This was a "half-breed family. The woman was a full-blood Snake Indian, and the two young men, or rather boys, were her children by a former white husband. Her present husband, a man of many good qualities and of wealth in his stock, made the good point and defense of his matrimonial choice, that he needed a house and home, and that it was no fair thing to take a white woman, from civilized life and its social enjoyments, into that wild, uninhabited country. We saw in his explanation the reason why seven of the fifteen ranch houses, which we passed in our one hundred and thirty miles' ride up that splendid valley, were bachelor homes. Good specimens of manhood the men were, mentally and morally, and socially when they had opportunities, but they realized that range and ranch life could but poorly allow for the true home.

Fortunate it is for those who will take a native wife that they are color-blind; and with a convenient blindness over some few other things, which some greatly need who have white wives on the border, life passes pleasantly among the half-breeds, where the husband furnishes a fair amount of civilization. True, our hostess of the Cottonwood Hotel expected us to furnish our own bed, as we did, she providing only that softness and spring which sweet hay and Wyoming prairie ground always afford. True, also, that on the dinner-table there were no perplexing changes in the

courses.

Here was a fair sample of a large body of the American people, much larger than the old East and even the Middle States realize. I therefore studied it with the more care, and have here sketched it in fuller outline. As I found afterward, I was to see much more of this mixed blood and life while completing my tour through our extreme northwest, and somewhat over our national boundary into the Dominion of Canada, and about old, fur-trading Fort Garry.

Was this what Mr. Secretary Crawford meant in his Report on Indian Affairs in 1816? As secretary of war under Madison, he had charge of the Indian Department, and made the following recommendation:

"If the system already devised has not produced all the effects which were expected from it, new experiments ought to be made. When every effort to introduce among them [the Indian savages] ideas of exclusive property in things real as well as personal shall fail, let intermarriage between them and the whites be encouraged by the government. This cannot fail to preserve the race, with

the modifications necessary to the enjoyment of civil liberty and social happiness. It is believed that the principles of humanity in this instance are in harmonious concert with the true interests of the nation. It will redound more to the national honor to incorporate, by a humane and benevolent policy, the natives of our forests in the great American family of freemen, than to receive with open arms the fugitives of the old world, whether their flight has been the effect of their crimes or their virtues.” 1

Mr. Crawford had been a member of Congress, and also our minister to France, and for a short time acting vice-president under Madison. While secretary of war in 1815, he aspired to the presidency in opposition to Monroe. The politicians seized on his intermarriage scheme for saving the Indian race, and, as may easily be supposed, used it with great effect against him. He was caricatured and lampooned, and his theory was variously set forth in social and domestic illustrations by the Nasts of those days, seventy years ago, and with such abusive personalities as might give even a demagogue of to-day some new hints for working a campaign.

Our Indian Question seems to take on new intricacies and perplexities as the decades go by. There are some unknown or unrecognized quantities in the problem which will not easily be eliminated. Among these is the complex and diffuse fact of intermarriage and half-breeds.

This fact is as old as any knowledge of the Indian races in North America by Europeans. In the fifth of his able Historical Letters on the Oregon Question, Albert Gallatin says that "all the American shores of the Pacific Ocean, from Cape Horn to Behring's Straits, are occupied by semi-civilized states, a mixture of European and Spanish descent and of native Indians, who, notwithstanding the efforts of enlightened, intelligent, and liberal men, have heretofore failed in the attempt to establish governments founded on law, that might ensure liberty, preserve order, and protect person and property." This he said in 1846.

The basis of this semi-civilized condition of society, it will be noted, is the mixture of European and Indian blood, which made it impossible to "establish a government founded on law" that could protect person and property.

From the earliest colonial dates the Canadas were permeated by the same uncivilizing causes. The immigrants came into the 1 Report on Indian Affairs. By W. C. Crawford, Secretary of War, March 13, 1816. Senate, 14th Congress, 1st Session.

country as unmarried men, either as employees of the Hudson Bay Company or as soldiers or adventurers, and very naturally formed domestic relations with the Indians. These ties generally had the strength and continuance only of fancy, or the conveniences of their wandering life in an unlimited wilderness. The two races became simply gregarious. The home government was intent mainly on population, regardless of race or legitimacy. Marriage was enjoined and at early years. The daughter of the governor of Three Rivers was married at the age of twelve, and one of the children of this marriage was the discoverer of the Rocky Mountains (Varennes de la Verendrye). Young women were imported, and not always with moral scrutiny, and royal bounties were paid on large families. The twelfth chapter of Parkman's "Old Régime" has authentic details enough on this to satisfy the most curious.

But especially all pursuits, as agriculture, mechanics, and manufactures, were overshadowed and lost sight of in the wild passion of the fur trade, with its social abandon. The industry and thrift of young homes and villages, the ties of wife and children, were ruthlessly thrown away in a popular passion for forest life and the spoils of the chase. "Many of these coureurs des bois became so accustomed to the Indian mode of living and the perfect freedom of the wilderness, that they lost all relish for civilization, and identified themselves with the savages among whom they dwelt, or could only be distinguished from them by superior licentiousness." 1

"The French merchant at his trading-post in the primitive days of Canada had his harem of Indian beauties and his troops of half-breed children."2 Colbert, an official, writes to the intendant, that "those who may seem to have absolutely renounced marriage should be made to bear additional burdens, and to be excluded from all honors," and bachelors were forbidden to take to the forest for the Indian trade. Parkman adds the note to this: "The prohibition to go into the woods was probably intended to prevent the bachelor from finding a temporary Indian substitute for a French wife.” 3

Du Lhut, whose name stands misspelled at the head of Lake Superior, in one enterprise led off hundreds of the Canadian young men into this decivilizing life, and under Duchesneau's administration the most active and vigorous of the young men of

1 Irving's Astoria, vol. i. chap. i.

3 Old Régime, p. 226.

2 Irving's Astoria, vol. i. chap. i.

the colonies took to the woods to enjoy the savage freedom of Indian life, and the intendant reported that 800 had thus gone out of a population of 10,000. The king affixed the penalty of branding and whipping for the first offense, and the galleys for life for the second. But the evil could not be suppressed, so fascinating was the fur trade and the domestic life incidental and inevitable to it.

In speaking of the coureurs des bois, Irving says that "their conduct and example gradually corrupted the natives." Nor was the influence of the fur trade better on the Indian. He ranged wide and wild in the forests, and sometimes would be gone for years from the settlements, and then return with his fur trophies, flush of money. Says the same author: "A short time, however, spent in revelry, would be sufficient to drain his purse and sate him with civilized life, and he would return with new relish to the unshackelled freedom of the forest." 1

The settlements themselves were not free from the same decivilizing and debauching influences. In his "Old Régime Parkman quotes Father Carheil, a Jesuit missionary at Mackinaw, as saying that the soldiery, with brandy, introduced an "infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice, impiety, and impurity among the Indians. He says the garrisons have only four occupations: first, to keep open liquor-shops for crowds of drunken Indians; and, fourthly, to turn the post into a place which I am ashamed to call by its right name." 2

...

"Our good king," writes Sister Marin, of Montreal, "has sent troops to defend us from the Iroquois, and the soldiers and officers have ruined the Lord's vineyard, and planted sin and crime in our soil of Canada."

More recent and personal testimony to the influence of soldiery on the Indians may here be introduced. An experienced and candid mountaineer of thirty-five years between the Missouri and the Pacific, and who spoke several Indian languages, and knew well the tribes, said to the author, in the Rocky Mountains in 1885 "The soldiery will have access to the Reservations. The officers and missionaries cannot prevent it, and they are being consumed by imported diseases. . . . The tribes are ruined beyond all chance of hope by the soldiers and cowboys and ranchers. . You can have no conception of their outrageous conduct." 4

1 Astoria, vol. i., chap. xii.

8 Old Régime, p. 369.

2 Pp. 319, 320.

4 The Indian's Side of the Indian Question. By William Barrows, D. D. Pp. 154-157.

In a change of sovereignty to sterner rule, morals and manners degenerated still lower, so that "it was thought a fine thing and a good joke [for the young men] to go about naked and tricked out like Indians, not only on carnival days, but on all other days of feasting and debauchery." 1

Fremont, in his exploring tour of 1843-44, found a similar state of things among the trappers. Speaking of Roubideau's tradingpost on the Uintah River, south of Salt Lake, he says: "It has mostly a garrison of Canadian and Spanish engegés and hunters, with the usual number of Indian women.'

The same is implied in what General P. St. George Cooke says of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas in 1846: "Here were many races and colors, a confusion of tongues, of rank and condition, and of cross-purposes." 2

In the "Narrative of a Journey Round the World," by Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-chief of the Hudson Bay Company, made in 1841-42, is a hint of this mixed condition of the races at that date. At Stikine, British Columbia, the governor says, "fourteen or fifteen of the men of the establishment asked permission to take native wives, and leave to accept the worthless bargains was granted to all such as had the means of supporting a family. These matrimonial connections are a heavy tax on a post, in consequence of the increased demand for provisions, but form, at the same time, a useful link between the traders and the savages." 3

It is pertinent and instructive to see how this policy pervaded and shaped the administration of the Hudson Bay Company, from the beginning of its two darkening centuries in British America. A few facts will make its course manifest: "The servants of the Company purchased Indian women, and halfbreed families were raised. The Company found it for their profit to encourage their employees thus to marry, as it attached them to localities, and made them contented in a wilderness home, while the offspring, as children of a slave mother, were themselves slaves, and became both profitable and inexpensive to the Company." 4

In his " Report on Slavery in Oregon," to the United States government, Mr. Slocum, of the navy, says: "The price of a slave varies from five to fifteen blankets. Women are valued higher than the men."

1 Ibid. p. 375.

2 P. 8.

8 Vol. i., p. 231.

Oregon: The Struggle for Possession. By W. Barrows, D. D. Pp. 91, 92.