Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Aldarondo, and
Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. This file wasproduced from images generously made available by theCanadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions.
Few tasks are more difficult of accomplishment than the overturning of theideas and prejudices which have been conceived in our youth, which havegrown up with us to mature age, and which have finally become the settledconvictions of our manhood. The overturning process is none the lessdifficult when, as is not seldom the case, those ideas and convictions arewidely at variance with facts. Most of us have grown up with very erroneousnotions respecting the Indian character—notions which have been chieflyderived from the romances of Cooper and his imitators. We have beenaccustomed to regard the aboriginal red man as an incarnation of treacheryand remorseless ferocity, whose favourite recreation is to butcherdefenceless women and children in cold blood. A few of us, led away by thestock anecdotes in worthless missionary and Sunday School books, have gonefar into the opposite extreme, and have been wont to regard the Indian asthe Noble Savage who never forgets a kindness, who is ever ready to returngood for evil, and who is so absurdly credulous as to look upon thepale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. Untilwithin the last few years, no pen has ventured to write impartially of theIndian character, and no one has attempted to separate the wheat from thechaff in the generally received accounts which have come down to us fromour forefathers. The fact is that the Indian is very much what his whitebrother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of thiscontinent, the settlement, of which by Europeans sounded the death-knellof his sovereignty. The aboriginal could hardly be expected to receive theintruder with open arms, even if the latter had acted up to his professionsof peace and good-will. It would have argued a spirit of contemptibleabjectness and faintness of heart if the Indian had submitted without amurmur to the gradual encroachments of the foreigner, even if the latterhad adopted a uniform policy of mildness and conciliation. But the invaderadopted no such policy. Not satisfied with taking forcible possessionof the soil, he took the first steps in that long, sickening course oftreachery and cruelty which has caused the chronicles of the white conquestin America to be written in characters of blood. The first and most hideousbutcheries were committed by the whites. And if the Indians did not tamelysubmit to the yoke sought to be imposed upon their necks, they only actedas human beings, civilized and uncivilized, have always acted upon likeprovocation. Those who have characterized the Indian as inhuman andfiendish because he put his prisoners to the torture, seem to haveforgotten that the wildest accounts of Indian ferocity pale beside theundoubtedly true accounts of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.Christian Spain—nay, even Christian England—tortured prisoners with adiabolical ingenuity which never entered into the heart of a pagan Indianto conceive. And on this continent, in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, men of English stock performed prodigies of cruelty to whichparallels can be found in the history of the Inquisition alone. For theterrible records of battle, murder, torture and death, of which the historyof the early settlement of this continent is so largely made up, the whiteman and the Christian must be held chiefly responsible. It must, moreover,be