| Show pro X THE INDIANS POINT OF an indian simon pokagon states lit irk the forum that he Is worried over the probable outcome of the government policy of feeding so many of the people on reservations the system permits he says of the gathering of lazy immoral white men who spend their time in idleness and in corrupting indian morality he asserts that when the white men first came to america the red men were kind and confiding they were a block of marble in the hands handa of the sculptor but they were more mor often hacked to pieces and destroyed than formed into works of art then he continues it to is useless to deny the charge that at times we have been goaded to vindictive and cruel acts some of my own tribe however were soldiers in the northern army during the civil war some of them were taken and held prisoners in the rebel prisons and the cruelty which according to the tales they tell was witnessed there was never outdone in border warfare with the scalping knife and tomahawk and yet I 1 believe that had the northern people been placed in the south under like circumstances their prisoners of war would have been treated with similar cruelty it was the result of a desperate effort to save an expiring cause I 1 believe there is no reasonable person well grounded in united states history i who will not admit that there were ten times as many who perished miserably in southern prisons as have been killed by our since the discovery of america I 1 recall these facts not to censure but to show that cruelty and revenge are the offspring of war not of race and that nature has placed no impassable gulf between us and civilization |
