Efforts are being made to reduce the area of the Reservation, and, should they succeed, these people who have cost the Government so little of blood or treasure, will be compelled to yield; only repeating, “Might versus Right.” I am not opposed to reduction of the limits of the coast Reservation, if these people, who have already given up so much beautiful country, shall be provided with schools, churches, shops, and other means whereby they may be compensated, and, in the mean time, prepared by civilization for the new life that awaits the survivors, that, a few years hence, may be left to represent their people.
The Government owes to these humble Indians all I have suggested, and, in addition, a home marked out and allotted in severalty, made inalienable for one or two generations.
But, however deserving they may be, it is doubtful if they ever enjoy the boon they crave. Few in number, peaceable in disposition, unknown to the world by bloody deeds, the probabilities are that the white man will encroach on their lands, a few miles at a time, until at last, hemmed in by a civilization they cannot enjoy, they will gradually mix and mingle, becoming more licentious and corrupt by association with vicious white men, and in a generation or two will be known only by a few vagabonds, who will wander, gipsy-like, through the country, a poor, miserable fag-end of a race.
Perhaps a few may take humble positions as laborers, and attain to a half-way station between savage and civilized life. Another few will become slaves to King Alcohol, and their chief men, lying around whiskey mills, drunken, debauched, despised, will drop back again to mother earth, mingling with the soil their fathers once owned.
Thus the people of Alsea will pass away. I pity you, humble, red-skinned children of the Pacific surf! You were happy once, and carelessly rode in your canoes over the shining sands of your native beach, or chased the game on the mountain side, little dreaming of the coming of a human tide which would swallow you and your sea-washed home, or carry both away out on the boundless expanse of a civilization whose other shores you could not see had sepulchres ready for your bones. You have spent your lives with your feet beating the paths your fathers made centuries ago; but your children shall follow newer trails, that lead to more dangerous jungles than those trod by your ancestors. Strange demons they will meet, before whom they will fall to rise no more.