CHAPTER IX INDIANS
The story of the Indians in America is the story of the weak in the presence of the strong. Despite the ideals which reign in capitals and cultural centers it is always the same with the main body of the human race—the strong may pity the weak but they will not forbear to use the advantage of their strength. There is little to choose between Spaniards and English. There is little to choose between any of the races; Belgians in the Congo, Portuguese in Brazil, Russians in Turkestan; they have dispossessed, enslaved, expelled, destroyed, without a mist upon their conscience. And it is difficult to think that mankind has improved. If a new world were discovered to-day, if the ocean delivered up a new continent, the first thought would be—Is there gold there? If we found people living on it, specimens would be brought to be shown to prime ministers and exhibited in places of amusement. And there would be a rush to that new world of gold seekers, pirates, adventurers, and Imperial administrators.
So it may be pardoned if at this stage in American history one refuses to wax indignant over how Spaniards and Anglo-Saxon forefathers of present Americans behaved toward the natural possessors of the soil.
The justification for the rapine of America—or at least of North America—is that it has been made into a "going concern." We believe in our curious self-complacence that an American humanity with factories, gilded by millionaires and mighty banks, towering heavenward in mighty cities, is a greater glory to God than the life of Hiawatha and his friends. We must confess that it seems so, and it is difficult to hear the ancient whisper—Where is thy brother Abel?
The Indians, however, are not forgotten. They are more remembered now that they are few. There comes a moment when the old race is mostly underground, or tucked safely away in wildernesses, remote from human ken, that the new race of conquerors becomes sentimental. It has destroyed all that it adored, and now it adores all that it has destroyed. It is so now in the United States, where the Indians have become the pets of tourists and the theme of poets.
You have to travel far to meet the Indians, so the railway companies have used the Indian as an advertisement, not only pictured but living. For at Las Vegas station or at Albuquerque, and many others, do you not see station Indians all bedizened, walking up and down before the delighted traveler's eyes. The Indian has become part of the romance of far travel.
The United States have left their own primitive past behind, and emerged from the mud and the smells and the roughness of pioneer days. All America treads paved sidewalks. All America goes in cars. All America is in clean linen and good clothes. There is electric light, sanitation. Baths have become more national than in Russia or Turkey. America indeed leads civilization and leads it forward. So the distance between the Indians and the citizens of the United States grows more and more remarkable. The gap is a sort of Grand Cañon in itself, a grand cañon in the continuity of human things.