It seems to me a question whether the Europeans, who, Heaven knows, have
much to answer for in their intercourse with these people, have not, in
some degree, injured the cause of the Indian women:--first, by
corrupting them; secondly, by checking the improvement of all their own
peculiar manufactures. They prepared deer-skins with extraordinary
skill; I have seen dresses of the mountain sheep and young buffalo
skins, richly embroidered and almost equal in beauty and softness to a
Cashmere shawl; and I could mention other things. It is reasonable to
presume that as these manufactures must have been progressively
improved, there might have been farther progression, had we not
substituted for articles they could themselves procure or fabricate,
those which we fabricate; we have taken the work out of their hands, and
all motive to work, while we have created wants which they cannot
supply. We have clothed them in blankets--we have not taught them to
weave blankets. We have substituted guns for the bows and arrows--but
they cannot make guns: for the natural progress of arts and civilisation
springing from within, and from their own intelligence and resources, we
have substituted a sort of civilisation from without, foreign to their
habits, manners, organisation: we are making paupers of them; and this
by a kind of terrible necessity. Some very economical members of our
British parliament have remonstrated against the system of Indian
presents, as too _expensive_; one would almost suppose, to hear their
arguments, that pounds, shillings, and pence were the stuff of which
life is made--the three primal elements of all human existence--all
human morals. Surely they can know nothing of the real state of things
here. If the issue of the presents from our government were now to
cease, I cannot think without horror of what must ensue: trifling as
they are, they are an Indian's existence; without the rifle he must die
of hunger; without his blanket, perish of cold. Before he is reduced to
this, we should have nightly plunder and massacre all along our
frontiers and back settlements; a horrid brutalising contest like that
carried on in Florida, in which the White man would be demoralised, and
the Red man exterminated.
The sole article of traffic with the Indians, their furs, is bartered
for the necessaries of life; and these furs can _only_ be procured by
the men. Thus their only trade, so far from tending to the general
civilisation of the people, keeps up the wild hunting habits, and tells
fearfully against the power and utility of the women, if it be not
altogether fatal to any amelioration of their condition. Yet it should
seem that we are ourselves just emerging from a similar state, only in
another form. Until of late years there was no occupation for women by
which a subsistence could be gained, except servitude in some shape or
other. The change which has taken place in this respect is one of the
most striking and interesting signs of the times in which we live.