or," by
H. H. (Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson), and "Our Indian Wards," (Geo. W.
Manypenny). The latter is a mere spiteful diatribe against various
army officers, and neither its manner nor its matter warrants more
than an allusion. Mrs. Jackson's book is capable of doing more harm
because it is written in good English, and because the author, who had
lived a pure and noble life, was intensely in earnest in what she
wrote, and had the most praiseworthy purpose--to prevent our
committing any more injustice to the Indians. This was all most
proper; every good man or woman should do whatever is possible to make
the government treat the Indians of the present time in the fairest
and most generous spirit, and to provide against any repetition of
such outrages as were inflicted upon the Nez Perces and upon part of
the Cheyennes, or the wrongs with which the civilized nations of the
Indian territory are sometimes threatened. The purpose of the book is
excellent, but the spirit in which it is written cannot be called even
technically honest. As a polemic, it is possible that it did not do
harm (though the effect of even a polemic is marred by hysterical
indifference to facts.) As a history it would be beneath criticism,
were it not that the high character of the author and her excellent
literary work in other directions have given it a fictitious value and
made it much quoted by the large class of amiable but maudlin fanatics
concerning whom it may be said that the excellence of their intentions
but indifferently atones for the invariable folly and ill effect of
their actions. It is not too much to say that the book is thoroughly
untrustworthy from cover to cover, and that not a single statement it
contains should be accepted without independent proof; for even those
that are not absolutely false, are often as bad on account of so much
of the truth having been suppressed. One effect of this is of course
that the author's recitals of the many real wrongs of Indian tribes
utterly fail to impress us, because she lays quite as much stress on
those that are non-existent, and on the equally numerous cases where
the wrong-doing was wholly the other way. To get an idea of the value
of the work, it is only necessary to compare her statements about
almost any tribe with the real facts, choosing at random; for
instance, compare her accounts of the Sioux and the plains tribes
generally, with those given by Col. Dodge in his two books; or her
reci