We were following the first skirmishing line of that army of civilisation which is overrunning in its steady advance all that wild country which was once the Indian’s sole domain.  When this advance guard collects at any given point, a hotel rises, and beside it the store where a trader will deal in every kind of merchandise, and especially in brandy, that most destructive of poisons to all indigenous races.  After the hotel will come the bank, and then the church and school, and before long the whole will grow into a village or town, of which the United States will take possession by law.  As for the original squatters, they will make over their log cabins and their bits of cultivation to new arrivals, of more sedentary tastes than their own, and will move on further, with their wives and children, to make a fresh settlement, often exchanging rifle shots with the Redskins the while, in some spot where they can find that absolute independence which they prize above all other goods.  Thus does the tide of civilisation, which shall soon cover the whole American continent, move ceaselessly onward.

But on our own particular road we had got no further than the squatters, and of them, after the day’s march was over, we asked a hospitality which was always cordially granted.

They were an energetic and a singular race.  Here you might come on a pupil from West Point (the military and polytechnic school of the United States), a former captain in the army, who had married an Indian wife, and had to learn French to make himself understood by her and the other Indians in the neighbourhood, who could speak no other language.  A whole family of little half-breeds, more red than white, swarmed about him.  There again, both father and mother would be white-skinned, witn splendid children, whom the mother rocked to sleep in the intervals of preparing an excellent dinner for us with a haunch of venison we had bought from an Indian who had just killed a buck.  Their log cabin, like all the others, indeed, consisted of one large room below, with a big fireplace on which perfect tree trunks were burning, and a loft above it.  In these lofts passing travellers like ourselves slept.  And they were not over warm, for the doors and windows only fitted tolerably, and the weather was frosty.  In the evening the sons of the house—­huge fellows who crushed your hand when they shook it, and who used their axes as well as they used their guns—­would come in from work, and the evenings would be spent sitting smoking and talking round the fire.

“There are a great many Indians still,” I was told, “and they are rather turbulent; they killed a white man quite lately.  The squatters are very far apart too.  But then we haven’t to bother our heads or put ourselves out because of anybody.”