In 1877 the Earl of Dufferin, late governor-general of Canada, addressing an audience at Winnipeg, made this politic and laudatory reference to this mixed class of which we are treating : "There is no doubt that a great deal of the good feeling subsisting between the red men and ourselves is due to the influence and interposition of that invaluable class of men, the half-breed settlers and pioneers of Manitoba," - the ancient Winnipeg, or Red River Colony. "They have preached the gospel of peace and goodwill and mutual respect, with results beneficent alike to the Indian chieftain in his lodge and to the British settler in his shanty." 1

On this Red River Colony Lord Selkirk expended about $400,000, and when it was sold out to the Hudson Bay Company in 1835 it had for population Canadians and half-breeds, Indians and naked savages, farmers, hunters, and fishermen, and missionaries of various denominations. When we visited it in 1885 the mixture of blood was not so obvious. That had faded out, even as the wigwams and shanties of primitive and wildwood times had given way to a neat and well-ordered town, honored and magnified by the stately offices of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, with flags flying commemorative of the day we were there, when the road was formally opened to the Rocky Mountains. The change was great from the condition given of it in 1835 by Dr. Ellis : “The inhabitants of the region at the time were of as motley and miscellaneous a make-up as any extensive region on earth would have afforded, - Canadians, half-breeds, Indians, and naked, painted, and feathered savages, strutting and fuming voyageurs, farmers, hunters, fishermen, furnished with missionaries of rival creeds, and not without means of education. .. Well-furnished and well-stocked houses and farm-barns, and the filthiest, dreariest cabins and wigwams.'

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In writing of Green Bay, Dr. Morse says: "This place and Prairie du Chien will probably be the future capitals of the Northwest Territory, which is now without any white population, except the garrisons of the United States and a few families of mingled French and Indian blood settled around them." 3

"More than half the Cherokee nation, a large part of the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and I may add, indeed, of all other tribes with whom the whites have had intercourse, are of mixed blood." 4

1 Speeches and Addresses of the Earl of Dufferin, pp. 237, 238, and quoted by Ellis, Red Man and White Man, p. 301.

2 Red Man and White Man, p. 494. 3 Report, p. 14.

4 Morse's Report, p. 74.

"Prairie du Chien is a military post near the confluence of the Ouisconsin with the Mississippi, an old French settlement, where are three or four hundred inhabitants, principally of mixed blood." 1

And so Chicago was born in Denver was

In 1803 Captain John Whistler and son were ordered from the army at Detroit to build and occupy a post at Chicago, and they erected Fort Dearborn. Their wives came with them, the first two white women ever in Chicago. They found there four cabins of Canadian trappers with their Indian wives. founded in half-breeds. And the first child half Indian, of an Arapahoe mother, in 1858. It is probable that a historical search into the beginnings of many of our larger towns beyond the Alleghanies would show that Chicago and Denver are typical in regard to the combination of the two races.

The holidays, sports, and sociables are a very good index to the state of society, and a ball in Rupert's Land - the royal trapping ground of the Hudson Bay Company - shows what a volume could be written on the civil, social, and moral life of the mixed races in British America. It continued for three days in eating, drinking, dancing, and sleeping. "From time to time as many as are requisite to keep up the festivities are awakened; and being forthwith revived with raw spirits, join in the dance with renewed vigor." 2

Mixed French, Spanish, and Indian society held sway in Louisiana long after its purchase, and after it came nominally under the laws of the United States. True, the English language was introduced into the courts by statute as early as 1808, but the change in manners, customs, and morals did not follow so early, or gain footing so readily. "The language, manners, customs, laws, usages of the American people began to extend over the French settlements and to change the aspects of the country. . . . Yet as late as the year 1814 St. Louis had not lost either its French population, aspects, or usages," when it was a border town of about 2,000 people.3

Nor was it changed radically from this when we took residence there in 1840, among its 16,000 inhabitants, though Monette's description would apply best to the lower and eminently French part of the city, Vete Pouche. A picture of St. Louis in 1810, as given by Irving from the Notes of Wilson P. Hunt, should 1 Morse's Report, Appendix, p. 316.

2 The Great Fur Land, by H. M. Robinson, p. 324.

3 Monette, vol. ii. p. 546.

have a place here. "The old French houses engaged in the Indian trade had gathered around them a train of dependants, mongrel Indians and mongrel Frenchmen, who had intermarried with Indians. . . . Here were to be seen, above the river banks, the hectoring, extravagant, bragging boatman of the Mississippi, with the gay, grimacing, singing, good-humored Canadian voyageurs. Vagrant Indians of various tribes loitered about the streets.... A motley population, composed of the creole descendants of the original French colonists; the keen trader from the Atlantic States; the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee; the Indians and half-breeds of the prairies; together with a singular aquatic race that had grown up from the navigation of the rivers the boatmen of the Mississippi.'" 1

In his "Sketches of Louisiana," Major Stoddard thus speaks of one village of Indians on the Arkansas, about forty-five miles from its mouth. "The French visited this place as early as 1685, where they opened a trade with the natives, built a fort, and formed some settlements about it. At that period the Arkansas nation of Indians was deemed one of the most powerful in the country, and the French, to preserve peace with them and to secure their trade, intermarried with them. Most of the inhabitants of that village are of mixed blood, and the mixture is observable among the Indians, who are now reduced to a very few in number and live in two small villages, above that of the whites." 2

The same author, speaking of the habits in Indian hospitality, says: "Among some, it is customary for the chief to present his youngest wife to his stranger guest, and if he refuses it is considered as an affront. Among others, the chief presents his daughter, or some other unmarried female relative. . . . In some nations of Indians, adultery is punishable with death, and fornication permitted. In others, fornication is a capital offence, and adultery is practiced with impunity." 3

"Of the seventy thousand persons inhabiting the Indian Territory, scarcely half are of pure Indian blood. No white man can reside there unless he has for a wife an Indian squaw, and so secures the noble title of "a squaw man." There are four thousand whites. The mongrel breeds are steadily increasing, and the pure race dying out." 4

1 Astoria, by Washington Irving, chap. xiv.

p. 206.

2 Historical and Descriptive Sketches of Louisiana, by Major Amos Stoddard, 3 Ibid., p. 431.

4 Dr. Ellis's The Red Man and the White Man, p. 580.

After the meeting of the American Board in St. Louis in 1881, a company of the attendants visited Vinita, in the Indian Territory. Vinita is one of the leading towns in the Cherokee nation. The Rev. Mr. Scroggs, long time a teacher there, made this remark to his visitors: "I do not feel sure of more than four pure-blood Indians in this place." There was an Indian population of possibly a thousand.

A correspondent in Montana gives me the following: "In an early day, before there were any white women in the country, many whites of education and good social standing lived with, and in some cases married, Indian women. A few of these have kept their Indian wives for the sake of their children. One notable instance of this is Mr. Blank, as finely educated and highly accomplished a gentleman as can be found in Montana." He has held positions of high honor in civil affairs, and "got married to a Snake woman, who, I believe, does not even speak English. In Helena there is now living a daughter of another Mr. Blank, and a Blackfoot squaw. She was educated in the East, and moved in the best society there. . . . Now very few whites are living with Indian women. A few such couples are found around the Indian Reservation, but the officials discourage it, and there is, on the whole, comparatively little white blood mixed with the Montana Indian tribes."

In 1874 the Osages numbered about 3,000 at the agency, of whom 300 were mixed bloods. The Commissioner reports them as "educated, wear citizens' dress; nearly all of the half-breed families have good houses and farms, with from 20 to 100 acres in cultivation, and self-supporting. About seventy-five families of the civilizing half-bloods are living in comfortable hewed-log houses, with from five to twenty acres improved; a few of them have wagons, farming implements, and milch cows. All of them have horses, hogs, and poultry." 1

In reporting on the Nez Percé Indians, in 1874, John B. Monteith, the agent, says they are importuning that murder, theft, polygamy, adultery, etc., be punished in accordance with the laws of the States. He recommends a law "compelling white men to care for their half-breed children. A law declaring all whites who are living with Indian women the same as married, and recognizing them as the lawful protectors of said women in all respects, ought to be passed." 2

1 Report of the Commissioner on Indian Affairs, 1874, p. 222.

2 Indian Commissioner's Report, 1874, p. 286.

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Some provisions in Cherokee legislation were directed to similar ends, and as early as 1820, as note the following statutes: Single white men are hereby admitted to be employed as clerks in any of the stores that shall be established in this Nation, by natives, on condition that the employer obtains a permit and becomes responsible for the good behavior of such clerks." Any man who shall hereafter take a Cherokee woman to wife, shall be required to marry her legally by a minister of the Gospel, or other authorized person, after procuring a license from the National Clerk for that purpose, before he shall be admitted to the privilege of citizenship." And marriage did not put the property of the squaw at the disposal of the white husband without her consent. "It shall not be lawful for any white man to have more than one wife."

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Statutes may well be provided against polygamy of the whites among the Indians, in view of what the Rev. John Sergeant, missionary among the Delaware and Stockbridge Indians in the Northwest, writes to Drs. Morse and Worcester, of the American Board, in 1818: "The Reservations ought to be large, and at least twenty miles from white or black inhabitants. Civilization and religion must go hand in hand. The plough and Bible must go together.' I am decidedly of the opinion that, if the good people in your State [Massachusetts] had fallen into this plan in Apostle Elliot's time, there might now have been large and flourishing towns of natives in the vicinity of Boston. It is a settled point that they cannot flourish where white people are allowed to mix with them. In order, therefore, to have religion and civilization flourish among Indians, the societies and missionaries must use their influence with the government to keep them at a distance from all immoral squatters on Indian lands.

"I wish your Foreign Missionary Society would, at their meeting, take up the subject of praying the government to allow the Indians a large and handsome Reservation, and by some effectual means prevent immoral people from getting among them when they have settled upon it. I can with truth inform you, that among the Indian tribes in Indiana there are white men who have half a dozen wives. Here are the strongholds of Satan."1

Dr. Morse, in his Report, quotes from a manuscript memoir on the civilization of the Indians, by one "Mons. Peniere, an exile from France during her Revolution, a man of genius and information, who resided four years among the Indians, a careful and 1 Report on Indian Affairs, by Dr. Jedediah Morse, pp. 113–117.