Thus the missionary vainly attempts, by once or twice holding up the cross, to turn deer and tigers into lambs; vainly attempts to convince the red man that a heavenly mandate takes from him his broad lands.  He bows his head, but does not at heart acquiesce.  He cannot.  It is not true; and if it were, the descent of blood through the same channels, for centuries, had formed habits of thought not so easily to be disturbed.

Amalgamation would afford the only true and profound means of civilization.  But nature seems, like all else, to declare, that this race is fated to perish.  Those of mixed blood fade early, and are not generally a fine race.  They lose what is best in either type, rather than enhance the value of each, by mingling.  There are exceptions, one or two such I know of, but this, it is said, is the general rule.

A traveller observes, that the white settlers, who live in the woods, soon become sallow, lanky, and dejected; the atmosphere of the trees does not agree with Caucasian lungs; and it is, perhaps, in part, an instinct of this, which causes the hatred of the new settlers towards trees.  The Indian breathed the atmosphere of the forests freely; he loved their shade.  As they are effaced from the land, he fleets too; a part of the same manifestation, which cannot linger behind its proper era.

The Chippewas have lately petitioned the state of Michigan, that they may be admitted as citizens; but this would be vain, unless they could be admitted, as brothers, to the heart of the white man.  And while the latter feels that conviction of superiority, which enabled our Wisconsin friend to throw away the gun, and send the Indian to fetch it, he had need to be very good, and very wise, not to abuse his position.  But the white man, as yet, is a half-tamed pirate, and avails himself, as much as ever, of the maxim, “Might makes right.”  All that civilization does for the generality, is to cover up this with a veil of subtle evasions and chicane, and here and there to rouse the individual mind to appeal to heaven against it.

I have no hope of liberalizing the missionary, of humanizing the sharks of trade, of infusing the conscientious drop into the flinty bosom of policy, of saving the Indian from immediate degradation, and speedy death.  The, whole sermon may be preached from the text, “Needs be that offences must come, yet we them by whom they come.”  Yet, ere they depart, I wish there might be some masterly attempt to reproduce, in art or literature, what is proper to them, a kind of beauty and grandeur, which few of the every-day crowd have hearts to feel, yet which ought to leave in the world its monuments, to inspire the thought of genius through all ages.  Nothing in this kind has been done masterly; since it was Clevengers’s ambition, ’tis pity he had not opportunity to try fully his powers.  We hope some other mind may be bent upon it, ere too late.

At present the only lively impress of their passage through the world is to be found in such books as Catlin’s and some stories told by the old travellers, of which I purpose a brief account.