 

 have been estimated at 125,000. On these great numbers (apart from 

 those of Mexico, Central and Southern America,) Christianity and 

 civilization have been equally inoperative. The great mass is still 

 pagan ; and what is surely a grave reproach to the British nation 

 and her colonies, this statement applies with full force to many tribes- 

 long settled and surrounded by a white population ; who regard with 

 a contemptuous indifference, the dissipated, idle, improvident descend- 

 ant of the old savage hunter and warrior of the forest. 



