RISING.

Listen! There lived an Indian--a sachem of the powerful and warlike
Shawnees; an Indian who loved his wild people, his wild land, and his
wild freedom dearer than his life, and for their defense and weal he
labored, and fought and died. Why and how, and to what end--listen!

The sachem looked around him. He saw his people, wasted to but the
shadow of what they once were, slowly moving toward the setting sun. He
saw them at deadly strife one with another--tribe with tribe, and
kindred with kindred. He marked how they were falling away from the
sober lives and pure faith of their fathers, and losing their wild
independence in the slothful and corrupting habits of vagabond
existence. He beheld his native wilderness gradually waning as from
before a slow-approaching, far-extended fire. In terror at the sight,
the animals of the chase, so needful to man in the savage state, went
flitting by, outstripping his people in their journey toward the setting
sun.

The sachem looked far forth toward the regions of the rising sun, and
there beheld the civilized and powerful white man, whose star of empire
was leading him onward in his resistless progress toward the mighty
rivers and the boundless plains of the far West--the land of the future.
The powerful stranger laid his hand upon the woody hills, and they
smoked; he set his foot upon the grassy plains, and they withered. He
lifted the hand of violence against the red sons of the forest, and they
fled; he breathed upon them, and they became diseased, corrupt, and
feeble; he sowed the seeds of strife among them, and straightway they
fell to wrangling and warring one with another, more fiercely than ever
before; he stretched his long arm over their heads and thrust his
terrible sword into the heart of their wilderness, now here, now there,
saying: "This pleasant valley is mine, here will I make my
dwelling-place; this fertile plain is mine, it shall yield me riches;
this broad river is mine, it shall be a highway between my great towns.
Then, westward, red man, farther westward; nor think of rest, while you
have the setting sun and this fair land before you!" Still onward and
westward the white man held his ever-widening, overwhelming course. A
little while and the red man should not have in all the green earth
where to lay his weary head and say: "This is my home--here dwelt my
fathers before me, and here they be buried; here with them shall I rest
when my race is run.