mes loquacious and eager. He will stake
all his most valuable possessions, and, losing these, will even risk his
own liberty, or life, on the turn of a card. We were once witness to a
game in San Antonio (in Western Texas), among a party of Lipans,[47] a
race of fine-looking men, who range the table-lands north of the
sources of the Nueces. Two of them, one the handsomest warrior among
them, lost, first, the money, which they had just received as the price
of skins, brought to the city for sale. They then staked, successively,
their horses, their arms, their moccasins, and their blankets. The
"luck" was against them--everything was lost; and we supposed the game
was over. But--as a last resource, like drawing blood from their beating
hearts--each produced a _little leathern bottle_, containing whiskey!
And, as if these possessed a higher value than all the articles yet
lost, the game went on with increased interest! Even the potent "spirit"
thus evoked, could not prevail upon Fortune to change her face: the
whiskey was lost with the rest! Each rose to his feet, with the usual
guttural exclamation, and, afoot, and unarmed as he was, silently took
his way to the prairies; while the winners collected in a group, and
with much glee, proceeded to consume the liquid poison so cheaply
obtained.

We come, finally to the question of the Indian's fate: What is to become
of the race? The answer presents no difficulties, save such as grow out
of men's unwillingness to look unpleasant truths in the face. There has
been, of late years, much lamentation, among our own people, over the
gradual extinction of these interesting savages; and in Europe we have
been made the subject of indignant eloquence, for (what those, who know
nothing about it, are pleased to call) "our oppression of the Indian."
But, in the first place, the decay of the American races is neither so
rapid nor so universal, as is generally supposed;[48] and, in the second
place, if the fact were otherwise, we could, at the worst, be charged
only with accelerating a depopulation already begun. "The ten thousand
mounds in the Mississippi Valley, the rude memorials of an immensely
numerous former population, but, to our view, no more civilized than the
present races, are proofs that the country _was depopulated_, when the
white man first became acquainted with it. If we can infer nothing else
from these mounds, we can clearly infer, that this country once had its
millions