THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 763 



In the past pages we have seen these unhappy people, in the midst of tL e cruel on- 

 slaughts for gold, by cataclysms sunk down, and by sabers struck down in the prog- 

 ress of their own civilization, and we have contemplated them in " floods," from which 

 tradition tells us a few only were saved on the tops of the mountains; but we have 

 yet to • view them in another deluge more fatal, and from the drowning waves of 

 which it is to be feared the mountain-tops will save no one of them — the flood of 

 emigration ! 



After cataclysms, the Indians' misfortune in South America, in Mexico, and His- 

 paniola was in their gold, and that done, there is yet a chance of their living. Their 

 misfortune in North America, that they owned the broadest and richest country on 

 the globe, teeming with all the luxuries tempting to white man's cupidity — the tem- 

 perature of its climate, the richness of its soil, its vast prairies speckled with buffa- 

 loes, and its rivers and mountains abounding in valuable furs, in latitudes most suit- 

 able for emigration, and that emigration led and pushed on by a popular government, 

 which could have but one motion, and that onward to the Rocky Mountains and the 

 Pacific Ocean. 



Under such accumulated circumstances the Indians' fate was sealed — their doom 

 was fixed; and in that u flood" which has been for a half century sj>reading over 

 their country the last of them are now being ingulfed ; and as if gold must neces- 

 sarily have its share in their destruction, its shining scales are being turned up in 

 various parts of the Rocky Mountains, adding fury to the maddened throng who are 

 now concentrating for its search in the very center of the vast solitudes to which 

 advancing civilization has been driving the poor Indians, both from the East and the 

 West, as their last possible hold in existence. 



Unlike the gold searchers in Mexico and Peru, who struck their blows, got their 



gold in masses, and were off, the gold seekers in the Rocky Mountains will hold on — 



their mines will last, and the poor Indians, between gold diggers and squatters and 



whisky sellers, who are all armed with repeating rifles and revolvers, will lengthen 



their days as long as they can, but there will be few of them. 



* * ***** 



The combined causes of border emigration moving on faster than the Government can 

 purchase the lands of the Indians — the unemployed hunters and trappers and whisky 

 sellers, whose business is declining, and a headlong stampede of adventurers flying to 

 the gold fields of the Roeky Mountains — form a phalanx of the most desperate men, 

 who take possession of the Indians' country. 



Twenty dollars offered by the corporation of Central City, in the middle of a State 

 of the Union, for every Indian's scalp, for every deliberate murder! What a carte 

 blanche! what a thriving business the trappers and whisky sellers can make of this! 

 How much better than killing wolves at $2 per head, or catching cunning beavers for 

 $3. The poor unsuspecting Indian of any distant tribe whilst hunting for food to feed 

 his wife and children may he shot down or decoyed from his wigwam, made drunk 

 with a pint of whisky, and scalped, as the trapper's exigencies may demand ; or taken 

 out of his grave, where he has been recently buried, and his scalp, "with both ears," 

 taken without the merit and without the trouble of a murder. 



Why the butcheries by Cortes and Pizarro and De Soto were not half so bad as this! 

 Can it be that, in the present age of civilization and emancipation, scenes so abhor- 

 rent as these are to be countenanced or permitted by the Government of my country 

 in the center of one of her States ? 



I have long been aware of the approaching Indian crisis which now is evidently at 

 hand, and in my notes written on the Upper Missouri, and published thirty years 

 since, I predicted it. 



It has been sneeringly said that I have " spoken too well of the Indians (better 

 to sx>eak too well of them than not to speak well enough) ; "that I have flattered 

 them " (better to flatter them than to caricature them ; there have been enough to do 

 this). If I have overdone their character, they have had in me one friend at least, 

 and I will not shrink from the sin and responsibility of it. 



