of human nature--a condition also which can
hardly again exist on this or any other continent, and which has,
therefore, a special value in the sum of human history."

Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point of
view. No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with anything but
respect and admiration. It is in books such as this, then, that we may
find something about the last stages of the clearing of the frontier.

Even in Marcy's times the question of our Government's Indian policy
was a mooted one. He himself as an Army officer looked at the matter
philosophically, but his estimate of conditions was exact. Long ago as
he wrote, his conclusions were such as might have been given forty years
later.

"The limits of their accustomed range are rapidly contracting, and their
means of subsistence undergoing a corresponding diminution. The white
man is advancing with rapid strides upon all sides of them, and they
are forced to give way to his encroachments. The time is not far distant
when the buffalo will become extinct, and they will then be compelled
to adopt some other mode of life than the chase for a subsistence.... No
man will quietly submit to starvation when food is within his reach, and
if he cannot obtain it honestly he will steal it or take it by
force. If, therefore, we do not induce them to engage in agricultural
avocations we shall in a few years have before us the alternative of
exterminating them or fighting them perpetually. That they are destined
ultimately to extinction does not in my mind admit of a doubt. For the
reasons above mentioned it may at first be necessary for our government
to assert its authority over them by a prompt and vigorous exercise of
the military arm.... The tendency of the policy I have indicated will be
to assemble these people in communities where they will be more readily
controlled; and I predict from it the most gratifying results." Another
well-informed army officer, Colonel Richard Dodge, himself a hunter,
a trailer, and a rider able to compete with the savages in their own
fields, penetrated to the heart of the Indian problem when he wrote:

"The conception of Indian character is almost impossible to a man who
has passed the greater portion of his life surrounded by the influences
of a cultivated, refined, and moral society.... The truth is simply too
shocking, and the revolted mind takes refuge in disbelief as the less
painful horn of the di