Father Felix Martin wrote me recently from Canada `' The Indian missions are reduced almost to nothing. They follow in the train of those sad tribes which are no more what they once were. It is like a body which gradually
sinks in itself. It is losing its grandeur, its force, its primi tive forms. They have lost the character of nations; they are individualities, with some ancier4,traditions, and even these traces are gradually becoming effAced."
If the poor and unfortunate inhabitants of the Indian Territory were treated with more justice and good faith, they would cause little trouble. They complain, and doubtless, justly, of the dishonesty of the whites. These banish them from their native soil, from the tombs of their fathers, to which they are devotedly attached, and from their ancient hunting and fishing grounds: they must consequently seek elsewhere what is wrested from them, and build their cabins in another and a strange clime. But they are scarcely at ease in their new abode when they are removed a second and third time. With each successive emigration, they find their grounds restricted, their hunts and fishing places less abundant. Yet in all the treaties the agents promise them. on the part of the President, whom they call their Great Father, protection and privileges that are never realized. Is it therefore astonishing that the savages give the whites the name of forked tongues, or liars? They say that the whites "walk in crooked paths to attain their Objects;" that their declarations of friendship, all beautiful and favorable as they appear, " never entered their hearts," and pass, ever with the same facility, " from the end of the tongue;" that they approach the Indian, " a smile on their lips," take him by the hand, to deceive him more easily, inebriate him and corrupt his children. " Like serpents," said Black Hawk, in his famous speech, " they have glided in among us; they have taken possession of our hearth-stones. The opossum
and the deer have disappeared at their approach. We are overwhelmed with misery. The very contact of the whites has poisoned us."