frontier are few, and not very fierce, while the Indians are numerous, and in the matter of blood-letting, exceedingly skilful operators. They know every pass, every spring, every grassy valley. They are troubled with no commissariat wagons, despatches, artillery, nor ambulance trains. They can subsist on anything, from sage-bush shoots to grasshoppers, and as their wardrobe, bedding, and uniform consists of a ragged blanket, they travel even more quickly than does the proverbial proprietor of the thin pair of breeches. Worst of all, that brown son of Belial, Sitting Bull, after having enjoyed an agreeable relaxation among his Sioux kindred in Manitoba, "cal'lates," as the frontiersmen say, on moving south, and replenishing his fast decreasing stock of scalps and serviceable horses of American breed. Now, the United States know Sitting Bull. We do not, for our part, believe that he is a West Point graduate, George Francis Train, or even General Butler, in disguise. In the first place, he is much too honest to be the latter gentleman, is not a fool, and hence cannot be the second, while his military skill is of rather a higher grade than results from a training in even the admirable military school on the Hudson River. The truth is, that Sitting Bull is a Sioux chief, with a taste for liberty and plunder, and, in pursuit of these penchants, found himself hotly pursued by a certain General Custer. This general was a skilful soldier, after the text-books, and accordingly so arranged his plans that his rival should be surrounded, and sent, with all his followers, to the happy hunting-grounds as fast as Shrapnel shell and Henry revolving rifles could put them. But Sitting Bull was also a soldier, and, in his own way, a kind of prairie Moltke, for in the Little Horn Cañon he surprised Custer and all his men, and meted out to them the measure they had prepared for him and his soapless spearsmen. Thereafter, not illogically considering the United States climate unsuitable for long life, he quietly moved over the frontier, and settled down in the Canadian Dominion, where, being justly treated, he has behaved himself as Indians, and most other people do, under like circumstances. In the United States the Indians have always been at war with the whites; in the British possessions rarely, and never as tribes.
We note this renewed Indian war in the United States, not because in an Indian war is there any novelty. On the contrary, for a period beyond which the memory of man runneth not, the United States government and citizens have been at murderous feud with the race whose fair heritage they now occupy, and, there is every likelihood, will be, until the last "hostile" Indian's bones lie very peaceably on the green prairie, or in a glass case in the Smithsonian Institution., When Captain John Smith and his swashbucklering cavaliers landed in the "Empire of Virginia," the aborigines of the United States, judging from the traces they have left behind, could not have been less than four or five millions in number. We question if at the present moment they number five hundred thousand. Driven from bank to wall, and from wall to ditch, they have contested every foot-breadth of the weary road over which they have had to retreat to make way for the Anglo-Saxon flood. Disease, whiskey, misery untold, and villanous saltpetre have civilized them off the face of the earth which was once their own. Once all the region east of the Mississippi, from Maine to Louisiana, was thickly peopled with the prosperous villages of those whom the old travellers called "the salvages." No part of America now shows so thickly populated a country, or so joyous a savage race as those who there hunted in the woods, and paddled their birch canoes, or Mandan coracles. With the exception of a few all but civilized fragments of tribes in one or two of the states, there is not now one single Indian — who owns to the name — in all that wide region. A swarthy, keen-eyed lawyer, pleading in the Supreme Court of New York, or a very dark-haired gentleman who sits next you in a general's uniform at a state dinner in the White House, are to the keenest ethnological eye about the only signs of the now thickly peopled states, covered with cities and towns, having been once inhabited only by dwellers in wigwams, who fished the salmon and hunted the bear and the deer, with no man to make them afraid.
Yet — paradoxical though the statement may seem — the United States government has not primarily treated the natives badly. They have recognized their right to every foot-breadth of the land, and have — perhaps under pressure — formed treaties with them for the cession of it to the whites under conditions which seem at first sight not unjust, and even favorable to the original holders, who made little use of it. The government arranged that the Indians should cede their lands, and receive so much down for them, and the rest in yearly annuities terminable at a
