The next morning (17th), on descending five miles, we stopped at a Mr. Williams's to prepare breakfast, where some persons were gathering to hear an itinerant preacher. Twenty miles lower, we stopped for the night, at a widow Lafferty's.
From the remarks made at the places where we have been entertained by the hunters and settlers on this river, there is considerable dissatisfaction with a treaty[11] made with the Cherokee Indians, by which a part of that nation are assigned a location between the north banks of the Arkansas and the south bank of White river. Many of them, including our hostess to-night, and the M'Gareys, Lees, and Matneys above, have lands in cultivation, with dwelling-houses, stock, and improvements, of more or less value, on the south banks of the river; which, as they apprehend, under the operation of this treaty, they are to relinquish to the Cherokees.
The truth is, the first white occupants of the frontiers, though generally rough men, and without a title to the lands they settle on, are the pioneers of civilization; and by thus taking their lives in their hands, and encountering the perils of the wilderness and of Indian hostility, they lay the government under a strong obligation to protect them. The natural hatred of races is such, that they are everlastingly on ill terms with the Indians, and the Indians with them. It is difficult to say which of the two races, during this period of contact, is most suspicious of the other.
The Indians, also, look up to the government with strong claims for justice and protection. The frontier, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was on and near the Atlantic borders, from Maine to Georgia, and long continued east of the Alleghany mountains. It is already west of the Mississippi river, that mighty geographical highway, which, like a longitudinal line, stretches across seventeen degrees of latitude, every mile of which will, ere long, be settled and cultivated by the Anglo-American race. As the population presses first on the Indian's hunting-grounds, and next on his cornfields, he flies before the irresistible tide, and takes shelter at some more remote western point. But he is hardly well seated on his new hunting-grounds--he has hardly begun to reap his new cornfields--when the pioneers of the same race that disturbed him before, are upon him; and again, and again he must fly before the resistless--the uncontrollable tide of migration. It is a providential reflux in the wave of races. It is something to be observed, rather than to be apprehended and understood. It seems to say, that the surface of the habitable earth was not formed for the permanent occupancy of races who rely on the pleasing and exciting uses of the bow and arrow; and that labor, which was, at the first, declared to be the proper condition of man, is destined to sweep away, if it cannot merge in its on-rush, these erratic and picturesque tribes. Where their frontiers will be found, a hundred years hence, the voice of history, looking to the past, may only tell; but this appears more appreciable and clear--that the perpetuation of the race as one of the elements of mankind, must depend, in the sequel, however long that sequel be postponed, on his substantial adoption of the principles of industry, letters, and Christianity. The "tents of Shem," however we may read the prediction, are still to be occupied, if they are not now, by a broad philanthropy, to be merged into those of the higher civilization of Japhet. For, the civilization and the moral elevation of man is the great object of revelation; and it appears clear, and conformable to reason, that, where future history is taught in the Pentateuch by figures, it should be figuratively, and not dogmatically, explained.