We are continually reproached by British writers for the obtuse carelessness with which we are allowing these people, with so much of the heroic element in their lives, and so much of the mysterious in their origin, to go into the annihilation which seems their inevitable fate as civilization advances, without an effort to secure and record all that they are able to communicate respecting themselves.
And the reproach is just.

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor.

To look upon the Indian with much regard, even in the light of literary material, would be inconvenient; for the moment we recognize in him a mind, a heart, a soul,--the recollection of the position in which we stand towards him becomes thorny, and we begin dimly to remember certain duties belonging to our Christian profession, which we have sadly neglected with regard to the sons of the forest, whom we have driven before us just as fast as we have required or desired their lands.

A few efforts have been made, not only to bring the poetry of their history into notice, but to do them substantial good; the public heart, however, has never responded to the feelings of those who, from living in contact with the Indians, have felt this interest in them.

To most Americans, the red man is, to this day, just what he was to the first settlers of the country--a being with soul enough to be blameable for doing wrong, but not enough to claim Christian brotherhood, or to make it _very_ sinful to shoot him like a dog, upon the slightest provocation or alarm.