I have been to-day, the 23d of August, over the same spot I wandered over this day fifty years ago. What changes have supervened it is difficult to realize. This was then a dense, unsettled wilderness. The wild deer was on every hill, in every valley. Limpid streams purled rippling and gladly along pebbly beds, and fell babbling over great rocks. These alone disturbed the profound silence, where solitude brooded, and quiet was at home. These wild forests extended west to Line Creek, then the dividing line between the Indian possessions and the newly acquired territory now constituting the State of Alabama. Upon this territory of untamed wilderness there wandered then fifty thousand Indians, the remnant of the mighty nation of Muscogees, who one hundred and thirty years ago welcomed the white man at Yamactow, now Savannah, and tendered him a home in the New World. Fifty years ago he had progressed to the banks of the Ocmulgee, driving before him the aboriginal inhabitant, and appropriating his domains. Here for a time his march was stayed. But the Indian had gone forward to meet the white man coming from the Mississippi to surround him, the more surely to effect his ultimate destruction and give his home and acres to the enterprise and capacity of the white man.
Wandering through these wilds fifty years ago, I did not deem this end would be so soon accomplished. Here now is the city and the village, the farm-house and extended fields, the railroads and highways, and hundreds of thousands of busy men who had not then a being. The appurtenances of civilization everywhere greet you: many of these are worn and mossed over with the lapse of time and appear tired of the weight of wasting years. The red men, away in the West, have dwindled to a mere handful, still flying before the white man, and shrinking away from his hated civilization.
Is this cruel and sinful—or the silent, mysterious operation of the laws of nature? One people succeeds another, as day comes after day, and years follow years. Upon this continent the Indian found the evidences in abundance of a preceding people, the monuments of whose existence he disregards, but which, in the earth-mounds rising up over all the land, arrest the white man's attention and wonder. He inquires of the Indian inhabitant he is expelling from the country, Who was the architect of these, and what their signification? and is answered: We have no tradition which tells; our people found them when they came, as you find them to-day. These traditions give the history of the nations now here, and we find in every Southern tribe that they tell of an immigration from the southwest.
The Muscogee, Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, all have the history of their flying from beyond the Mississippi, and from the persecutions of superior and more warlike nations, and resting here for security, where they found none to molest them, and only these dumb evidences of another people, who once filled the land, but had passed away.
When the white man came, he found but one race upon the two continents. Their type was the same and universal, and only these mounds to witness of a former race. Ethnology has discovered no other. All the remains of man indicate the same type, and there remains not a fossil to record the existence of those who reared these earth-books, which speak so eloquently of a race passed away.
How rapidly the work of demolition goes on! Will a century hence find one of the red race upon this continent? Certainly not, if it shall accomplish so much as the century past. There is not one for every ten, then; and the tenth remaining are now surrounded on all sides, and, being pushed to the centre, must perish.
They are by nature incapable of that civilization which would enable them to organize governments and teach the science of agriculture. They were formed for the woods, and physically organized to live on flesh. The animals furnishing this were placed with them here, and the only vegetable found with them was the maize, or Indian corn. The white man was organized to feed on vegetables, and they were placed with him in his centre of creation, and he brought them here, and with himself acclimated them, as a necessity to his existence in America.
No effort can save the red man from extermination that humanity or Christianity may suggest. When deprived of his natural food furnished by the forest, he knows not nor can he be taught the means of supplying the want. The capacities of his brain will not admit of the cultivation necessary to that end. And as he has done in the presence of civilization, he will know none of its arts; and receiving or commanding none of its results, he will wilt and die.
Here, on the very spot where I am writing, is evidence in abundance of the facts here stated. Every effort to civilize and make the nomadic Indian a cultivator of the earth—here has been tried, and within my memory. Missionary establishments were here, schools, churches, fields, implements, example and its blessings, all without effect. Nothing now remains to tell of these efforts but a few miserable ruins; nothing in any change of character or condition of the Indian. And here, where fifty years ago, with me, he hunted the red deer and wild turkey for the meat of his family and the clothing of himself and offspring—to-day he would be a curiosity, and one never seen by half the population which appropriates and cultivates the soil over which he wandered in the chase. His beautiful woods are gone; the green corn grows where the green trees grew, and the bruised and torn face of his mother earth muddies to disgust, with her clay-freighted tears, the limpid streams by which he sat down to rest, and from which he drank to quench his thirst from weariness earned in his hunt for wild game, which grew with him, and grew for him, as nature's provision. The deer and the Indian are gone. The church-steeple points to heaven where the wigwam stood, and the mart of commerce covers over all the space where the camp-fires burned. The quarrels of Hopothlayohola and McIntosh are history now, and the great tragedy of its conclusion in the death of McIntosh is now scarcely remembered.
True to his hatred of the Georgians, Hopothlayohola, in the recent war, away beyond the Mississippi, arrayed his warriors in hostility to the Confederacy, and, when numbering nearly one hundred winters, led them to battle in Arkansas, against the name of his hereditary foe, and hereditary hate—McIntosh; and by that officer, commanding the Confederate troops, was defeated, and his followers dispersed. Since that time, nothing has been known of the fate of the old warrior-chief.