redmen preface 3

Page 3 (unnumbered in text)

PREFACE

TIME is rapidly obliterating from the memory of passing generations all knowledge of the facts and incidents pertaining to a people who formerly occupied the soil which has given growth to our present American civilization. The day is not far in the future when the student of ethnology may obtain his knowledge of the aboriginal races of this continent only from the pages of such faithful chroniclers as Schoolcraft, or learn of their legends and traditions only in the fascinating verse of Longfellow. For more than two hundred and fifty years, the Indian has struggled against our superior civilization to maintain his right to this land, and while the pen of the historian records with a shudder the massacres and tragedies enacted at his hands, it is compelled at the same time to accord to him a wonderful heroism in the struggle against his fate. Since the days of the Narragansett War, when King Philip resisted the advance of the white man in the valleys of New England, the Indian has contributed to history a long line of more or less savage heroes. Conspicuous among those whose names are connected with many thrilling episodes recorded in the border chronicles of the West, may be mentioned Pontiac, Logan, Tecumseh, and Black Hawk. They resisted the advance of the Pale-face to maintain possession of the fairest portion of the American continent, and being at last vanquished by a superior people, who now enjoy the products of the fair slopes and fertile valleys that once constituted their hunting-grounds, the conqueror can at least afford to render them justice in making up his records of the conquest. We are accustomed to designate the Indian as a savage, forgetting, meanwhile, that but a few centuries in the past our own ancestors groped in intellectual darkness, little better than savages, amid the mountain fastnesses, and along the borders of the rivers and seas of the Old World. As the

Preface, page 4

Illustrations (page 7)| Contents (pages 8 - 17)

Introductory Page| Portrait of MA-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-KIA-KIAH (Black Hawk)| Title Page| Page 2

w3c validation logo HTML Validation Results

Bobby approval logo Bobby's Home Page

This is a genuine MOM (Mother of Michael) site estone@yawp.com
Michael A. Stone, Owner, janitor, and chief data rancher for YAWP (Yet Another Webservice Provider...)
revised 12 August 1999