Is it a fair “business transaction,” after he has thus forced the trade?
What though he does faithfully pay the contract-price? Does it atone for the first moral wrong, in legally forcing the sale? And how much more aggravated the injury becomes, when, through his agents, or his sons, he “legitimately,” under various pretences, permits the unfortunate seller to be robbed, by paying him off in “chips and whetstones,” that he does not desire nor need, so that in the end he is practically defrauded out of his property, and finds himself at the last payment, homeless and penniless.
All done, however, under the sanction of law, and in the shade of church-steeples, and with sanctimonious semblance of honesty and justice.
The picture is not overdrawn. The illustration is
fair, or, if deficient at all, it has bean in excess of advantage to the principal, not the victim. The latter has accepted the situation and suffered the consequences.
To return to Pow-e-shiek’s band leaving their home. Who shall ever recount the sorrows and anguish of those people, while they formed in line of march, and turned their eyes for the last time upon the scenes that had been all the world to them? What mattered it though they realized all the pangs their natures were capable of, in those parting hours, with the uncomfortable promises that the ploughshare of civilization would level down the graves of their fathers, before their retreating footprints had been obliterated from the trail which led them sadly away? They were “Injins;” and they ought to have been in better luck than being “Injins.”
Such was the speech of a white man in whose hearing I had said some word of sympathy on the occasion. I did not like the unfeeling wretch then, and have not much respect for him, or for the class he represents. Now I may have charity and pity, too, for all such. Charity for the poverty of a soul so devoid of the finer sensibilities of “common humanity that make mankind akin;” pity for a heart overflowing with selfishness, made manifest in thoughtless or spiteful speech.
The trying hour in the lives of these Indian people had come, and the long cavalcade moved out along the line of westward march, wagons loaded with corn and other supplies. The old men of the tribe, with darkened brows and silent tongue, sat on their horses;
the younger ones, with seeming indifference, in red blankets, feathers, and gaudy paints, moving off on prancing ponies, in little squads, to join the funeral pageant; for so it was. They were leaving the cherished scenes of childhood to hunt for sepulchres in the farther West.
The women, young and old, the drudges of the Indian household, as well as homes, where the sunlight of civilization should warm the hearts of men, and move them to truer justice, were gathered up, and preparing their goods for transportation, while bitter tears were flowing and loud lamentations gave evidence of the grief that would not be repressed, and each in turn, as preparations were complete, would lift the pappoose-basket with its young soul to altitudes of mother’s back or horse’s saddle, and then, with trembling limbs, climb to their seats and join the sad procession, adding what of woful wailing seemed necessary to make the whole complete with sights and sound that would bid defiance to painter’s skill or poet’s words, though, in the memory of those who beheld it, it may live as long as the throbs of sympathy which it kindled shall repeat themselves in hearts that feel for human sorrow.