the hand of tyrannical oppressions from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, against odds in point of numbers, munitions of war, skill and means, as one to ten thousand, and yielded not until the last warrior had fallen, the last bow broken and his race reduced to absolute poverty, want and woe. Still, though poor and lowly as he seemed to his venal destroyers, yet his whole heart and life were wrapt up in the remembrance of his freedom. He worshipped the thought as his most precious property, the dear treasure of his secret and highest bliss. It was the constant companion of his thoughts the monitor of his actions and the true key to his life. But alas, when memory now turns to the past of his early life and its unexpected blighting, and raises before his mind every hope connected with it, and his seeming present doom stares him in the face, what can rid him of those successive images that seem to glide around him like mournful apparitions of the long lamented dead, since grief long since has looked up the avenues of complaint, and he stands as one petrified to stone. But how wonderful, amid all their adversities, has been their power to rally and to recover their waning resolution and courage; verily, they oft seemed to experience a kind of determined pleasure in resolutely confronting the worst aspect of their innumerable reverses; yea, in standing in the breech that has long since overthrown their future, and hurling back in defiant despair, "Here we stand, at least an honest and chivalrous people;" but alas, only to seek solitude by retiring within themselves pleading "Jailor, lock the door." Truly their lives, though not without their efforts of strong exertion, have been during the last two centuries, and still are, a dream spent in chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, while they have worn the garb of hope which has diverted their past and present woes. by a touch of the wand of imagination and gilded over the future by prospects fairer than were ever realized. But it is impossible to deny and yet not to admire and praise the strong sense of solidity and fraternity which, through all their lives, still unite the members of the same tribe, and the feelings which have not been dimmed by modern changes but still exist as warm and active as ever; yet the White Race has ever looked upon the Red from the Ishmaelitish standpoint, and in all its intercourse, from first to last, began and so continued by treating them as inferior beings, too low in the scale of humanity to be reached by the hand of Christianity and civilization; inveterate and uncompromising enemies to be circumvented and overreached under an exhibition of smiling and artful hypocrisy and base vehality unknown to the Red Man and unsurpassed in the annals of the White. ( But long since cut loose from their ancient moorings, they have felt for more than a century that they were slowly but surely drifting toward an unknown destiny foreshadowing extermination, What other people that would not have had recourse to war or the suicide's rifle? yet, after despair had usurped the place of hope in longer resistance, they had principle to resist the one, and resolution to combat the other. But they were to tread the lowest paths of sorrow, poverty and humiliating depressions; -whose circumstances were too humble to expect redress and whose sufferings. (mental and physical) were too great even for pity; and whose wrongs, at the hands of inside white intruders and outside defamers, have long since destroyed that strength of mind with which mankind can meet distress; therefore they prepare to suffer in silence rather than openly complain. What else could they do? The world disclaims them. Christianity even seems to have turned its back upon their distress, given them up to spiritual nakedness and hunger, and left them to plead to white wretches whose hearts are stone, or to debauchees who may curse but will not give relief, while every devilish trick is played upon them, and their every action made a fund for eternal ridicule. Truly, instead of wondering that so little of their true history has been preserved, it is a matter of much greater wonder that so much of truth has escaped the waste of two centuries through which they have been dragged from place to place, while all narratives concerning them have been written, with few exceptions, in shameful derogation of their true characters, all exaggerated and still continuing to be exaggerated, evincing a strange love of defamation only to gratify the morbid fondness of their readers for the marvelous, and their own manifested inability to tell the truth; therefore the most absurd and ridiculous falsehoods are fabricated and published about this people and joyfully read and believed by all who are in harmony with their traducers, a truth that remains, in essential points at least, from one end of the scale to the other. True, the ways of the Indians are not the ways of the civilized world of which they knew nothing; nor were they, being without its ways, versed in its revolting vices, and their so-called love of war and carnage existed but in the imagination of the White Race, one of its beliefs which may be traced hither and thither but never to the propitiation of truth concerning anything about the Red; since, having its origin alone in the impatience of its venality while drifting amid zones of ignorance and prejudice; and when I contemplate such, I am taught to look upon their errors more in sor row than anger. True the Indians were cruel to their enemies in war, and so are we together with all the nations of earth. But when I take up the North American Indian who has suffered and represent to myself the struggles he has passed through for centuries past, to defend his just rights and sustain the freedom of his country from exotic vandals, and reflect upon his brief pulsations of joy; the tears of woe; the feebleness of purpose; the scorn of the world that has, without just reason, no charity for him; the desolation of his soul's sanctuary, his freedom buried in the memory of the past; happiness gone; hope fled; I fain would leave his blighted soul with Him from whose hands it came, for how difficult it is to roll away the black and huge stone of prejudice from off the white man's heart, to whom ignorance is bliss in regard to all Indians; thousands, therefore, hate the Indian because they do not know him and desire not to know him because they hate him. Truly, the North American Indians constitute as grand a record of human courage, patriotic endurance, and as harrowing a history of human suffering as has ever been told; while their oppressors and destroyers, who have figured in their nefarious designs against them from the alpha to omega as the beau-ideal of cruel injustice, are still laboring with a zeal never manifested before to intensify the public feeling against the helpless people, that they may the more effectually accomplish their infamous schemes to rob and plunder, them; and whose consciences seem so elastic that, at one time it seems difficult for them to stretch them over a mole hill; at another, with ease, they stretch them over a mountain. Yet the influence, power and grip these characters exert and impress upon the public mind are truths both humiliating and disgraceful, and the strange liberties that are, by our seemingly defective systems of jurisprudence, legally permitted to such plunderers in high places who have the audacity and impertinence to appeal to law, and misuse its machinery for selfish and covetous purposes, are everywhere illustrated at the expense of the misguided and alike helpless and unfortunate Indians, upon whom they have descended in countless thousands as blow-flies on a decomposing body, to rob and plunder them of the last acre of their territories. Truly our sensibilities in the light of humanity, and our judgment in the light of truth and justice, are absolutely dead in regard to this people; therefore, thousands have supinely yielded to the false assertions of thieves and robbers, the reverence due to a Divine decree, without any investigation whatever, which has been done in all cases of dealing with Indians from first to last. Truly it may be written as an epitaph for their history, "unutterably sad, because so disastrously true." Alas! multiplied thousands to-day look with horror on the wrongs and sufferings of the feeble and helpless Indians still hovering in our midst, yet are content to hide themselves from their woes; yea, they openly acknowledge their shameful reality yet do nothing to alleviate their condition. They well know of the thousand wrongs continually being heaped upon them, yet only shrug their shoulders and fold their arms in callous acquiescence in that which they falsely and cowardly declare to be inevitable; while they, at the same time, acknowledge a sense of shame and personal guilt in permitting such infamous cruelty and oppression to be heaped upon that helpless race in their midst and under their own eyes, without being actuated to noble efforts to stop it. No wonder the Indian's countenance seems prematurely marked by deep furrows, and his long hair waves over his brow on which is fixed a deep gloom that no smile from the lips can chase away! Alas, through what direful changes have they been forced to pass! through what cycles of hope and fear have their generations been coerced while the world about them seemed like a vision hurrying by as they stood still in silence, helplessness and woe! Therefore, in their entire history, how little there is to contemplate but the most agonizing struggles followed by the deepest and most ostensible decay through their long and continued attempts at redress and the recovery of their God-inherited rights. which expired with their liberty. HISTORY OF THE Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez INDIANS. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. There has been, and is to-day, as great a proportion of of those characteristics that elevate and adorn mankind found among the North American Indian race as ever were found upon earth. Men and women in whose breasts were seats of virtues as pure as ever found in man or woman. This may seem as shadows to many, incontrovertible truths to those who truly know them, not as enemies but as friends. Through a long life of personal acquaintance with and experience among them, I can and do here testify to the same when living in their ancient domains, and still find them in the present years as in those of the long past, though my opinions then may have been formed to some extent as shadows in the back-ground of imagination, yet they took substantial form and substance with time, in perfect harmony with the positive assertions of all the early explorers, as far back as anything is known of their history. Truly, prolific fancies of the larger portion of modern writers seem to have been governed by the many false descriptions of the ancient; and poetic license has extended the peculiarities of the ancestors with all their imaginary faults and none of their virtues to their descendants, this too in the absence of all authentic history; while our own traditions have dealt no less unjustly with the remnant whom we are following down to their seemingly inevitable destiny (extermination) so unjustly and cruelly decreed through the instigation of our insatiable venality, whose merciless sword is still drawn and stretched athwart the gate of the Indian's highest ambition, his freedom; allowing him no place in that |