THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 545 



sellers and traders in the wilderness, to whose enormous exactions their semi-civilized 

 habits and appetites have subjected them, will assuredly pity them. Where they 

 have to quit their acquired luxuries, or pay ten times their accustomed prices for 

 them, and to scuffle for a few years upon the plains, with the wild tribes, and with 

 white men also, for the flesh and the skins of the last of the buffaloes; where their 

 carnage, but not their appetites, must stop in a few years, and, with the ghastliness 

 of hunger and despair, they will find themselves gazing at each other upon the vacant 

 waste, which will afford them nothing but the empty air, and the desperate resolve 

 to flee to the woods and fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains ; whilst the more lucky white 

 man will return to his comfortable home, with no misfortune, save that of deep re-, 

 morse and a guilty conscience. Such a reader will find enough to claim his pity and 

 engage his whole soul's indignation at the wholesale and retail system of injustice 

 which has been, from the very first landing of our forefathers (and is equally at the 

 present day, being), visited upon these poor and naturally unoffending, untrespass- 

 ing people. 



CRUELTY OF REMOVAL WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 



In alluding to the cruel policy of removing the different tribes to their new coun- 

 try, west of the Mississippi, I would not do it without' the highest respect to the 

 motives of the Government, and to the feelings and opinions of those worthy divines 

 whose advice and whose services were instrumental in bringing it about, and who, 

 no doubt, were of the opinion that they were effecting a plan that would redound to 

 the Indian's benefit. Such was once my own opinion ; but when I go, as I have done, 

 through every one of those tribes removed, who had learned at home to use the plough- 

 share, and also contracted a passion and a taste for civilized manufactures, and after 

 that removed 1,200 and 1,400 miles west, to a wild and lawless region, where their 

 wants are to be supplied by the traders, at eight or ten times the prices they have 

 been in the habit of paying ; where whisky can easily be sold to them in a boundless 

 and lawless forest, without the restraints that can be successfully put upon the sellers 

 of it in their civilized neighborhoods, and where also they are allured from the use of 

 their ploughs by the herds of buffaloes and other wild animals on the plains, I am 

 compelled to state, as my irresistible conviction, that I believe the system one well 

 calculated to benefit the interests of the voracious land-speculators and Indian trad- 

 ers, the first of whom are ready to grasp at their lands as soon as they are vacated, 

 and the others at the annuities of one hundred and twenty thousand extravagant 

 customers. I believe the system is calculated to aid these, and perhaps to facilitate 

 the growth and the wealth of the civilized border ; but I believe, like everything else 

 that tends to the white man's aggrandizement and the increase of his wealth, it will have 

 as rapid a tendency to the poverty and destruction of the poor red men, who, un- 

 fortunately, almost seem doomed never in any way to be associated in interest with 

 their pale-faced neighbors. 



TRADE AND SMALL-POX. 



The system of trade and the small-pox have been the great and wholesale destroy- 

 ers of these poor people, from the Atlantic coast to where they are now found. And 

 no one but God knows where the voracity of the one is to stop, short of the acquisi- 

 tion of everything that is desirable to money-making man in the Indian's country ; 

 or when the mortal destruction of the other is to be arrested, whilst there is untried 

 flesh for it to act upon, either within or beyond the Rocky Mountains. 



From the first settlements on the Atlantic coast, to where it is now carried on at 

 the base of the Rocky Mountains, there has been but one system of trade and money- 

 making by hundreds and thousands of white men, who are desperately bent upon 

 making their fortunes in this trade with the unsophisticated children of the forest; 

 and gen erallv they have succeeded in the achievement of their object 

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