Chapter XIII: Front Matter (13)

“A daughter and a granddaughter, Tom,” replied George, with an inflection in his voice that sounded very like pride, and a soft look in his eyes; “so you understand that I had to stick to my business for ten years more, that I might get her a dowry; and then, when at last I did sell out—well, I was old ... and I couldn’t think of anything pleasanter than just to stay quietly in my arm-chair! Didn’t I tell you that my life has been nothing but a chapter of accidents from beginning to end? Come, shall we have some punch, Tom? I’ll make it.”

“If you will. So you have a daughter! And she is married! Well married, I hope?”

“Well, yes; her husband is a sub-prefect.”

George’s voice again took a tone of gratified pride, which elicited a smile from his observant friend.

“A sub-prefect! Bravo, bravissimo! But you’re putting too much lemon into that punch.”

“Do you think so? And now, Tom, that I’ve made a clean breast of it—told you all—you must explain something to me that I never could comprehend: how _have_ you contrived to make your modest fortune suffice for nearly half a century’s constant travel?”

“It is easy enough to explain,” said Rouvière, sitting up straight in his chair and becoming very animated and somewhat loud as he proceeded. “I began life with ten thousand francs a year in land; my first operation was to change my patrimony into bank-notes, by which means I doubled my income; then I invested it in the sinking funds, which trebled it. And then, freed from every narrow calculation, from every family tie, from every social trammel, I took my flight into space! Here’s to your health, my old friend George! Hip! hip! hurrah!”

“What a wonderful fellow!” cried George in a paroxysm of admiration, excited, very probably, much more by the brandy and the rum and the punch than by Rouvière’s comprehension of life and happiness. “What energy! what grandeur!”

“I consecrated my youth,” continued Tom in a declamatory style, “to distant adventures, reserving Europe for the autumn of life. My foot—this foot, this very foot, George, which now touches yours on this carpet—has left its print among those of the tiger and the elephant on the sands of India! Nay, it has even followed those terrible prowlers into their forests of bamboo, lofty and solemn as our cathedrals!”

“Ah! that was something like living!” ejaculated Dupuis, who listened with almost breathless interest.

“Two years later I arrived in Canton. What an arrival, ye gods! Never shall I forget the scene. It was a lovely summer night. The accession of the emperor of the Celestials to his ancestral throne was being celebrated. Our canoe could scarcely force its way among the junks and flower-boats, all of them decorated with innumerable paper lanterns. Fireworks of a thousand different hues were reflected, mingled with the stars, in the flowing river, and we could watch their rainbow tints playing on the porcelain temples that rise on its banks!”

“What a fairy-like sight! Happy, happy Tom!” murmured Dupuis.

“From China,” pursued Rouvière, after quaffing off his glass of punch, “I sailed for the Americas. I travelled about there for several years, going to and fro, from north to south, from the savannas to the pampas, from the great austere Canadian woods to the smiling Brazilian forests; sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, oftenest in a _pirogue_. My longest stay was in Peru. I could not tear myself away from that coquettish city of Lima!”

“Ha! ha! _traître_, gay deceiver! O Tom, Tom!” laughed Dupuis, shaking his head in ecstasy.

“I turned gamester, too. It is impossible for you, George, to conceive the immense attraction a gaming-table possesses in that land of gold and silver and jewels. One might almost fancy that one of those fabulous trees we read of in Oriental tales had been shaken over the green cloth! There is little or no regular coined money to be seen on it, but dull yellow ingots, bright golden spangles, fiery diamonds, and milk-white, lustrous pearls are heaped up there pell-mell! All the treasures of earth and ocean seem to be brought together on that table, tumbled and jostled in dazzling confusion! You can stay whole nights by that board—nights that fly like minutes—your eyes fascinated, your brain on fire! Twenty times in twenty-four hours you are raised to the throne of Rothschild—as often precipitated down, down to Job’s dunghill. You become bald, you may become mad, but you feel what life is—you live!”

“It is true, it is true!” cried Dupuis in a state of intense excitement; “you are right, Tom, there is no doubt of that. And to think that I have never played at anything but that blackguard whist at a sou the counter! But go on, Tom, go on; you really electrify me!”

“Everything has its end,” continued Rouvière, highly flattered by the effect he was producing; “there came a day of sadness and discouragement, and I took passage on board an American whaler bound for the south pole. Yes, my hand has touched the frozen limits of our globe; I have contemplated, with feelings akin to awe, those creatures with human-like faces, the morse, on their pedestals of ice, recumbent and dreamy as the sphinx of Thebes. And in the midst of those silent spaces, so strangely different from all I had hitherto seen, I experienced sensations that seemed to belong to another world. A kind of _posthumous_ illusion of being in another planet took possession of me. Certainly I am much deceived if the days and nights I saw in those regions of ice do not resemble those in our pale satellite. What more shall I tell you, my dear friend? Three years after this I found myself in Rio Janeiro, whence I returned to Europe, after having literally described the whole circumference of our globe with the end of my walkingstick! And thus passed away my youth!”

M. Rouvière here threw himself back in his arm-chair, and stroked his beard with a sigh.

“Every king living might envy you, Tom!” cried Dupuis. “But tell me more. What have you been doing since then?”

“Since then, George,” said Rouvière with nonchalance, “I have not travelled; I have merely made excursions. First upon the Mediterranean—but, pshaw! it was like sailing on the basin in the Tuileries’ garden! I have visited all the countries on its shore. And by degrees, as I grew older, my circle became smaller, so that now I live entirely in Europe, going from city to city, according to the attraction of the moment. Indeed, I may say, my dear fellow, that Europe is my property, my domain!” Here the speaker began to wax warmer and louder. “Every festival given by nature or man in Europe is given to amuse me. For me Naples displays her bay and her volcano, and keeps open her grand theatre, San Carlos; for my recreation Paris adorns her boulevards and builds her opera-house; to amuse me Madrid has a Prado and bull-fights. All the great exhibitions were made for me, beginning with that of London. _Evviva la libertà!_ Let’s drink!” So saying, he filled for himself a brimming bumper of punch, and tossed it off with a very self-satisfied smile.

“Tom!” cried Dupuis delightedly, “you are a genius! But you have said nothing about the great monuments—the Alhambra, the Coliseum, the Parthenon.”

“Pshaw! those are your friends!” retorted Tom with his peculiar sneer. “I’ve said nothing about them because they are dragged about everywhere. Who hasn’t seen _them_?”

There was a minute of silence, broken by an emphatic “Ah!” breathed not loudly but deeply by the excited listener. Starting from his seat, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, he began hurriedly to pace up and down the room. His friend glanced at him uneasily.

“What’s the matter? What annoys you?” he asked.

“O Tom, Tom!” cried George, still continuing his agitated walk, “I blush when I compare your life with mine. While your heart has counted each pulsation by some noble or beautiful emotion, mine has stupidly gone on ticking off the hours and days and years as calmly as a kitchen clock! Have I really lived, tell me?” He stopped in front of his friend, gesticulating violently. “I was born, and I have slept, and I have eaten; but what else? And what has been the result? My intelligence is extinguished; I have dried up; I have descended in the scale of being, until I have come to be on a level with the idiot of the Alps, with a shellfish, with an oyster!”

“Come, come, George, you’re going too far!” said Rouvière soothingly. “Even supposing that you no longer possess as much freshness of imagination, as much vivacity of wit, as you used to have....”

“I thought so! I knew it!” interrupted Dupuis, resuming his hurried walk backwards and forwards; “you acknowledge that you find me rusty!”

M. Rouvière rose slowly from his seat, and, after lighting a cigar, remained standing with his back against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on his friend, who paused in front of him at his first word.

“Listen to me, George,” said he seriously, caressing his moustache with his fingers as he spoke; “I will be frank with you. You know that I always used to be frank with you. The impression your house made on me when I first entered it was, I must confess, a sinister one. I seemed to breathe the air of a cemetery in it. I could have fancied that I was in one of those long-buried dwellings which the patient labor of enthusiastic antiquaries has restored to light and life. While the servant went to call you I could not prevent myself from examining, with a kind of wondering, stupid curiosity, the old-fashioned furniture, and the pictures, and those dismal tapestries worthy of figuring in a museum! I remembered the delicacy of your character, the elegance of your manners, your intelligent taste, your love of art; and positively I could not reconcile the bright memories I retained of you with the dull, insipid existence of which I had the evidence before my eyes. You came to me; I looked at you; you spoke. What was it? Was my sight affected, or my judgment biassed by the thoughts which were literally _preying_ on me at that moment? I can’t tell what it was—I can’t explain—but your language astonished me! Your forehead actually seemed to me to have grown narrower! I wiped away a secret tear, and I sighed as I should have sighed had I been standing by your grave! I even half spoke the words, ‘This, then, is all that remains of my friend!’ You’re not offended, George?” added M. Rouvière, stopping short and looking inquiringly into his victim’s anxious, attentive face.

“Not a bit, Tom; not a bit,” replied George. “I tell you I felt that I had sunk; at least, I suspected it, and the suspicion was intolerable. I prefer the certainty.” He turned away with an attempt at a smile, and resumed his agitated walk up and down the room.

Rouvière applied himself to the fire, put on a new log of wood, shovelled up the glowing embers and ashes and threw them with much care and skill to the back, gazed on his work for a minute, and, finally assuming again his favorite _pose_, with his back leaning against the chimney-piece, started the conversation afresh in a lively, chatty tone.

“Let us change the subject,” said he. “You have sold your business; what do you think of doing now?”

“What do you expect me to do?” cried Dupuis vehemently. “I shall finish by dying!”

“_Morbleu!_ you had better resuscitate. Let us talk seriously, George. When you married you created for yourself new duties, which you have fulfilled to the utmost, honestly and generously. You have provided amply for the future of your wife and daughter. What is there, then, to prevent you now from plunging yourself for two or three years into the vortex of life, and so awaken and reinvigorate your benumbed faculties? The facilities of travel nowadays are wonderful. In the space of two years you can run over the whole of Europe, and even explore a part of Asia and Africa. All the freshness and vivacity of thought you once possessed will return to you when you find yourself in contact with the most glorious creations of art and nature. In the course of two years—two years, mark you!—you can lay at rest for ever every one of those regretful feelings which are now eating out your heart and shortening your life! Choose now: suicide or travel? Remember that you are free in your choice—you are free to do as you like!”

“Pish!” cried George, turning on his heel and pursuing his walk. “Is it probable that at my time of life I shall set out alone to scour the highways of Europe?”

“But who wants you to go alone?” said Rouvière, going up to him and laying a hand on his shoulder. “Am not I ready to go with you? My experience, my post-chaise, my servant—everything I have is at your service, George!”

“Is it possible, Tom? Are you really in earnest?” exclaimed Dupuis, gratified beyond expression at this proof of his friend’s affection. “You really will accompany me?”

“I will lead you by the hand, my boy!” answered Rouvière gaily; and, falling into step with George, the two friends paced the room together. “I will spare you the torment of guides and ciceroni, and all that species of vermin which besets the tourist. No, don’t thank me,” he continued, when Dupuis began to express his gratitude. “The thought delights me as much as it does you. Your new impressions will revive mine of past days. And won’t it be delicious, George, to end our lives as we began them—participating in the same adventures, in the same pleasures, and even sharing our purses? Come, now, is it settled?”

“My dear friend,” replied Dupuis, with a slight hesitation in his voice, “I will confess to you that no project was ever more agreeable to me, but....”

“No buts! no buts!” cried Rouvière imperatively; “it _is_ settled! We will go direct from this to Paris and wait there until the spring. The museums and theatres will help us to while away the time. I will take you behind the scenes; you shall hear Ristori and Patti! You used to love music!”

“I love it still,” said George, smiling; “I play the flute!”

“So much the better!” cried Tom with increasing animation, as they continued to pace the room side by side; “so much the better! You shall bring your flute with you. What was I saying? Oh! yes; well, the winter in Paris—that’s settled; but at the very beginning of spring we’ll cross the Pyrenees and spend three glorious months in Spain. Then we’ll take advantage of the summer to visit all the principal cities of Germany; and after that we’ll get down into Italy by Trieste and Venice. What do you say to this programme?”

“I say,” replied Dupuis, stopping in his walk and speaking in a strong, decisive tone—“I say that it opens Paradise to me. Give me a cigar, Tom. I say that you are right. I _have_ lived long enough for others. I _have_ offered up a sufficiently large portion of my life as a sacrifice. Bah! a man has duties towards himself.” He lighted his cigar and puffed vigorously for a minute or two. “Providence has conferred gifts on us,” he resumed, “for which we have to render an account. Intellect, imagination, the feeling of the beautiful—these are gifts which bind us. Savages only ought to be capable of such a crime as to allow these sacred flames to die out for want of nourishment!”

“Well said!” exclaimed Rouvière exultingly; “that’s my old George again! Now let us strike while the iron’s hot. Marianne!” He went towards the door to open it as he spoke.

“Hush! hush!” cried Dupuis, stopping him and speaking under his breath; “what do you want with her?”

“I want to tell her that you are going away to-night, and that she must look after your portmanteau. Marianne!” he called again.

“Hush, I beg of you!” repeated poor George earnestly. “Surely we are not going to start to-night?”

“At nine o’clock to-night,” answered Rouvière decisively; “you know very well that I ordered horses for nine o’clock.”

“Yes, I know,” said Dupuis, hesitating and embarrassed; “but the night is going to be deucedly cold—Siberian. I think we should do better to wait until to-morrow morning.”

“Now, just let me tell you this, George,” cried the other impatiently: “if you’re afraid of frosted fingers or toes, and of a night in a post-chaise, you’d better pull your night-cap over your ears at once and go to bed, and never talk again about travelling!”

“I’m afraid of nothing and of nobody,” replied poor Dupuis, driven to his wits’ end; “but the truth is this haste rather puts me out. I had reckoned upon two or three days to look about me and to make my preparations.”

“Preparations! What preparations?” cried Tom in a tone of indignant surprise. “You need a portmanteau and a few shirts and stockings, and you have an hour before you to get them together, and that’s more than time enough. Come, now, George, no childishness; if you defer your departure for two or three days, you know just as well as I do that you won’t go at all. I’ve no need to tell you what influences will be brought to bear on you, what obstacles will rise up before you, to unman you and break down your resolution. Believe me, my dear fellow, in such cases as this, however you yourself may suffer and _make_ suffer, you _must_ cut down to the quick or give up....”

“Once more you are right, Tom,” said Dupuis after a moment’s silent thought. “I’m your man; there’s my hand on it.”

“Marianne!” shouted Rouvière, shaking his friend’s hand with a will.

“No, no, don’t call Marianne,” cried Dupuis hurriedly, and getting between Rouvière and the door. “I know better than she does what I shall need. I shall pack my portmanteau myself as soon as my wife comes in. It’s just eight now,” looking at the clock; “she’ll not be long. Well,” he continued with some agitation, “I shall have to pass a few minutes—sad ones they will be, I know—but my conscience reproaches me with nothing; ... and after all, if my cup be filled with generous wine, what does it matter though the edge be a little bitter?... O Tom!” he continued after a moment’s pause, during which he seemed to have roused his courage, “what a perspective you have opened out before me—what a horizon! Granada! Venice! Naples! It is a dream!” He glanced at the clock and his voice fell. “Five minutes past eight! I would willingly give twenty-five louis to be a quarter of an hour older—a quarter of an hour! I know that I am very weak, but....”

“Shall I tell your wife for you?” interrupted Rouvière, who was watching him anxiously.

“Well, frankly, Tom, you would do me a service,” cried Dupuis eagerly.

“Go and pack your trunk, then, and I’ll settle the business.”

“There’s no danger of a scene,” said George, stopping short near the door; “you would be quite mistaken in your estimate of her character if you feared that.”

“I shall see,” returned his friend laconically.

“Tell her that I entreat her to keep calm. Tears might unman me, but could change nothing in my plans.”

“I’ll tell her. Go to your trunk.”

“I’m going, Tom.”

He opened the door, hesitated, then closed it again and came back to the fireplace, near which Rouvière was still standing.

“My dear friend,” said he softly, laying his hand on Tom’s arm, “you will be very gentle with her, will you not?”

A kind smile gleamed in the usually cold, sharp eyes of the traveller, as he looked in his friend’s anxious, agitated face.

“Don’t be afraid,” he replied; “but you—don’t you desert me when I’ve gone to the front.”

“Desert during the battle! You don’t know me, Tom!”

“Why, you see,” said Tom, “I should look wondrous silly if you did!”

“Tom Rouvière,” cried Dupuis solemnly, “permit me to assure you that my mind is made up, and that this evening at nine o’clock, come what will, I go with you. I pledge you my word of honor. Are you satisfied?”

“Go and pack your trunk!” laughed Rouvière, taking him by the shoulders and pushing him out of the room.

Left to himself, M. Rouvière returned to the chimney-piece and stood over the fire, rubbing his hands meditatively, and from time to time breaking out into words.

“Now then, Mme. Dupuis, it’s between you and me,” said he, half-aloud, with a kind of chuckle. “It’s very certain that my principal object is to make poor George something like himself again, but I really sha’n’t be sorry to try the effect of a thunder-bolt on that serene-looking lady!” Here M. Rouvière rubbed his hands gleefully and laughed heartily; picturing to himself, probably, the poor wife’s consternation and despair when he should announce the fatal news.

“I’m not a Turk,” he muttered presently—“far from it, I’m sure; until now I always believed, like every true Christian, that polygamy deserved the gallows; but, hang it! only think of a decent man condemned to perpetual communion with such a disagreeable creature as that old village sauce-pan! Such a life is clearly impossible!” A minute’s silent thought followed, and then M. Rouvière roused himself, and sat down before the fire to warm the soles of his feet. But not for long.

“I understood that woman,” he suddenly exclaimed, starting up from his seat and beginning to pace rapidly up and down the floor—“I understood her and judged her before I saw her! I knew her to be exactly what she is, from her cap to her shoes! She was always odious to me! Just see with what stupid symmetry all this furniture is arranged: two chairs here and two chairs there, everything square with its neighbor, all at equal distances—how wearisome! That old barometer, too, and these absurd curiosities”—he stopped, as he spoke, in front of the chimney: “a stuffed bird, a shell-box, spun-glass, and horrid cocoanut cups carved by galley-slaves! They absolutely give one the height and the breadth and the weight of the woman, both physically and morally. Poor George! an intelligent man, too. I was sorry for him,” he continued, taking a seat in front of the fire, “but I couldn’t help it. How I pegged into her all dinnertime! Ha, ha, ha! I was as disgusting as a Kalmuck! I really _was_ ashamed of myself! but, the deuce take it! every one’s nerves are not made of bronze. M. du Luc! Mme. le Rendu! and her fish ... and her cat ... and her _curé_ ... hang it! I _couldn’t_ stand it.”

Here M. Rouvière interrupted his monologue for a minute to examine the toe of his boot; satisfied that it was intact, he resumed his train of thought.

“No, I really don’t believe that it would be possible to meet with a more perfect type of the humdrum existence, the narrow-minded ideas, and flat conversation prevalent in these provincial mole-hills than this dowdy female presents! That good fellow—how much he must have suffered before he learnt to bow his intellect beneath her imbecile yoke! God bless me! I know the whole story. He probably struggled hard at first, and then, little by little, he was bowed and bent and broken, as so many others have been, by the continued pressure of a feminine will! Thirty years’ martyrdom. But, ha! ha! Mme. Dupuis, _your_ hour has come; he shall be avenged.”

Here M. Rouvière drew himself up straight in his chair and laughed merrily. “It reminds me,” continued he half-aloud, “of my battle with that old Indian woman when I stole her idol while she was asleep. What a good-for-nothing hussy she was! Extraordinary how much old women resemble one another all the world over.”

[TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.]

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A GLANCE AT THE INDIAN QUESTION.[40]

Let us begin by considering the Indian himself. As soon as he is able to stand alone he commences that practice with the bow and arrow which makes him a good marksman before he is well in his teens. He is tied in his saddle before he can walk, and a horse becomes as much a part of his nature as if he were a Centaur. While yet a child he learns the subterfuges of the chase: the quiet, patient, breathless watchfulness, the stealthy, snake-like advance, which enable him in adult life to crawl, unseen and unheard, upon his unsuspecting victim, to take him at a disadvantage, surprise and kill him without the risk of a wound. From his earliest years he hears the warriors of his tribe relate their acts of treachery and blood, of rapine and violence, and boast of them as brave and glorious deeds. He is taught to consider treachery courage, robbery and murder honorable warfare, and the most renowned warrior the one who despatches his foe with the least possibility of danger to himself. For him revenge is a sacred duty. He hears shouts of savage laughter and applause greet the warrior who devises the worst tortures for the miserable captive. His initiation to the order of warriors is a terrible ordeal of physical suffering, which must be borne without flinching or murmuring to ensure the success of the candidate. The grossest sensuality is practised openly under his childish eyes. He learns to regard cunning and falsehood as virtues, and to look upon the warrior most skilled in the arts of deceit as the greatest hero of his tribe. Until he has committed some signal act of murder, treachery, or robbery, he is without influence among the braves or attractions for the squaws.

All is fair in the wars of Indians, either with the white man or foes of their own color. The Sioux kills the Crow—man, woman, or papoose at the breast—at sight. The Crow will brain the sleeping Sioux equally without regard to age or sex. A small party of Minneconjon Sioux went to the Tongue River Cantonment, last December, to surrender. They carried a flag of truce. Unfortunately, they rode into the camp of some Crow scouts which was situated within a few hundred yards of the cantonment. The Crows received them in a friendly manner, shook hands with them, and while with one hand they gave the pledge of amity, with the other they poured the contents of their revolvers into the breasts of the bearers of the white flag. The Crows could not understand the indignation of the officers and soldiers at such an act of treachery and cowardice (we regret to say that it was not without apologists and applauders among white frontiersmen), but they feared it enough to run away to their agency, where the leader in the bloody deed was the recipient of high honors. There he was the hero of the time.

HOW THE INDIAN IS CIRCUMSTANCED.

Next let us consider the circumstances in which this creature, so savagely nurtured and developed, is placed.

We find him in a district of country which he believes to be his by immemorial right of possession. It is the land of his fathers. The white man formally recognizes his claim by making solemn treaties for the transfer of portions of the Indian’s heritage. The land being his, the game is his. The Great Spirit created the buffalo for the sustentation of his red children. The buffalo-hunter enters the Indian’s domain, and slaughters the buffalo by tens of thousands for the robes, leaving the flesh to rot upon the plain. Thousands are wantonly destroyed by wealthy idlers who call themselves sportsmen. The buffalo supplies the Indian not only with food, but with raiment and shelter. It furnishes him the article of exchange which enables him to obtain the necessaries of his savage life. The diminution of the buffalo means privation, suffering, nakedness, starvation to the Indian and his family.

The white man by formal compact purchases from the Indian some certain district, and solemnly binds himself to respect the Indian’s remaining rights within certain prescribed limits, to keep trespassers from entering the now diminished territory, and to ensure it to him and his tribe for ever. But this does not stop the insatiate adventurer, who again crosses the newly-defined limit.[41] The government seems powerless to compel its citizens to respect its treaty obligations or to punish their infraction. The exasperated Indian kills some of the trespassers. Would it be astonishing that he should do so, even if he had been reared under the influences of Christianity instead of those of barbarism? Troops are now sent against the Indians. After the sacrifice of a greater or less number of brave soldiers the hostile tribe is subjected, compelled to return to a quasi-peaceful condition, and to consent to a further reduction of its territorial limits. Before the ink is dry with which the so-called treaty is written the adventurer again crosses the newly-designated boundary. Thus the process goes on _ad infinitum_, or until the Indian, driven from the last foot of his ancestral earth, starving, naked, the cries of his suffering women and children ringing in his ears, is compelled to accept any terms which will give him food and covering.

THE INDIANS ON THE RESERVATIONS.

The Indian is now taken to a reservation. Even his removal may be a transportation job by which some politicaster in New York or Boston or friendly Philadelphia, who never saw a hostile Indian, and who invests no money in the enterprise, makes a fortune. From this time on he is a means of money-making for a crowd of sharpers. A scanty supply of bad beef at a high price, a little coffee and sugar of the lowest grade, with sometimes indifferent flour, compose his ration. If he happens to be where he can occasionally kill a buffalo, a deer, or a wolf, his squaw dresses the skin, and he takes it to the trader’s store, where he barters it for a little sugar, coffee, or pemican to add to his meagre ration. He gets in exchange for his peltries what the trader chooses to give him. For a calf-robe or a wolf-skin he may get a few cupfuls of the coarsest sugar, or a tin cup worth about ten cents in New York. For a fair calf-robe the trader will ask _three dollars_! “We make every white man rich who comes to our country,” said Sitting Bull to Gen. Miles in the council which preceded the fight on Cedar Creek, in Montana, last October. The remark was not without truth, so far as Indian traders and reservation rings are concerned.

It is alleged that Indians on reservations have been compelled to kill some of their ponies to feed their families. We do not personally know this to be so, but we can well believe it. We do know that not three years ago the Kiowas and Comanches were without flour for months; that the beef issued to them was miserable. We have seen it stated and have been told time and again that rations have been drawn for numbers greatly exceeding those actually at the agencies; and, with the developments made through the honesty and courage of Professor Marsh still fresh in our memory, we can well believe it also. Is it a subject of special wonder that, being the victim of such a system, in addition to his peculiar training, the Indian should look upon deceit and robbery as not only justifiable but laudable?

WHAT WE ASK OF THE INDIAN.

All men are naturally tenacious of their rights of property; the more civilized the community the more sacred those rights. The Indian has the instinct of property very strongly developed. After we have subdued, swindled, and reduced him to the verge of starvation we say to him: “You must now surrender your horses and your arms.” The earliest ambition of an Indian is to possess a fire-arm. He will pay thirty to forty ponies for a good rifle. Ponies are his currency. If the government sells this rifle by auction, it will bring perhaps five to ten dollars. It is hard for the Indian to see his rifle carried off and his horse ridden away by some white hunter, “wolfer,” or trapper. He is very fond of his ponies. No consideration of value will induce him to part with a favorite horse. A friend of the writer saw a squaw, with tears in her eyes, cut a lock from the mane of her favorite pony before surrendering the animal to the representative of the government. Thus, we starve the Indian; we deprive him of his arms, with which he might kill game to eke out a subsistence; we take away his ponies, which furnish him food when he is reduced to extremity through our fault or failure. What Christian people would be content under such treatment? Can we be surprised that an untutored savage, who cannot understand our clashing of bureaus, our shifting of responsibility, or our red-tape refinements of official morality, should look upon the white man as the liar of liars and the thief of thieves, and, when he is on the war-path, should execute the wild justice of revenge on any of the race who happens to come within reach of his rifle? Can we be surprised if he leaves his reservation and chooses to fight to the last rather than be the patient victim of such a system of injustice and spoliation? It is not astonishing that the Indian should surrender only his poorest animals, should hide his magazine guns and rifles and give up only rusty old smooth-bores or arms for which he cannot procure fitting ammunition. In our every transaction with him we strengthen by example the lessons of deception he was taught in his childhood.

INDIAN LIFE AT AN AGENCY.

An Indian agency is not usually a school of morality. Interpreters, traders’ clerks, “squaw-men,” have what are euphemistically termed “Indian wives.” It is scarcely necessary to say that these are nothing more than concubines. These poor red slaves are usually purchased from their savage sires for a blanket, a cheap trinket, a pony, or a few cartridges. Sometimes they are presents given for the purpose of making interest with influential underlings. Agency life has no tendency to elevate the Indian. He lives in idleness and inaction. He has nothing to do and nothing to hope for. He has no future. He must occupy his time in some way, and he becomes a slave to gambling and sexual indulgence. Occasionally the young men, wearied by the monotony of such a life and ambitious of distinction, seize upon the first real or fancied wrong as a pretext for revolt, fly the agency, and go upon the war-path.

OUR INDIANS IN CANADA.

Why is it that the Indians who give us so much trouble become peaceable, and remain so, when they settle on the Canadian side of the border? There they receive no governmental aid, and are able to procure their own subsistence. We read of no outrages or robberies there. It is simply because the Indian’s rights are respected. He has been protected in his rights even against the greedy nephews of English statesmen who cast covetous eyes upon his lands. If he is guilty of offence, he is promptly and sternly punished. The arm of the military is not held back when offending Indians are within reach of punishment because a million or so has been appropriated to be expended for their benefit as soon as they can be reported peaceable, and because the vultures of the ring are a-hungering for the spoil.

THE FRONTIERSMAN AND THE INDIAN.

It is difficult for the honest frontiersman—the hardy pioneer who, with an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other, hews himself a farm out of the wilderness—to be just toward the Indian. The memory of massacre of his neighbors or relatives, of outrage on defenceless women, stirs up, even in gentle breasts, a hatred of the red man which prompts an undying vendetta, which begets a feeling that a remorseless shedding of Indian blood to the very last drop would not be an adequate punishment for such atrocities. There is many a worthy and otherwise humane and law-abiding pioneer who believes that dead Indians are the only good ones; and such a feeling seizes even the strongest advocate of a humane policy when he sees the scalp of a white woman dangling from the girdle of a filthy savage. There are men on the frontier, otherwise brave and gentle-hearted, who would have no more scruple to shoot an Indian at sight than to kill a prairie-wolf. Peace is difficult to keep between two opposing elements imbued with corresponding sentiments toward each other. For this state of things the rapacious Indian rings, the violators of treaty stipulations, the ruthless adventurers, the horse-thieves, the murderers, fugitives from justice, respecting no laws, human or divine, who infest the Indian country, are mainly responsible. An American gentleman who spent two years recently in Manitoba told the writer that he found many of the Sioux who were engaged in the Minnesota massacre living there peaceful and contented. “Wearing a red coat,” said he, “I can travel alone from one end of the Territory to the other without danger of molestation.”

THE QUAKERS AND THE INDIANS.

The failure of the Quaker specific does not need to be dwelt upon. We have had under the Quaker management the most serious and bloody Indian wars that have afflicted the frontier for many years. Besides, there is scarcely a wild tribe of which some portion has not been in a state of hostility to a greater or less extent. There are itching palms among the Quakers as well as among the other religious denominations. What was needed was not men who made professions of peace—or “made-up Quakers,” who put on the Friendly drab for the occasion—but men who practised honesty and fair-dealing.

THE ARMY AND THE INDIANS.

The worst elements of society on the frontier—“wolfers,” buffalo-hunters, trappers, guides, scouts, contractors, venders of poisonous whiskey, and keepers of frontier gambling-saloons—may and generally do desire Indian wars; for to them they are a source of employment and profit. Territorial officials, their friends and clients, may desire a state of hostility, on account of the money it causes to be expended in their districts, especially if authority can be obtained to raise special forces. This, in addition to opportunities of profit, offers a means of augmenting and strengthening what is delicately termed “political” influence by a judicious distribution of patronage. It is not very long since a force was raised, in a certain frontier State, which, during an Indian war then raging, did not kill or capture an Indian, inflict or receive a scratch, or fire a shot. This force, which was in service only for a few months, cost the country at large nearly two hundred thousand dollars. This was very pleasant for the force, very profitable to the State. No doubt a repetition of the experience would be agreeable at any time. It was not very economical or beneficial to the country at large. But to suppose that the regular army desires wars with the Indian tribes is a very great mistake. Why should it? To the army Indian wars are neither sources of honor nor of profit. To it they only mean hard work, no glory, increased personal expenditures without additional pay. For our hard-worked little army receives no field allowances. A member of the non-combatant branches of the military establishment can effect more toward his advancement in one campaign in Washington than can the live, the real soldiers, the fighting men, in five lustres of laborious and dangerous field-service in the Indian country. Operations against hostile tribes, though attended by exposure, hardship, suffering, and dangers to which civilized warfare presents no parallel, with the possibility of death by indescribable tortures in the event of capture, are not considered “war” by certain gentlemen who sit at home at ease and enjoy, if they do not improve, each shining hour. Hundreds of brave men in blue may fall in Indian battle, crushed by the mere power of numbers; but this, forsooth, is not “war.” It is only wounds, or maiming for life without hope of recognition or reward, or death upon a battle-field to which glory is denied.

THE TRANSFER OF THE INDIANS TO THE WAR DEPARTMENT.

The transfer of the Indians to the War Department would be advantageous, for a time, both to the government and the Indian, but it would be ruinous to the army. The Indian Ring would eventually either effect the abolition of the army altogether—which would be bad enough—or fill it with the material of which Indian traders and reservation sharks are made—which would be still worse. The country cannot afford to risk the deterioration or destruction of a class of officials admitted on all hands to be among the most honorable and trustworthy servants of the government.

CAUSES OF INDIAN WARS.

The usual cause of Indian wars is want of good faith in carrying out the obligations of treaties. It is scarcely too much to say that we rarely, if ever, carry out treaty stipulations with Indians. The great majority of the people of the United States wish to treat the Indian not only fairly, but kindly, generously, magnanimously. Money enough is appropriated, if it were judiciously and honestly expended. But the sums appropriated seem to become small by degrees and wonderfully less before they reach the Indian. It is not the interest of the Indian Ring to have the Indian question settled.

The transgression of limits solemnly agreed upon has been already mentioned. The lawless classes enumerated above steal Indian ponies and do not scruple to kill an unoffending Indian occasionally. The Indian does not understand individual responsibility for crime. He holds the whole race or tribe accountable for the actions of one of its members, and avenges the killing of his brother on the first victim presented to him.

Indian wars have doubtless been caused by more than usually grasping traders whose rapacity has made the Indians discontented and driven them from the reservations. We have read, at least, of cases in which numbers have been fed on paper in excess of the actual number present on the reservation. We are told that in such cases, when an impending investigation has made discovery possible, the tribe is reported hostile and large numbers said to have left the agency. The Indians who have lived quietly on the reservation, utterly unable to comprehend the forcible measures about to be adopted, suspicious as Indians always are, and supposing they are all to be killed, leave the reservation and go upon the war-path.

THE FIRST STEP TOWARD PEACE.

The first step toward bringing the Indian to a permanently peaceful condition is to place in his country a military force strong enough to show him the utter madness of keeping up the war. In general, a show of sufficient force is all that is necessary to bring the Indian to subjection. No one understands the lesson of force better or applies it more readily than he. It is the only thing he respects or fears. Instead of doing this, however, we place in the Indian country meagre garrisons, barely able to protect themselves, and powerless for offensive operations. The Indian does not believe our statements of the numbers we could put in the field if we would. He thinks we are boasting, or—as he plainly calls saying anything that is not exact truth—lying. With the directness of mind of a child of nature, he takes a plain, logical view of the situation, and cannot imagine that we have strength and do not use it, or, at least, exhibit it. After the annihilation of Custer on the Little Horn in 1876, and the retirement of all forces from the country between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, except four or five hundred infantry, the Indians at certain agencies, who sympathized and held constant communication with the hostiles, thought they had succeeded in killing nearly all the white soldiers, and boasted that at length the Great Father in Washington would have to accede to their terms. There should be to-day 10,000 men in the Sioux country—6,000 infantry, 2,500 thoroughly drilled and disciplined light cavalry (not raw boys from the great cities who can neither ride nor shoot, mounted on untrained horses), and 1,500 light artillery with light steel guns easily transportable over rough country, but possessing considerable comparative length of range. Such a force would thoroughly complete the work done by the infantry amid the snow and ice of the past winter. It would be the most humane and least expensive mode of laying the indispensable foundation for further work toward the elevation and amelioration of the Indian’s condition. Such a force would drive all the Indians between the Yellowstone and the British line to their agencies, with little, if any, loss of life. If the humanitarians would end the war with the least possible shedding of blood, this is the way to do it. When such a display of force is made as makes resistance hopeless—and the Indian will be quick to see it—there will be an end of Indian wars and we may begin the work of civilization in earnest.

THE MODE AND EXTENT OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION.

We must not try to push the Indian forward too fast. There is no use in trying to make the adult Indian of to-day an agriculturist, or to take him far out of the sphere in which he was brought up. Once the writer happened to be in company with a gentleman who has given some thought to the Indian question, and has had some experience of the Indian character, when a feathered and beaded warrior made his appearance. He was richly dressed—scarlet cloth, eagle’s feathers, profusely-beaded moccasins. “It is nonsense to expect such a creature as that to dig in mud and dirt,” said our friend. “He would spoil his fine clothes and ruin his dainty moccasins.” And there was much wisdom in the remark. The best you can do with the adult Indian is to make him a stock-raiser. Give him good brood mares. Introduce good blood among his herds of ponies. Then find a market for his horses. Buy them for the cavalry. Let him raise a certain proportion of mules, and let the government buy them for the Quartermaster’s Department. Encourage him to raise beef-cattle enough at least for his own consumption; and if you can induce him to raise a surplus, buy the surplus for the Subsistence Department. Give the Indian a fair price for his produce. Dash down the monopoly of Indian trading. Allow any merchant of good standing to trade with the Indian, under proper restrictions as to exclusion of ammunition and spirituous liquors. Let the red man have the benefit of free-trade and competition. Ammunition should be furnished, when necessary, only by the Ordnance Department.

Let the red man also have the same liberty of conscience which is accorded to the white, the black, and even the yellow. Let there be no more parcelling out of Indians among jarring sects. Let them have missionaries of their choice.

Compel all children now under fourteen years to attend schools. Vary school exercises with the use of tools in the workshop or agricultural training in the field. Thus you may make some mechanics and some agriculturists out of the generation now rising. You will have more out of the next generation. But you cannot make an agriculturist out of the grown-up Indian, nor a mechanic. It is folly to attempt it. You cannot reconcile to our nineteenth-century civilization those who have grown up to maturity with the ideas, manners, and morals of the heroic ages. You can no more expect Crazy Horse to use the shovel and the hoe than you could Achilles and Tydides Diomed to plant melons or beans.

THE ONE GREAT REMEDY, AND THE HOPELESSNESS OF ITS APPLICATION.

The remedy of remedies is common honesty in our dealings with the Indian, backed by a force strong enough and always ready to promptly crush any attempt at revolt, and punish speedily and severely every act of lawlessness committed by an Indian. But too many are interested in keeping up the present system to warrant even the slenderest hope of any radical change. To put it in crude frontier terms: “There is too much money in it.” Politicasters, capitalists, contractors, sub-contractors, agents, traders, agency employés, “squaw-men”—or degraded whites who live in a state of concubinage with Indian women, and who are generally tools and touters for the traders—hosts of sinecurists and their friends, find “money in it.” The links of the ring are legion. It is too strong. It can shelve or crush any man with honesty and boldness enough to attack the system. It is too strong for the commissioner or the secretary. It is to be feared that it may prove too strong for the country.

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CHARLES LEVER AT HOME.

The man whose rollicking pen has made more dragoons than all the recruiting-sergeants in her Britannic Majesty’s service; who has “promoted” the “Connaught Rangers” and _Faugh a ballaghs_ into _corps d’élite_; who has broken more bones across country than the six-foot stone walls of Connemara; whose pictures of that land “which smiles through her tears like a sunbeam in showers” are as racy of the soil as her own emerald shamrock; who has painted Irish girls pure as angels’ whispers, bright as saucy streamlets, and the “boys” a bewildering compound of fun, fight, frolic, and “divarshin”; whose career was as stainless as his success was merited, and whose memory is an heirloom—was born in the city of Dublin in the year of grace 1806. Graduating at Cambridge University, and subsequently at the _U_-niversity of Göttingen, his student-life betrayed no symptoms of the mental _élan_ which was to distinguish him later on, and, save for its Bohemianism, was absolutely colorless, and even dull. The boy was not father to the man. Selecting the medical profession as much by chance as predilection, he succeeded, during the visitation of cholera in 1832, in obtaining an appointment as medical superintendent in the northwest of Ireland, in the districts of Londonderry and Coleraine, and for a time continued to “guess at prescriptions, invent ingredients,” and generally administer to the requirements of afflicted humanity. But the task was uncongenial, the life a dead-level, flavored with no spice of variety, uncheckered in its monotonous routine. It was a “bad billet, an’ no Christian man cud live in it, barrin’ a say-gull or a dispinsiry docthor.” Doctor Lever!—pshaw! Charley Lever; who ever thinks of the author of _Harry Lorrequer_ as Doctor Lever? Nevertheless, his experiences at this period bore him rich fruit in the after-time, and in Billy Traynor, “poet, peddler, and physician” (_The Fortunes of Glencore_), we have a type of the medical men with whom he was then associated. “I am the nearest thing to a doctor going,” says Billy. “I can breathe a vein against any man in the barony. I can’t say that for any articular congestion of the aortis valve, or for a seropulmonic diathesis, d’ye mind, that there isn’t as good as me; but for the ould school of physic, the humoral diagnostic touch, who can beat me?” The hedge-doctor and hedge-schoolmaster, pedants both, are now an institution of the past.