546 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



The Governments of the United States and Great Britain have always held out 

 every encouragement to the fur-traders, whose traffic has uniformly heen looked upon 

 as beneficial and a source of wealth to nations, though, surely they never could have 

 considered such intercourse as advantageous to the savage. 



WHISKY AMONG THE INDIANS AND TRADERS. 



Besides the many thousands who are daily and hourly selling whisky and rum and 

 useless gewgaws to the Indians on the United States, the Canada, the Texan, and 

 Mexican borders, there are of hardy adventurers in the Rocky Mountains and beyond, 

 or near them, and out of all limits of laws, one thousand armed men in the annual 

 employ of the United States fur companies, an equal number in the employment of 

 the British factories, and twice that number in the Russian and Mexican possessions, 

 all of whom pervade the countries of the wildest tribes they can reach, with guns and 

 gunpowder in their hands, and other instruments of death, unthought of by the sim- 

 ple savage, calculated to terrify and coerce him to favorable terms in his trade ; and 

 in all instances they assume the right (and prove it, if necessary, by the superi- 

 ority of their weapons) of hunting and trapping the streams and lakes of their coun- 

 tries. 



These traders, in addition to the terror, and sometimes death, that they carry into 

 these remote realms at the muzzles of their guns, as well as by whisky and the 

 small-pox, are continually arming tribe after tribe with fire-arms, who are able 

 thereby to bring their unsuspecting enemies into unequal combats, where they are 

 slain by thousands, and who have no way to heal the awful wound but by arming 

 themselves in turn, and in a similar manner reeking their vengance upon their de- 

 fenseless enemies on the west. In this wholesale way, and by whisky and disease, 

 tribe after tribe sink their heads and lose their better, proudest half, before the next 

 and succeeding waves of civilization flow on, to see or learn anything definite of them. 



VICE OF THE INDIAN TRADE. 



Without entering at this time into any detailed history of this immense system, or 

 denunciation of any of the men or their motives who are engaged in it, I would 

 barely observe, that from the very nature of their traffic, where their goods are to be 

 carried several thousands of miles on the most rapid and dangerous streams, over 

 mountains and other almost discouraging obstacles, and that at the continual hazard 

 to their lives from accidents and diseases of the countries, the poor Indians are obliged 

 to pay such enormous prices for their goods that the balance of the trade is so de- 

 cidedly against them as soon to lead them to poverty ; and, unfortunately for them, 

 they mostly contract a taste for whisky and rum, which are not only ruinous in their 

 prices but in their effects destructive to life, destroying the Indians much more 

 rapidly than an equal indulgence will destroy the civilized constitution. 



In the Indian communities, where there is no law of the land or custom denominat- 

 ing it a vice to drink whisky and to get drunk, and where the poor Indian meets 

 whisky tendered to him by white men whom he considers wiser than himself, and 

 to whom he naturally looks for example, he thinks it no harm to drink to excess, 

 and will lie drunk as long as he can raise the means to pay for it. And after his first 

 means in his wild state are exausted he becomes a beggar for whisky, and begs until 

 he disgusts, when the honest pioneer becomes his neighbor, and then, and not before, 

 gets the name of the "poor, degraded, naked, and drunken Indian," to whom the 

 epithets are well and truly applied. 



BONNEVILLE'S ADVENTURES— CRUELTY TO INDIANS. 



On this groat system of carrying the fur trade into the Rocky Mountains and other 

 parts of the wilderness country where whisky is sold at the rate of twenty and thirty 

 dollars per gallon, and most other articles of trade at a similar rate, I know of no 

 better comment, nor any more excusable, than the quotation of a few passages from 



