In the famous Lord Selkirk grant, the primitive Manitoba, there were in 1840, and after its absorption in the Hudson Bay Company, about 6,000 persons, but the most of them were Indians and half-breeds; but very few of them were Europeans in blood.1

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As to the agency of the Hudson Bay Company in introducing a half-breed population into the wilds of America, Gray, in his History of Oregon," makes the statement, with his not unusual excessive force: "They had agreed, in accepting their original charter, to civilize and Christianize the natives of the country. This part of their compact the individual members of the company were fulfilling by each taking a native woman, and rearing as many half-civilized subjects as was convenient." 2

"At some villages there were but one or two traders; at others, ten, twenty, and sometimes as many as fifty [French and English]. For the most part the traders were married to squaws, and had children by them. . . . We have heard of but two instances where traders had white wives living with them in Indian villages." 3

All readers of our history recall the Seminoles as one of the most numerous and powerful of all our Indian tribes. Of these Dr. Morse says: "The pure Seminoles, Captain Bell verbally stated to me, are about twelve hundred in number." As the entire number of the tribe at that time was 4,560, the number of pure blood was about one fourth.*

It does seem as if a prediction made in 1820 is likely to prove true, with extension of time: "In the course of another half century no genuine trace of them probably will remain in our borders."

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"5

In speaking of the mixed population of Lower Louisiana, Major Amos Stoddard, who was our first governor of it, says that among these are Spaniards, Creoles, aboriginals, a vast variety of mixed bloods, forming no less than seven distinct castes. Their moral principles are extremely debauched, and their intercourse with each other is marked by the most corrupt profligacy of manners." 6

1 Ibid., p. 94.

2 A History of Oregon, by W. H. Gray, 1870, p. 78.

8 Magazine of Western History, December, 1884, p. 120.

4 Report on Indian Affairs, 1820, Appendix, pp. 309, 311.

5 Emigrants' Guide to Upper Canada. C. Stuart, Esq., London, 1820, p. 267. 6 Stoddard's Sketches of Louisiana, p. 291.

This mixture of white and Indian blood was but the outcome of the trapping and trading and gold-hunting interests of Europeans from the Canadas to the Gulf of Mexico. Nor were domestic alliances sought only on the part of white men among the natives. In his "Travels in the Valley of the Mississippi," 1815-1825, Timothy Flint found among the Cherokees “a young woman, not only a full-blooded American, but rather fair and pretty, a wife to one of the young warriors." 1

While this Hudson Bay Company controlled and covered a country one third larger than all Europe, its employees of European blood would hardly exceed 3,000. Of the rest, about one fourth were Hawaiian, one fourth Orkney, and the rest Canadian, Indian, and half-bloods.

One friendly historian of the Company says: "A large proportion of the Company's servants, and, with very few exceptions, the officers, are united to native women."2 Speaking of social life at Vancouver, as late as 1849, he adds: "The residents mess at several tables: one for the chief factor and the clerks; one for their wives, it being against the regulations of the Company for their officers and their wives to take their meals together." A sad reflection this on English business and English civilization which interdicts the family table over a region one third larger than all Europe!

Sometimes, though rarely, a European was imported to order for a wife, and she was received as goods, and in one case at least the receipt stands: "Received, one wife, in good condition." But this was a luxury which few could afford to enjoy. As a general result, the increase of population was half-breed; European civilization stooped to nominal matrimony in the low type of the wigwam. The elevating, ennobling, and refining influence of woman, which makes the true home, was wanting under the Hudson Bay Company, and society was a dubious hyphen between savagery and civilization.

John Grant, agent for the Fort Hall trading-post of the Company on Snake River, Idaho, was a man much married, and head of a tawny family. He held this post as a Gibraltar against all immigration into Oregon, and turned the human tide southerly to California, till Dr. Whitman broke through with his "old wagon," and brought over Oregon into the Union.

1 P. 149.

2 Hudson Bay Territories and Vancouver's Island. London, 1849. By R. M. Martin.

This miserable policy and practice of the Company for domestic life of course had their influence within the territory of the United States on the wild border, and facts in this line, therefore, must not surprise us. In 1842 a band of one hundred and thirtyseven persons from the States passed this same Fort Hall for Oregon. There were in it men, women, and children, adventurers and missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic. Of this company twenty-five of the men had native wives.1

Long before this, such a social condition had become the common order on the Illinois. "The early French on the Illinois were remarkable for their talent of ingratiating themselves with the warlike tribes around them, and for their easy amalgamation in manners and customs and blood.” 2

When in Wyoming in 1885, one town of sixty families was pointed out to me in which one fourth of the families were of mixed blood.

In July, 1701, Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, under the order of Louis XIV., founded Detroit. To secure population he encouraged his soldiers to marry the Indian girls. He had prepared for this by settling the Miamis, Pottawatomies, Hurons, and Ottawas in the close vicinity of Port Detroit. He made an eminent success of his plan. In 1837 Judge John W. Edmonds, appointed by President Jackson to pay off the Pottawatomies for their lands, found that fully one half of them bore French names, or were classed distinctively as half-breeds. Many of the Detroit half-breeds rose in civilization, and to high social and civil positions, and founded some of the most influential families in Michigan in the second and third generations.

"The Fond du Lac tribe consists of forty-five men, sixty women, and two hundred and forty children. There are about thirty of the half-breed, and three freemen, who have families. They are Canadians married to Indian women, living entirely with the Indians, and are not engaged to the Company, by whom, as well as by the Indians, they are considered a great nuisance, being forever exciting broils and disturbances." 4

"In this place [Fort Brown], on both sides of the mouth of Fox River, are about eighty families, some say less, principally French, all the married men but one connected with Indian

Edmund Kirke, in Harper's Monthly, August, 1866, p. 330.

4 Report of Dr. Morse, Appendix, p. 37.

women.

There are here about two hundred and sixty children of mixed blood, growing up without any public-school education, and by far the greater part of them without any education at all." 1

While spending some time in the Indian Territory in 1880, it was our good fortune to be able to attend the great Indian Fair at Mus-ko-ge. Besides the Five Nations, there were probably twentyfive tribes represented, and the whole multitude was between two and three thousand. It was entirely an Indian fair, agricultural, mechanical, industrial, and domestic, as well as in administration; and the Ladies' Department was attractive both for its superiority over that of the gentlemen in the number and quality of articles on exhibition, and for its intelligent and ladylike superintendence. The women were marked for their beauty, grace of manner, good style of dress, and general deportment. The ordinary observer in Cincinnati or St. Louis would pass them for beautiful white ladies of the Lower Mississippi, with their attractive brunette complexions. They had had the education of letters, taste, and refinement at the North. Very like, they were wealthy, or heiresses of quadruped fortunes in live-stock, and some of them with "squaw for husbands, who were greatly their inferiors in appear

ance and civilization.

The gentlemen officials showed white blood, and in their bearing carried themselves as well as New-Englanders in like circumstances. One, less than half-blood, a graduate of Dartmouth and bred to the law, with an Ohio wife, made a very fine impression. Massive yet symmetrical in person, Websterian in his English diction, he would stand as a man of mark anywhere, regardless of complexion or pedigree. He made a very good address on the stand at the fair.

One need not be an expert in ethnology to mark on the streets of Montreal and Winnipeg, St. Louis and Omaha, aboriginal as well as imported blood, in making up their ardent and energetic populations; and often is it a difficult discrimination to tell which blood has the mastery and brings the honors. In time, race peculiarities disappear in a new and complex type of man.

We quote below a remark, in one of the Reports of the American Board, on the pride some most noble families will take in tracing their ancestry back on one side to the Five Nations of the Indian Territory. This is very strictly true, and justly so, of some Virginians. It will be remembered how proud John Randolph was of his descent, on the father's side, from the prin1 Ibid., p. 58.

cess Pocahontas. And it comes into the romance of history that Theodoric Bland, great-grandson of Pocahontas, poet, scholar, and patriot, was one of the committee of five, on the part of the House, to receive Washington on the New Jersey shore as he journeyed from Mount Vernon to New York to take his inauguration oath and first place in our long line of Presidents. Bancroft has well said of the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas that "she stammered before the altar her marriage vows, according to the rites of the English service," and that "distinguished men trace from it their descent." She was admired in England, and made a social ornament at court when Lady Delaware presented her. Α similar treatment of other American princesses of the forest would have left a nobler record for our Christian States, and for our civilization which historians will discount at no flattering per cent. "Many a descendant of Pocahontas has been prouder of his lineage than the nobly born in other lands; and hereafter, no doubt, men of the Southwest will love to reckon among their ancestry some godly and large-hearted Indian." 1 And this despite the low white ancestry that usually introduces the first generation of half-breeds.

"When the tide of emigration sets strong towards the wilderness occupied by the native tribes, a large proportion of the most lawless and worthless part of the population is carried in advance of the older settlements, like driftwood upon a swollen river. Hence it is almost impossible for the civil authorities to restrain acts of lawless violence in such persons on the extreme confines of civilization." 2

In speaking of the remnants of Indians in Massachusetts in 1820, Dr. Morse says: "The number of pure-blooded Indians is extremely small, say fifty or sixty, and is rapidly decreasing. The mixture of blood arises far more frequently from connection with negroes than with whites." 3

In connection with these remarks on Indians in Massachusetts, Dr. Morse speaks of those in Rhode Island, and gives their number as four hundred and twenty-nine, "nearly all, if not every individual, of mixed blood and color in various degrees and shades." And this is the last of the Narragansetts, the tribe which was such a terror to the colonists and to the surrounding Indian tribes. Dr. Bacon, in his "Genesis," page 357, gives the estimate of their number in 1622 at 30,000.