ans' best hope is euthanasia. Even that is
desperately uncertain. The Cherokees, Creeks and Choctaws, with their
minor associates in the Indian Territory, are, though not increasing in
numbers, living in peace and something like industry. Yet they are at the
mercy of any vagabond who should take it into his head to "salt" with
gold-dust or silver-ore any ravine in the midst of their country. No law
and no army would avail to repel the rush. They would go the way of the
Sioux of the Black Hills, and would have only the choice of drifting out
of existence on the outskirts of white society or of being washed high and
dry over the frontier. Where are the sixty thousand Indians who at the
time of the transfer of California were so comfortably coddled under the
wing of the missions? They have been the victims of no recorded war, and
the agents never had a chance at them. They have gone, however, with a
rapidity unexampled anywhere east of the mountains.

Solutions of the Indian problem are endless, and the writer of the book
named at the head of these paragraphs has his shy at it. His plan is new
chiefly in blaming all round--traders, Quakers, Indians, government and
frontiersmen. If we can venture to centralize his invective, we should lay
it specially on the heads of the class the Indians term "squaw-men"--the
whites who have Indian wives and are established among the lodges. Of
these he gives us a conjectural census--a hundred agencies and
reservations and ten squaw-men to each. From this thousand are drawn all
the interpreters; and not a solitary interpreter, Colonel Dodge insists,
can be relied upon. They are, every man of them, in league with the
agents and traders against the government and the Indians. The two last
named--parties of the first part, as we should style them--never come
together and never understand each other. The colonel's cure is remitting
the whole thing to army control. But that, we need not say, has been
tried, with results by no means brilliant.

For those who have never even seen an annuity distributed to aggravate the
muddle with their suggestions would be most presumptuous. It is as little
as we can do to abstain. We may venture here only to say a word in
mitigation of the deep stain left upon the fair fame of the United States
by its management of Indian affairs. The contrast so frequently drawn with
the course of things in Canada is not wholly just. It was the French who
saved the Canadian In