e millions, and I could be head of all,
and rule the land, yet would I rather be a white girl in the hut of her
white man, struggling for daily bread among the people who sweep the
buffalo out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand
live where one lived before. It is peace you want, my mother, peace and
solitude, in which the soul goes to sleep. Your days of hope are over,
and you want to drowse by the fire. I want to see the white men's cities
grow, and the armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the
reapers and the mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the
great factories, and the white woman's life spreading everywhere; for I
am a white man's daughter. I can't be both Indian and white. I will not
be like the sun when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark.
I will not be half-breed. I will be white or I will be Indian; and I
will be white, white only. My heart is white, my tongue is white, I
think, I feel, as white people think and feel. What they wish, I wish;
as they live, I live; as white women dress, I dress."

She involuntarily drew up the dark red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew. She drew herself up
with pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
convention had not cramped.

Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English.
She might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though
nothing of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and
something sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure
which the storm and struggle in her did not smother. The white women
of Portage la Drome were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she
really was, and admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would
have nothing to do with them till the women met her absolutely as an
equal; and from the other halfbreeds, who intermarried with each other
and were content to take a lower place than the pure whites, she held
aloof, save when any of them was ill or in trouble. Then she recognised
the claim of race, and came to their doors with pity and soft impulses
to help them. French and Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were,
they understood how she was making a fight for all who were half-Indian,
half-white, and watched her with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her
superior pl