ining
gold lay hidden.

"Then came the traders. And they traded with the Indian. They gave him
little for much, and that little changed his life. He learned a taste
for the sweet foods of the white man. Because he could trade for a sack
of flour he worked less in the field. And the very fiber of his bones
softened.

"Then came the missionaries. They were proselytizers for converts
to their religion. The missionaries are good men. There may be a bad
missionary, like Willetts, the same as there are bad men in other
callings, or bad Indians. They say Shadd is a half-breed. But the Piutes
can tell you he is a full-blood, and he, like me, was sent to a white
man's school. In the beginning the missionaries did well for the Indian.
They taught him cleaner ways of living, better farming, useful work with
tools--many good things. But the wrong to the Indian was the undermining
of his faith. It was not humanity that sent the missionary to the
Indian. Humanity would have helped the Indian in his ignorance of
sickness and work, and left him his god. For to trouble the Indian about
his god worked at the roots of his nature.

"The beauty of the Indian's life is in his love of the open, of all that
is nature, of silence, freedom, wildness. It is a beauty of mind and
soul. The Indian would have been content to watch and feel. To a white
man he might be dirty and lazy--content to dream life away without
trouble or what the white man calls evolution. The Indian might seem
cruel because he leaves his old father out in the desert to die. But the
old man wants to die that way, alone with his spirits and the sunset.
And the white man's medicine keeps his old father alive days and days
after he ought to be dead. Which is more cruel? The Navajos used to
fight with other tribes, and then they were stronger men than they are
to-day.

"But leaving religion, greed, and war out of the question, contact with
the white man would alone have ruined the Indian. The Indian and the
white man cannot mix. The Indian brave learns the habits of the white
man, acquires his diseases, and has not the mind or body to withstand
them. The Indian girl learns to love the white man--and that is death of
her Indian soul, if not of life.

"So the red man is passing. Tribes once powerful have died in the life
of Nas Ta Bega. The curse of the white man is already heavy upon my race
in the south. Here in the north, in the wildest corner of the desert,
chased here by