The men of these subjugated tribes, now accustomed to drunkenness and every way degraded, bear but a faint impress of the lost grandeur of the race.  They are no longer strong, tall, or finely proportioned.  Yet as you see them stealing along a height, or striding boldly forward, they remind you of what was majestic in the red man.

On the shores of lake Superior, it is said, if you visit them at home, you may still see a remnant of the noble blood.  The Pillagers—­(Pilleurs)—­a band celebrated by the old travellers, are:  still existant there.

     “Still some, ‘the eagles of their tribe,’ may rush.”

I have spoken of the hatred felt by the white man for the Indian:  with white women it seems to amount to disgust, to loathing.  How I could endure the dirt, the peculiar smell of the Indians, and their dwellings, was a great marvel in the eyes of my lady acquaintance; indeed, I wonder why they did not quite give me up, as they certainly looked on me with great distaste for it.  “Get you gone, you Indian dog,” was the felt, if not the breathed, expression towards the hapless owners of the soil.  All their claims, all their sorrows quite forgot, in abhorrence of their dirt, their tawny skins, and the vices the whites have taught them.

A person who had seen them during great part of a life, expressed his prejudices to me with such violence, that I was no longer surprised that the Indian children threw sticks at him, as he passed.  A lady said, “do what you will for them, they will be ungrateful.  The savage cannot be washed out of them.  Bring up an Indian child and see if you can attach it to you.”  The next moment, she expressed, in the presence of one of those children whom she was bringing up, loathing at the odor left by one of her people, and one of the most respected, as he passed through the room.  When the child is grown she will consider it basely ungrateful not to love her, as it certainly will not; and this will be cited as an instance of the impossibility of attaching the Indian.

Whether the Indian could, by any efforts of love and intelligence from the white man, have been civilized and made a valuable ingredient in the new state, I will not say; but this we are sure of; the French Catholics, at least, did not harm them, nor disturb their minds merely to corrupt them.  The French they loved.  But the stern Presbyterian, with his dogmas and his task-work, the city circle and the college, with their niggard concessions and unfeeling stare, have never tried the experiment.  It has not been tried.  Our people and our government have sinned alike against the first-born of the soil, and if they are the fated agents of a new era, they have done nothing—­have invoked no god to keep them sinless while they do the hest of fate.

Worst of all, when they invoke the holy power only to mask their iniquity; when the felon trader, who, all the week, has been besotting and degrading the Indian with rum mixed with red pepper, and damaged tobacco, kneels with him on Sunday before a common altar, to tell the rosary which recalls the thought of him crucified for love of suffering men, and to listen to sermons in praise of “purity"!!