[468] Drake, Life of Tecumseh, 134.
[469] Dawson, Harrison, 178.
[470] Edwards, Life of Ninian Edwards, 49.
Thus to the native mind there were two kinds of justice, one red and the other white, and moreover the red man was keen enough to observe that most of the faults for which he was visited with punishment had been learned from the palefaces. In particular the white man's fire-water had for him a fatal fascination, leading him into depths of degradation and crime which beggar description. There is no more mournful picture in English literature than that of the steady destruction of the Indian race by this poison dealt out to the red man by the white trader for the sake of paltry gain. The efforts of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and of the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States to suppress the accursed traffic were all alike in vain. The narratives of travelers and the letters and reports of government officials abound in portrayals of shocking scenes of debauchery indulged in by the Indians while under the influence of liquor.[471] "I have witnessed the evils caused by that liquor among the Indians," wrote Denonville, governor of New France, in an official memoir in 1690.[472] "It is the horror of horrors. There is no crime nor infamy they do not perpetrate in their excesses. A mother throws her child into the fire; noses are bitten off; this is a frequent occurrence. It is another Hell among them during these orgies, which must be seen to be credited.... Those who allege that the Indians will remove to the English, if Brandy be not furnished them do not tell the truth; for it is a fact that they do not care about drinking as long as they do not see brandy; and the most reasonable would wish there had never been any such thing; for they set their entrails on fire and beggar themselves by giving their peltries and clothes for drink." "This passion for drink," said General Cass to the chief, Metea, at the Chicago Treaty of 1821, "has injured your nation more than any other thing—more than all the other causes put together. It is not a long period since you were a powerful independent tribe—now, you are reduced to a handful, and it is allowing to ardent spirits."[473] And Governor Harrison, pleading for a law to protect the Indians against the liquor traffic, thus addressed the Indiana legislature in 1805: "You are witnesses to the abuses; you have seen our towns crowded with furious and drunken savages, our streets flowing with their blood, their arms and clothing bartered for the liquor that destroys them, and their miserable women and children enduring all the extremities of cold and hunger. So destructive has the progress of intemperance been among them, that whole villages have been swept away. A miserable remnant is all that remains to mark the names and situation of many numerous and warlike tribes. In the energetic language of one of their orators, it is a dreadful conflagration, which spreads misery and desolation through their country, and threatens the annihilation of the whole race."[474]
[471] For examples see Volney, View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America, 354; Latrobe, Rambler in North America, II, chap, xi; Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Sources of the St. Peter's River, I, 124-27; Charlevoix, Letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguières, 228-29; and citations collected by Dillon, in Indiana Historical Society, Publications, I, 131-38.
[472] O'Callaghan, New York Colonial Documents, IX, 441.
[473] Schoolcraft, Travels in the Central Portions the Mississippi Valley, 351.
[474] Dawson, Harrison, 73.
At an earlier date than the foregoing, in an official communication to the Secretary of War, Harrison described the general effect upon the Indians of their intercourse with the whites in these words:
"Killing each other has become so customary amongst them that it is no longer thought criminal. They murder those whom they have been most accustomed to esteem and regard—their chiefs and their nearest relatives fall under the stroke of their tomahawks and their knives.... All those horrors are produced to those unhappy people by their too frequent intercourse with the white people. This is so certain that I can at once tell, upon looking at an Indian whom I chance to meet, whether he belongs to a neighboring, or to a more distant tribe. The latter is generally well clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former, half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication; and many of them without arms, except a knife, which they carry for the most villanous purposes."[475]