And so the latest Indian War is over! It is absurd to call such chases and skirmishes by so dignified a name. Small bands of ten, twenty, sometimes a hundred or two outlaws in revolt, are hunted to death or surrender in the wildernesses of the Far West. We call them nations, and this undignified pursuit a war. It is, in reality, only the same thing which is continually being done in our great cities by the police. Law-breakers, and men who avenge their own wrongs, must be chased to their dens, and either caught and chained, or shot like dogs. Only that, on the frontier, the facilities for the violence, and then for the escape, are so much greater than in the city; and that we have to send generals and colonels in the army after them, instead of sergeants of police.
We pity the “braves” of the Territories more than we do the “roughs” of the bloody sixth ward, because they are more ignorant and more wronged, and because the hindrances to a better life are even greater for them. And we pity the gallant men of the army, who are compelled to do this police work, in dogging criminals to death.
Among the recent dispatches is one, telling of an encounter between six cow-boys and eight Indians on the Nueces River, in which four Indians were killed and one captured; one of the boys had a flesh-wound, and the others only wounds in their clothing. Generalship does not go for much in such guerrilla warfare. West Point tactics are not of much avail. Often, in the brooks of New England, the farmer’s boy, who goes fishing with a stick and a string, when it rains too hard to work out of doors, will bring home ten times as many trout as the city sportsman with eight-ounce rod, a Conroy reel and a choice assortment of flies. Perhaps a small army of cow-boys would serve us best on the frontier. It is not fit work for real soldiers. We do not mean a word of disrespect to them. They have our sympathy and admiration for their fidelity and obedience, and for not resigning when they are set to such work.
But how much better it would be if, by fair treatment and honestly-fulfilled pledges, we had made these Indians both friendly and law-abiding—or, even, if now, with patience and forbearance, we should be persistently kind and true, and see how long it would be before we and they should find each in the other, “a man and a brother.”
The difference between equal and identical rights is well illustrated by the action of the Georgia Central Railroad officials. Travel between Macon and Savannah is so light that only one passenger coach is run. By a partition this is divided into two parts, furnished exactly alike, one for white and the other for colored passengers. The colored end being nearly empty one day, a white man took a seat, or rather four seats, in it, upon which the conductor told him that he was in the wrong end of the car, and that the vice-president was very particular that no white persons be allowed to ride in the apartment for colored people.
A similar arrangement formerly prevailed on the street-cars in Mobile, and some of the old partitioned cars are still in use. It is to be hoped that, in the course of human events, identical rights on steam-cars will not be considered any worse than on horse cars by the constituents of Georgia’s good Governor Colquitt.