The purely sentimental historians take no account of the difficulties under which we labored, nor of the countless wrongs and provocations we endured, while grossly magnifying the already lamentably large number of injuries for which we really deserve to be held responsible.  To get a fair idea of the Indians of the present day, and of our dealings with them, we have fortunately one or two excellent books, notably “Hunting Grounds of the Great West,” and “Our Wild Indians,” by Col.  Richard I. Dodge (Hartford, 1882), and “Massacres of the Mountains,” by J. P. Dunn (New York, 1886).  As types of the opposite class, which are worse than valueless, and which nevertheless might cause some hasty future historian, unacquainted with the facts, to fall into grievous error, I may mention, “A Century of Dishonor,” by H. H. (Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson), and “Our Indian Wards,” (Geo. W. Manypenny).  The latter is a mere spiteful diatribe against various army officers, and neither its manner nor its matter warrants more than an allusion.  Mrs. Jackson’s book is capable of doing more harm because it is written in good English, and because the author, who had lived a pure and noble life, was intensely in earnest in what she wrote, and had the most praiseworthy purpose—­to prevent our committing any more injustice to the Indians.  This was all most proper; every good man or woman should do whatever is possible to make the government treat the Indians of the present time in the fairest and most generous spirit, and to provide against any repetition of such outrages as were inflicted upon the Nez Perces and upon part of the Cheyennes, or the wrongs with which the civilized nations of the Indian territory are sometimes threatened.  The purpose of the book is excellent, but the spirit in which it is written cannot be called even technically honest.  As a polemic, it is possible that it did not do harm (though the effect of even a polemic is marred by hysterical indifference to facts.) As a history it would be beneath criticism, were it not that the high character of the author and her excellent literary work in other directions have given it a fictitious value and made it much quoted by the large class of amiable but maudlin fanatics concerning whom it may be said that the excellence of their intentions but indifferently atones for the invariable folly and ill effect of their actions.  It is not too much to say that the book is thoroughly untrustworthy from cover to cover, and that not a single statement it contains should be accepted without independent proof; for even those that are not absolutely false, are often as bad on account of so much of the truth having been suppressed.  One effect of this is of course that the author’s recitals of the many real wrongs of Indian tribes utterly fail to impress us, because she lays quite as much stress on those that are non-existent, and on the equally numerous cases where the wrong-doing was wholly the other way.  To get an idea of the value of the work, it is only necessary to compare her statements about almost any tribe with the real facts, choosing at random; for instance, compare her accounts of the Sioux and the plains tribes generally, with those given by Col.  Dodge in his two books; or her recital of the Sandy Creek massacre with the facts as stated by Mr. Dunn—­who is apt, if any thing, to lean to the Indian’s side.