The selfishness that exterminated the buffalo—“might makes right”—runs through the veins of the white man. In the same report to the Secretary of War in which Mr. Stevens calls attention of settlers to “many pleasant valleys” that are occupied by “friendly Indians—in some instances described with log houses, cultivated fields, barns, flocks and herds, mills and churches, with good morals and observance of the Sabbath day—that many tribes live in a rich and inviting country, and are wealthy in horses, cattle, and hogs.” He closes by saying: “Laws should be passed for the extinguishment of the Indian title. Posts are recommended with half regiments of mounted men, with a battery of horse artillery, and one of mountain howitzers; that all the Indians west of the mountains ‘should be placed in reservation,’ and the country opened to settlement.”
It is stated that with a small distribution of presents and “prudence, judgment, and display of a small military force, no difficulty will be experienced in accomplishing these arrangements so essential to the construction of the road.” And it does not appear that the government protected the rights of those in possession of the “fertile valleys” any more than it did the game it knew gave support to the people inhabiting the country. If the same careless indifference and love of greed that wantonly destroyed the game beasts which existed upon the vast unoccupied domain west of the Mississippi had in like manner forestalled the settlement of the “North-west Territory” by killing all the game, population and civilization would have been suspended if not made improbable within the past century.
The area of Ohio was well supplied with a variety of the most attractive game, fed and marked by Nature as her own, free for all—which made the early settlements contented, independent, and observing. No means of education gives the mind so much satisfaction and confidence in truth and reality as the study of the object lessons received while living in a garden of Nature, an invited guest.
“All self-educated persons,” says Doctor Newman, “are likely to have more thought, more mind, more philosophy, than those who are forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an examination—who have too much on their hands to indulge in thinking or investigation.... Much better is it for the active and thoughtful intellect ... to eschew the college and university altogether than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious.
“How much more profitable for the independent mind after the rudiments of education to pursue the train of thought which his mother-wit suggests! How much healthier to wander in the fields, and there with the exiled prince to find
‘Tongues in trees, books in running brooks.’
How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in the poem—
‘As the village school and books a few supplied,’
contrived from the beach, and the quay, and fisher’s boat, and the inn’s fireside, and the tradesman’s shop, and shepherd’s walk, and smuggler’s hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and poetry of his own.” Sir Walter Scott long ago declared: “The best part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself.”