CHAPTER VI
THE RED MEN, HOW THEY LIVED AND WERE TREATED
NOW that you have been told about the settlement of the colonies, it is well to recall how many of them there were. Let us see. There were the Pilgrim and Puritan settlements of New England, Roger Williams's settlement in Rhode Island, the Dutch settlement in New York, the Quaker one in Pennsylvania, the Catholic settlement in Maryland, the Cavalier ones in Virginia and the Carolinas, and the Debtor settlement in Georgia. Then there were some smaller ones, making about a dozen in all.
These stretched all along the coast, from Canada, the French country in the north, to Florida, the Spanish country in the south. The British were a long time in settling these places, for nearly 250 years passed after the time of Columbus before General Oglethorpe came to Georgia.
While all this was going on, what was becoming of the native people of the country, the Indians? I am afraid they were having a very hard time of it. The Spaniards made slaves of them, and forced them to work so terribly hard in the mines and the fields that they died by thousands. The French and the English fought with them and drove them away from their old homes, killing many of them.
And this has gone on and on ever since, until the red men, who once spread over all this country, are now kept in a very small part of it. Some people say there are as many of them as there ever were. If that is so, they can live on much less land than they once occupied.
What do you know about these Indians? Have you ever seen one of them? Your fathers or grandfathers have, I am sure, for once they were everywhere in this country, and people saw more of them than they liked; but now we see them only in the Wild West shows or the Indian schools, except we happen to go where they live. Do you not want to know something about these oldest Americans? I have been busy so far talking about the white men and what they did, and have had no chance to tell you about the people they found on this continent and how they treated them. I think I must make this chapter an Indian one.
Well, then, when the Spanish came to the south, and the French to the north, and the Dutch and the Swedes and the British to the middle country, they found everywhere a kind of people they had never seen before. Their skin was not white, like that of the people of Europe, nor black like that of the Africans, but of a reddish color, like that of copper, so that they called them red men. They had black eyes and hair, and high cheek-bones, and were not handsome according to our ideas; but they were tall and strong, and many of them very proud and dignified.