Were the atrocities, committed in the Vale of Wyoming and Cherry Valley unprecedented among the Waldensian fastnesses and the mountains of Auvergne? Who has read Fox’s Book of Martyrs and found any thing to parallel it in all the records of Indian warfare? The slaughter of St. Bartholomew’s day, the destruction of the Jews in Spain, and the Scotch Covenanters, were in obedience to the mandates of Christian princes, aye, and some of them devised by Christian women, who professed to be serving God, and to make the Bible the man of their counsel.
It is said also the Indian was treacherous, and in compliance with the conditions of no treaty was ever to be trusted. But our Puritan fathers cannot be wholly exonerated from the charge of faithlessness; and who does not blush to talk of Indian traitors when he remembers the Spanish invasion and the fall of the princely and magnanimous Montezuma?
“Indians believed in witches and burned them too!” Did not the sainted Baxter, with the Bible in his hand, pronounce it right? and was not the Indian permitted to be present, when a quiet, unoffending woman was cast into the fire by the decree of a Puritan council?
To come down to more decidedly Christian times, we [[22]]are yet called upon to shudder at the revelations of Howard and Miss Dix. It is not so very long since, in Protestant England, hanging was the punishment of a petty theft, and long and hopeless imprisonment, of a slight misdemeanor. I think it is within the memory of those who are not the oldest inhabitants, when men were yet up to be stoned and spit upon by those who claimed the exclusive right to be called humane and merciful.
Again, it is said, the Indian mode of warfare is, without exception, the most inhuman and revolting. But I do not know that those who die by the barbed and poisoned arrow, linger in more unendurable torments, than those who are mangled by powder and balls. The tomahawk makes quick work of dying, and the custom of scalping among Christian murderers would save thousands from groaning days, and perhaps weeks, among heaps that cover victorious fields and fill hospitals with the wounded and the dying! But scalping was not an invention exclusively Indian. “It claims,” says Prescott, “high authority, or, at least, antiquity.” The Father of history, Herodotus, gives an account of it among the Scythians, showing that they performed the operation, and wore the scalps of their enemies taken in battle, as trophies, in the same manner as our North American Indians. Traces of the same custom are also found in the laws of the Visigoths, among the Franks, and even the Anglo-Saxons. The Southern Indians did not scalp, but they had a system of slavery, no trace of which is to be found among the customs, laws, or legends of the Iroquois.
Again: “They carried away women and children captive, and in their long journeys through the wilderness, they were subjected to heart-rending trials.”
The wars of Christian men throw hundreds and thousands [[23]]of women and children helpless upon the cold world, to toil, to beg, to starve!
This is not so bright a picture as is usually given of people who have written laws and stores of learning; but I cannot see that in any place the coloring is too dark. There is no danger of painting Indians, so that they will become attractive to civilized people; and there is no need of painting them more hideously than they paint themselves.
There is a bright and pleasing side to Indian character; and thinking that there has been enough written of their wars and their cruelties, of the hunter’s and the fisherman’s life, I have sat down by their firesides, and listened to their legends, and tried to become acquainted with their domestic habits, and to understand their finer feelings, and the truly noble traits of their character.
It is so long now since they were the lords of our soil, and formidable as our enemies,—they are so utterly wasted away and helpless that we can afford to listen to the truth, and to believe that even our enemies had virtues. Man was created in the image of God, and it cannot be that any thing human is utterly vile and contemptible. To remain in ignorance and censure without knowledge is easier than to study and toil for the truth, but with the present facilities for digging, Christian people cannot be excused in remaining content with dross.