with ineffectual sabre and carbine, encumbered with a variety of traps about as useful as they, usually managed, if not forced to put back by stress of provisions, to come up with him in the gates of the hills.  There an idle interchange of arrow and round ball between hollow and cliff wound up the eventful history of the chase.  As a rule, no marked chastisement was inflicted on the Indian:  he realized in peace the proceeds of his little speculation.

Now, Minie, like the Harpagon of his countryman, has “changed all that.”  The retreating heathen flies to his hills in vain.  They do not cover him, but the rifle does.  Cantering to the summit of a knoll, he waves his compliments to the distant dragoon with a gesture of derision, more expressive than elegant, he has acquired from the white.  Turning calmly to depart, as he sinks below the crest of the hill a sagittiform bullet, fired at five hundred yards’ distance with all the science and talent purchasable with thirteen dollars a month and rations, plumps into the rump of his unhappy pony, and the Stoic of the woods is unhorsed.  Reared on horseback, and weak in the legs from long addiction to that mode of locomotion, this is a casus omissus in Lo’s tactics.  Scant time, however, has he for reflection.  He gathers up himself and his drapery as well as circumstances will allow, and scuttles hurriedly off, a fluttering chaos of rags and feathers.  It is too late.  Heaven is on the side of the best artillery.  A few minutes and the Philistines are upon him.  Burnside’s or Remington’s last patent again lifts up its voice, and the triumph of civilization is complete.

The prairie Indian, unlike his congener of the woods, has as yet been but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the bow.  The advantage he has in the protection afforded him by the desolation of his waterless mesas and sage-covered hills is thus in great measure neutralized.  What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their volcanic stronghold will attest.  But these were few, and soon went down.  The extinction of the tribes west and south of the Rio Grande and the Humboldt cannot be many years postponed.  The red rover of that region will disappear as a combatant in the same way, and before the same weapon, as his brother nomad of Algeria, the earliest victim of the conoidal bullet.  The spherical ball has done its appointed part in disposing of the aborigines east of the Mississippi, where forests covered the land and trees generally intercepted the sight at a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards.  With the extension of Caucasian empire to the Plains came an extension of the range of vision, which necessitated an advance in the range of the rifle.  The weapon of Sharpe figured for the first time in the van when the woods of Missouri were passed and the open plains of Kansas reached.  There its office was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white.  The largest