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.

It had been agreed between the United States and Georgia, and the famous Yazoo Company, in order to settle the difficulties between the two latter, that the United States should purchase, at a proper time, from the Indian proprietors, all the lands east of the Chattahoochee and a line running from the west bank of that stream, starting at a place known as West Point, and terminating at what is known as Nickey Jack, on the Tennessee River.  The increase of population, and the constant difficulties growing out of the too close neighborhood