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the modifications necessary to the enjoyment of civil liberty and social happiness. It is believed that the principles of humanity in this instance are in harmonious concert with the true interests of the nation. It will redound more to the national honor to incorporate, by a humane and benevolent policy, the natives of our forests in the great American family of freemen, than to receive with open arms the fugitives of the old world, whether their flight has been the effect of their crimes or their virtues." 1

Mr. Crawford had been a member of Congress, and also our minister to France, and for a short time acting vice-president under Madison. While secretary of war in 1815, he aspired to the presidency in opposition to Monroe. The politicians seized on his intermarriage scheme for saving the Indian race, and, as may easily be supposed, used it with great effect against him. He was caricatured and lampooned, and his theory was variously set forth in social and domestic illustrations by the Nasts of those days, seventy years ago, and with such abusive personalities as might give even a demagogue of to-day some new hints for working a campaign.

Our Indian Question seems to take on new intricacies and perplexities as the decades go, by. There are some unknown or unrecognized quantities in the problem which will not easily be eliminated. Among these is the complex and diffuse fact of intermarriage and half-breeds.

This fact is as old as any knowledge of the Indian races in North America by Europeans. In the fifth of his able Historical Letters on the Oregon Question, Albert Gallatin says that "all the American shores of the Pacific Ocean, from Cape Horn to Behring's Straits, are occupied by semi-civilized states, a mixture of European and Spanish descent and of native Indians, who, notwithstanding the efforts of enlightened, intelligent, and liberal men, have heretofore failed in the attempt to establish governments founded on law, that might ensure liberty, preserve order, and protect person and property." This he said in 1846.

The basis of this semi-civilized condition of society, it will be noted, is the mixture of European and Indian blood, which made it impossible to "establish a government founded on law that could protect person and property.

From the earliest colonial dates the Canadas were permeated by the same uncivilizing causes. The immigrants came into the 1 Report on Indian Affairs. By W. C. Crawford, Secretary of War, March 13, 1816. Senate, 14th Congress, 1st Session.

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the colonies took to the woods to enjoy the savage freedom of Indian life, and the intendant reported that 800 had thus gone out of a population of 10,000. The king affixed the penalty of branding and whipping for the first offense, and the galleys for life for the second. But the evil could not be suppressed, so fascinating was the fur trade and the domestic life incidental and inevitable to it.

In speaking of the coureurs des bois, Irving says that "their conduct and example gradually corrupted the natives." Nor was the influence of the fur trade better on the Indian. He ranged wide and wild in the forests, and sometimes would be gone for years from the settlements, and then return with his fur trophies, flush of money. Says the same author: "A short time, however, spent in revelry, would be sufficient to drain his purse and sate him with civilized life, and he would return with new relish to the unshackelled freedom of the forest." 1

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The settlements themselves were not free from the same decivilizing and debauching influences. In his "Old Régime' Parkman quotes Father Carheil, a Jesuit missionary at Mackinaw, as saying that the soldiery, with brandy, introduced an "infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice, impiety, and impurity among the Indians. He says the garrisons have only four occupations: first, to keep open liquor-shops for crowds of drunken Indians; . . . and, fourthly, to turn the post into a place which I am ashamed to call by its right name. 992

"Our good king," writes Sister Marin, of Montreal, "has sent troops to defend us from the Iroquois, and the soldiers and officers have ruined the Lord's vineyard, and planted sin and crime in our soil of Canada."

More recent and personal testimony to the influence of soldiery on the Indians may here be introduced. An experienced and candid mountaineer of thirty-five years between the Missouri and the Pacific, and who spoke several Indian languages, and knew well the tribes, said to the author, in the Rocky Mountains in 1885 "The soldiery will have access to the Reservations. The officers and missionaries cannot prevent it, and they are being consumed by imported diseases. . . . The tribes are ruined beyond all chance of hope by the soldiers and cowboys and ranchers. ... You can have no conception of their outrageous conduct.” 4

1 Astoria, vol. i., chap. xii.

2

Pp. 319, 320.

8 Old Régime, p. 369.

The Indian's Side of the Indian Question. By William Barrows, D. D.

Pp. 154-157.

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In the famous Lord Selkirk grant, the primitive Manitoba, there were in 1840, and after its absorption in the Hudson Bay Company, about 6,000 persons, but the most of them were Indians and half-breeds; but very few of them were Europeans in blood.1

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As to the agency of the Hudson Bay Company in introducing a half-breed population into the wilds of America, Gray, in his History of Oregon," makes the statement, with his not unusual excessive force: "They had agreed, in accepting their original charter, to civilize and Christianize the natives of the country. This part of their compact the individual members of the company were fulfilling by each taking a native woman, and rearing as many half-civilized subjects as was convenient." 2

"At some villages there were but one or two traders; at others, ten, twenty, and sometimes as many as fifty [French and English]. For the most part the traders were married to squaws, and had children by them. . . . We have heard of but two instances where traders had white wives living with them in Indian villages." 3

All readers of our history recall the Seminoles as one of the most numerous and powerful of all our Indian tribes. Of these Dr. Morse says: "The pure Seminoles, Captain Bell verbally stated to me, are about twelve hundred in number." As the entire number of the tribe at that time was 4,560, the number of pure blood was about one fourth.*

It does seem as if a prediction made in 1820 is likely to prove true, with extension of time: "In the course of another half century no genuine trace of them probably will remain in our borders."

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In speaking of the mixed population of Lower Louisiana, Major Amos Stoddard, who was our first governor of it, says that among these are Spaniards, Creoles, aboriginals, a vast variety of mixed bloods, forming no less than seven distinct castes. Their moral principles are extremely debauched, and their intercourse with each other is marked by the most corrupt profligacy of

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2 A History of Oregon, by W. H. Gray, 1870, p. 78.

8 Magazine of Western History, December, 1884, p. 120.

4 Report on Indian Affairs, 1820, Appendix, pp. 309, 311.

5 Emigrants' Guide to Upper Canada. C. Stuart, Esq., London, 1820, p. 267.

• Stoddard's Sketches of Louisiana, p. 291.

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