Of the enormous numbers of the wild cattle which were once the exclusive property of the Indian we have been accustomed to form but a very inadequate idea. They exceed those which have raised the Tartar into the comparatively high rank of a pastoral nomad. The patriarch or poet Job was a famous cattle-owner, but he was a small dairyman by the side of a Cheyenne or Rickaree chief, and a stampede of a small detachment of buffalo would have run down unnoticed the whole of his live-stock. In the three years 1872-74 four and a half millions of buffalo—considerably more than half as many as all the black cattle in the British Islands—were slaughtered. From this fact may be gathered an impression of the vast provision of human food until lately stored by Nature in a region still marked on modern geographies as a desert. Of the value of this endowment the Indian, with all his improvidence, had some notion. It was a resource he may be said to have husbanded. Of nothing like the wanton and shameful destruction dealt by the whites since the feeding-grounds were made accessible by rail was he ever guilty. He managed his hunts systematically, placed them under the rigid control of a sort of guild known as "dog-soldiers," and allowed to be slain only what were needed for his wants. The buffalo was to him what the cocoa-palm is to the Polynesian; and more, for he needed warm shelter and warm clothing. He cared for it accordingly. It grew around him almost as the cocoa-grove around the hut of the islander. A herd will even now graze quietly for days in the neighborhood of an Indian village of a thousand souls, while an encampment of half a dozen whites disperses it instantly. The whites kill only for the hides, two of which they lose for every one saved in merchantable condition. A very small proportion of the flesh is utilized when the railway happens to be near enough, and within a like limit of territory the bones are collected. In the single year 1874 over ten millions of tons of these were sent East to fertilize the exhausted fields of the Atlantic slope with the refuse riches of the "desert."
No treaties are made with the buffalo. He is swindled by no agents, post-traders or secretaries at war. He addresses no pathetic remonstrances to his Great Father, and expresses no sense of his wrongs by taking scalps or inflicting worse horrors still. School-houses, temperance societies, small-pox and whiskey are not for him. Yet does he move toward annihilation, as we have said, in singularly close lock-step with the Indian. His problem, like the other, is being settled by the settler. Were the red man edible, the parallelism in destiny would be more complete. As it is, the quadruped will disappear before the biped native. Individuals of the latter will be absorbed into the bosom of civilization, as the remnants of the Senecas, the Oneidas and the Pamunkeys have long since been. As a race, the Indians' best hope is euthanasia. Even that is desperately uncertain. The Cherokees, Creeks and Choctaws, with their minor associates in the Indian Territory, are, though not increasing in numbers, living in peace and something like industry. Yet they are at the mercy of any vagabond who should take it into his head to "salt" with gold-dust or silver-ore any ravine in the midst of their country. No law and no army would avail to repel the rush. They would go the way of the Sioux of the Black Hills, and would have only the choice of drifting out of existence on the outskirts of white society or of being washed high and dry over the frontier. Where are the sixty thousand Indians who at the time of the transfer of California were so comfortably coddled under the wing of the missions? They have been the victims of no recorded war, and the agents never had a chance at them. They have gone, however, with a rapidity unexampled anywhere east of the mountains.
Solutions of the Indian problem are endless, and the writer of the book named at the head of these paragraphs has his shy at it. His plan is new chiefly in blaming all round—traders, Quakers, Indians, government and frontiersmen. If we can venture to centralize his invective, we should lay it specially on the heads of the class the Indians term "squaw-men"—the whites who have Indian wives and are established among the lodges. Of these he gives us a conjectural census—a hundred agencies and reservations and ten squaw-men to each. From this thousand are drawn all the interpreters; and not a solitary interpreter, Colonel Dodge insists, can be relied upon. They are, every man of them, in league with the agents and traders against the government and the Indians. The two last named—parties of the first part, as we should style them—never come together and never understand each other. The colonel's cure is remitting the whole thing to army control. But that, we need not say, has been tried, with results by no means brilliant.
For those who have never even seen an annuity distributed to aggravate the muddle with their suggestions would be most presumptuous. It is as little as we can do to abstain. We may venture here only to say a word in mitigation of the deep stain left upon the fair fame of the United States by its management of Indian affairs. The contrast so frequently drawn with the course of things in Canada is not wholly just. It was the French who saved the Canadian Indians from the mere sordid extinction which has befallen most of their southern congeners, as it was the Spaniards who kept the California tribes alive. The natives—or rather the French half-breeds—were made trappers and voyageurs before the English conquest of the province. But for that preparation they might have gone the way of our Indians under Anglo-Saxon pressure. Climate also favored them. Only an infinitesimal fraction of British America is capable of white colonization.
Dropping a theme which bids fair to remain undisposed of, like the disputes of Hogarth's doctors, till the patient is dead, we revert to Colonel Dodge's book, and to those of its pages which it is clear he wrote most en amateur. Soldier and student, he is above all a sportsman. It is delightful to follow him over the plain and (in spirit and untearable trousers) into the chaparral. Anywhere between the Rio Grande, the Missouri and Bridger's Pass he seems to be as much at home as on his own farm. All its live-stock is familiar to him. His sheep are of the big-horn breed; his black cattle, the two varieties of buffalo, mountain and lowland; and his poultry, the prairie-chicken and its relatives. He is both interesting and instructive. The puma and the panther he avers to be distinct species. The prong-horned antelope—the only American species, and now, we believe, assigned by naturalists to a genus of its own—he demonstrates to shed its horns. He describes six species of native grouse; to which if we add two others not found within the limits he describes, we have eight for the United States against two in Great Britain and four for all Europe. His stories of sport and adventure are given with circumstance and animation. Extra spice is thrown in by a moderate infusion of second-hand relations of a more or less imaginative character, which he is careful to separate from the fruit of his own experience and observation. The physical conformation of the country and its climate are described with remarkable distinctness. We do not know a book on the subject that comes up more faithfully to its title.
Books Received.
The Struggle against Absolute Monarchy, 1603-1688: Epochs of English History. By Bertha Meriton Cordery. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.
The Tudors and the Reformation, 1485-1603: Epochs of English History. By M. Creighton, M.A. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping. Compiled from Original Recipes. Marysville, Ohio: Buckeye Publishing Co.