24 Field and Forest Rambles. 



with their progenitors. With reference to the hereditary and 

 transmissible diseases, such as have just been mentioned, it 

 is highly probable that they owe their origin to unsanitary 

 conditions of living rather than to any direct transmission from 

 the whites. Thus, a wooden shed badly built suffices for a 

 winter covering, without further preparation to exclude the 

 intense cold ; here, round an over-heated stove, the squaw and 

 children huddle, while wretched ground pallets of rags form 

 their bedding ; there is no' household comfort or economy 

 whatever, whole families living from hand to mouth. Of course 

 there are exceptions; such, however, is the pitiable condition 

 of the majority. But of all the besetting demons that ever 

 danced destruction around the Indian, that fiend has been 

 drunkenness. If only temperate habits could be formed, 

 and more trouble taken by the whites in encouraging them to 

 set out their villages on the models of the settlers, and in 

 making the aged comfortable, and in holding forth induce- 

 ments to the well behaved, instead of the live and let live 

 system hitherto pursued, there might still be hopes of pro- 

 longing their existence ; but as matters have been, and continue 

 to go on, it seems clear that there is a race between the red 

 man and the larger quadrupeds who shall be the first to 

 disappear from the land where both once flourished and 

 multiplied ! Unfortunately, however, he is of obdurate heart 

 and slow to adopt our manners and customs, the force of habit 

 being strong within him ; moreover, he soon finds that his 

 ways can never be our ways, and that, do what he may, even 

 to his utmost, he cannot manage to place himself in other 

 than a doubtful equality with even the poorest and humblest 

 of white men ; indeed, it is the case that, whether pure bred 

 or half-caste, nay, even without any traceable blood- of an 

 Indian in his veins, he carries traits of character and habits 

 which more or less exclude him, irrespective of caste, from 

 the society of all excepting his own people. I was often 

 amused with what doubtless is a relic of the conciliatory 



