Wandering through these wilds fifty years ago, I did not deem this end would be so soon accomplished.  Here now is the city and the village, the farm-house and extended fields, the railroads and highways, and hundreds of thousands of busy men who had not then a being.  The appurtenances of civilization everywhere greet you:  many of these are worn and mossed over with the lapse of time and appear tired of the weight of wasting years.  The red men, away in the West, have dwindled to a mere handful, still flying before the white man, and shrinking away from his hated civilization.

Is this cruel and sinful—­or the silent, mysterious operation of the laws of nature?  One people succeeds another, as day comes after day, and years follow years.  Upon this continent the Indian found the evidences in abundance of a preceding people, the monuments of whose existence he disregards, but which, in the earth-mounds rising up over all the land, arrest the white man’s attention and wonder.  He inquires of the Indian inhabitant he is expelling from the country, Who was the architect of these, and what their signification? and is answered:  We have no tradition which tells; our people found them when they came, as you find them to-day.  These traditions give the history of the nations now here, and we find in every Southern tribe that they tell of an immigration from the southwest.

The Muscogee, Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, all have the history of their flying from beyond the Mississippi, and from the persecutions of superior and more warlike nations, and resting here for security, where they found none to molest them, and only these dumb evidences of another people, who once filled the land, but had passed away.

When the white man came, he found but one race upon the two continents.  Their type was the same and universal, and only these mounds to witness of a former race.  Ethnology has discovered no other.  All the remains of man indicate the same type, and there remains not a fossil to record the existence of those who reared these earth-books, which speak so eloquently of a race passed away.

How rapidly the work of demolition goes on!  Will a century hence find one of the red race upon this continent?  Certainly not, if it shall accomplish so much as the century past.  There is not one for every ten, then; and the tenth remaining are now surrounded on all sides, and, being pushed to the centre, must perish.

They are by nature incapable of that civilization which would enable them to organize governments and teach the science of agriculture.  They were formed for the woods, and physically organized to live on flesh.  The animals furnishing this were placed with them here, and the only vegetable found with them was the maize, or Indian corn.  The white man was organized to feed on vegetables, and they were placed with him in his centre of creation, and he brought them here, and with himself acclimated them, as a necessity to his existence in America.