higher civilization concerning which heaven and earth are amazed at our continued vociferations, and stupified in our inconsistency that denies to them their natural and individual rights, since it does but establish our inability to comprehend the eternal principles of human development, as we assume to fear to trust them with the choice of their own destiny, and that of their souls, moved and actuated by the divine principles therein implanted. It could not justly be expected that they would at once adopt our principles and institutions, to them a chaos of contradictions. Yet we charge them with the utter want of those virtues that distinguish man from the brute, though well knowing the falsity of the accusation by the undeniable testimony manifest among them every where to the contrary.

We also charge them with every crime, but how greatly inconsistent and unjust when being so deeply stained ourselves! Alas, when hope of longer freedom had given place to hopeless despair, and they as a forlorn hope, threw themselves upon our boasted humanity, they awoke but to find a myth; for we then displayed our so-called Christian virtues and high sounding hallelujahs of freedom to all mankind by cooping them up in isolated reservations, but more properly vestibules of the cemetery, the ante-rooms where the recruiting agents of death (woe and despair) assemble their conscripts to prepare them for the ranks whence there is neither desertion or discharge; and having thus and there caged them, now perform the honorable (?) and humane (?) task of watching them at the doors of their prisons, while our parasites keep a faithful record of the complaints of the unfortunate, helpless, hapless and hopeless sufferers, whose dire misfortunes few have the magnanimity to respect, while thousands scoff and mock and which they seem determined shall only cease in the silence of the last Indian's grave.

Can the Indians of to-day but cherish the greatest abhorrence toward those who forced them into those lazarprisons where curses reply to their just complaints and blows and kicks to their dying groans, as each is tortured in his separate hell where all can hear but none will heed? Can they but shun, in their limited Inch of freedom, as a blighting pestilence, those who still seek to debase them in the estimation of the world by falsely branding them as creatures to be feared and shunned, with no power to resent but only to weep in silence and hopeless despair, while their blighted spirits are being proved in this furnace like steel in tempering fire ?

Once they were quick in feeling and fearless in resent

ment that is o'er. They are now the sons of silence; their wounds of mind and body are now callous, or long since they would have dashed their brains against their prison bars, as the rays of the sun of their remembered freedom and happiness flashed through them in seeming mockery of their woes. Neither are their slumbers sleep but only a continuance of enduring woes, a lingering despair whose envenomed tooth preventing truth, justice and humanity would still mangle the dead. Their hair is gray, but not from years; 'tis the impatient thirst for freedom parching the heart, and abhorred slavery maddening the soul with heaviness and woe as it battles with its agony under the knowledge that to them earth and air are banned and barred" a living grave of long years of oppression, abuse, calumny and outrage; yet they live, endure and bear the likeness of breathing men, while they bear the innate tortures of a living despair, becoming old in their youth, and dying ere middle age, some of weariness, some of disease, (the legacy of their destroyers) but more of withered hopes and broken hearts. Alas, that they should have found so few among the White Race with whom they could safely wear the chain of unassumed friendship and confidence; therefore have shunned their companionship and sadly sought as long as they could the solitude of the remote wilderness and there with its more congenial spirit divided the homage of their hearts, but alas, only to find even there no secure retreat from their restless foes. This fatalism, the assured certainly that nothing good can now be expected; the full conviction that even the United States government seems indifferent to protect them from the venality of its own unprincipled and seemingly law defying white subjects, is now deeply rooted in the minds of the aged Indians; while the younger receive their education in the high (so-called) schools of the States in learning by heart Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and noted exotic philosophers, thus losing much of their respect for their own religion as taught them by the true missionaries of the gospel of the world's Redeemer, rendering their present a gloomy back-ground, a black shadow of a once bright picture; - therefore they have become decrepit and have fallen down like a huge memorial of antiquity prostrate and broken to pieces, while the fragments only remain as a treasure belonging alone to the modern archieologist. Yet, a noble people whose memorials have long since been swept away by the hand of usurpation, and whose relics of their former greatness have alike crumbled to dust leaving no trace of their former existence, save here and there names of a few rivers and little streams, touching for their simplicity, but for whom

justice has long but vainly demanded an honorable place among Christian people, and for whom the time has surely (yea, years ago) arrived to be redeemed from the cruel and unjust bondage of that long, dark night of misrepresentation to which they have been so mercilessly subjected for so many long and weary years-a people good without a pretense and blest with plain reason and sober sense; whose traditional history, connected as it is with the Eastern Continent, abounded with many of those striking events which furnish modern history with its richest materials; as every tribe had its Thermopylae, and every village had produced its Leonidas. But the veil of centuries past now hides those events that might have been bequeathed to the admiration of the present age of the world. The opportunity was offered by the Red Man to the White two centuries ago but was rejected, though advancing years proved their merit. But too late was discovered the error. Our many unfortunate misunderstandings and contests with the ancient and modern Native Americans of this continent are as fertile as any of similar character that have afflicted man-kind; while many characters and scenes have been brought upon the theatre by the sanguine hand of war which history has not recorded. Many of such have been obtained and are recorded in this book; as it was my fate (whether good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate yet without cause for regret) to be born and reared among the Choctaws; and having spent the bright morn of life to man-hood among that excellent people and sister-tribe, the Chickasaws, as well as my long and well known friendship and admiration entertained for them and their entire race, have influenced them to give me a hearing (not boasting but unvarnished truth) upon any and all subjects above that which generally falls, to the lot of the White Man to obtain.

THE DISCOVERY OF THIS CONTINENT. IT'S RE

SULTS TO THE NATIVES.

In the year 1470, there lived in Lisbon, a town in Portugal, a man by the name of Christopher Columbus, who there married Dona Felipa, the daughter of Bartolome o Monis de Palestrello, an Italian (then deceased), who had arisen to great celebrity as a navigator. Dona Felipa was the idol of her doting father, and often accompanied him in his many voyages, in which she soon equally shared with him his love of adventure, and thus became to him a treasure indeed not only as a companion but as a helper; for she drew his maps

and geographical charts, and also wrote, at his dictation, his journals concerning his voyages. Shortly after the marriage of Columbus and Felipa at Lisbon, they moved to the island of Porto Santo which her father had colonized and was governor at the time of his death, and settled on a large landed estate which belonged to Palestrello, and which he had bequeathed to Felipa together with all his journals and papers. In that home of retirement and peace the young husband and wife lived in connubial bliss for many years. How could it be otherwise, since each had found in the other a congenial spirit, full of adventurous explorations, but which all others regarded as visionary follies. They read together and talked over the journals and papers of Bartolomeo, during which Felipa also entertained Columbus with accounts of her own voyages with her father, together with his opinions and those of other navigators of that age-his friends and companions -of a possible country that might be discovered in the distant West, and the future fame of the fortunate discoverer. Thus they read, studied, thought and talked together concerning that which they believed the future would prove a reality, but of which no other had a thought. This opinion had found a permanent lodgment in the mind of Columbus and awakened an enthusiasm therein never experienced before in the breast of man' upon a like subject, and which aroused him to that energy of determination which rebuked all fear and recognized no thought of failure. But alas, the noble Felipa, who alone had stood by him in their mutual opinions and shared with him the storm of thoughtless ridicule, lived not to learn of the fulfillment of their hopes, and the undying fame of her adored husband, even as he lived not to learn the extent of his discovery. But alas, for human justice and consistency. Instead of naming the "New World" in honor of his equally meritorious wife, the heroic Dona Felipa, or in honor of both, it was wrested from them by one Amerigo Vespucci, a pilot on a vessel of an obscure navigator named Hojeda, and the world acquiesced in the robbery. But such are its rewards!

But more than four-hundred years have been numbered with the ages of the past, since a little fleet of three ships, respectively named Santa Maria, Pinta and Nina, under the command of Christopher Columbus, were nearing the coast of that country that lay in its primitive grandeur and loveliness, even as when pronounced "good" by its Divine Creator, beyond the unknown waters that stretched away in the illimitable distance to the West where sky and sea, though ever receding, seemed still to meet in loving embrace, but whose existence was first in the contemplations of Columbus

and Felipa, and its reality, first in the knowledge of Columbus. At 10 o'clock, p. m., as it is recorded, Columbus discovered the feeble glimmerings of a distant light, to which he at once directed the attention of Pedro Gutierrez, who also saw it. On the next day, at 2 a. m., the distant boom of a gun was heard rolling along on the smooth surface of the tranquil waters, the first that ever broke the solitude of the night in those unknown regions of the deep. It came from the Pinta, and bore the joyful intelligence that land was found. But how little did these daring adventurers imagine the magnitude of their discovery; or that that midnight signal also heralded the extermination of old notions and the birth of new; the prelude to war and bloodshed with a people whose types were unknown to the civilized world! For man was there-man in his primitive state. Fiercely energetic, yet never demonstrative or openly expressing his emotions; uncultured, yet slow and deliberate in his speech; congenial, yet ever exhibiting a reserve and diffidence among strangers; hospitable, yet knowing his rights, knew no fear in maintaining them; trusting, yet welcomed death rather than endure wrong. Yet, in most of his characteristics and peculiarities seemingly to have a foreign origin from the known races of mankind; still indisputably of the human race-he, too, was man; though with no regular or consistent ideas of the Deity, religion or civil government, yet possessing correct views of a distinction between right and wrong, on which were founded very correct maxims or codes of morality; but whose penal code was a definite and fixed rule of personal retaliation-"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth;" thus they were gliding smoothly along on the tide of time, nor had a troubled wave ever risen to disturb the tranquility of their voyage, or shadows darkened their sky, and to whom the past had been so bright that the future held only fair promises for them. But, alas, how little did they realize how dark a future was in store for them! That midnight gun, as it momentarily flashed upon the deck of the Pinta and then sent its welcomed boom to the listening ears and watching eyes upon the decks of the Santa Maria and Nina proclaiming that their languishing hopes were realized and their declining expectations verified, was also the death signal, first to the distant Peruvians by the hand of Pizarro; next, to the Aztecs by the hand of Cortez; then last, but not least, to the North American Indians by the hand of De Soto-as an introduction of what would be-but the Old died hard to make way for the New.

Once the dominant power of this continent; but alas, through unequal wars; through altered circumstances,