/lit/ - Literature

What can be more melancholy than the history of the American Indians? By a law of their nature, they seemed destined to a slow but sure extinction. We hear the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone forever.

They pass mournfully by us, and they return no more. Two centuries ago the smoke of their wigwams, and the fires of their councils, rose in every valley from Hudson's Bay to the farthest Florida, from the ocean to the Mississippi and the Lakes.

The thick arrows and the deadly tomahawk whistled through the forest; and the hunter's trace, and the dark encampment, startled the wild beasts in their lairs. The warriors stood forth in their glory. Braver men never lived; truer men, never drew the bow.

They had courage, and fortitude, and sagacity, and perseverance, beyond most of the human race. They shrunk from no dangers, and they feared no hardships. If they had the vices of savage life, they had the virtues also. They were true to their country, their friends, and their homes.

If they forgave not injury, neither did they forget kindness. If their vengeance was terrible, their fidelity and generosity were unconquerable also. Their love, like their hate, stopped not on this side of the grave. But where are they.^ Where are the villages, and warriors, and youth?

The sachems and the tribes? The hunters and their families? They have perished. They are consumed. The wasting pestilence has not done the mighty work. No, nor famine, nor war. There has been a mightier power, a moral canker, which has eaten into their heart-cores; a plague, which the touch of the white man communicated; a poison, which betrayed them into a lingering ruin.

The winds of the Atlantic fan not a single region, which they may now call their own. Already the last feeble remnants of the race are preparing for their journey beyond the Mississippi. I see them leave their miserable homes, the aged, the helpless, the women, and the warriors, ' few and faint, yet fearless still.' The ashes are cold on their native hearths.

The smoke no longer curls round their lowly cabins. They move on with a slow, unsteady step. The white man is upon their heels, for terror or despatch, but they heed him not. They turn to take a last look of their deserted villages. They cast a last glance upon the graves of their fathers.

They shed no tears; they utter no cries; they heave no groans. There is something in their hearts which passes speech. There is something in their looks, not of vengeance or submission, but of hard necessity, which stifles both; which chokes all utterance, which has no aim or method.

It is courage absorbed in despair. They linger but for a moment. Their look is onward. They know and feel that there is for them but one remove farther, not distant, or unseen. It is to the general burial-ground of their race.

>They need to die only for me to write such sublime paragraphs

>aforementioned