DR. BELL'S "NEW TRACKS IN NORTH AMERICA."* DR. BELL'S work

is full of interesting matter, and yet it can hardly be pronounced an interesting book. The main reason of this is apparently, that being a medical man, he was not able to resist the temptation of showing how much he had made himself of an engineer. Hence his two volumes are filled with minute details of routes, distances, gradients, levels, which not only are of comparatively little value out of the United States, and even there out of a certain class, but must in the course of a few years become, if not obsolete, yet superfluous.

Not that one would wish to suppress from the second volume that "Part IV.," which treats of "the Pacific Railways." This tells haw the idea of such a means of communication between ocean and ocean was first broached in 1837, how it reached Congress in 1850, took the shape of a Surveying Act in 1853, was brought to the test of scientific exploration between 1854 and 1857, became one of the shuttlecocks of the anti-slavery struggle till 1860, and at last owed its realization to the Secession war, as a means of binding the Pacific States to the North ;—describes the feverish rapidity with which the now open Omaha line was constructed, "not by a staff formed of scientific engineers—they might have shrunk from so reckless a venture—but by a few go-a-head merchants of San Francisco, who left their counting-houses to become railway con- tractors," at the rate of two miles a day and sometimes more, through nearly 1,600 miles of desert, over snow-capped mountains where the whole line has to be roofed over for some thirty miles ; but indicates the superior advantages of the Kansas Pacific line further South, of which over 700 miles are expected to be completed within the present year, passing as it does by easier levels through a fertile country, in which obstruction through snow is unknown ; and, above all, of the Northern Pacific Rail- way, scarcely begun as yet, which will open up one of the most fertile and the most salubrious region of the continent, as well as the most direct route to Northern China and Japan, and—if we do not gain a march upon it by means of a line along a still more favourable route within the British frontiers—is expected to "seal the destiny of the British possessions west of the 91st meridian." All this is well and clearly told, nor do we grudge many illustra- tive details scattered throughout the body of the work,—e.g., the "town-making system" as practised upon these lines, which have altogether to create their traffic instead of supplying its needs, and on which at first the depOt towns move with the line, so that when Cheyenne rose to this dignity, the guard of "along freight train. . . laden with frame houses, boards, furniture, palings, old tents, and all the rubbish which makes up one of these mushroom cities, • . . jumped off his van, and seeing some friends on the platform, called out with a flourish, Gentlemen, here's Julesberg P "—the

• New Tracks in North America; a Journal of Travel and Adventures whilst engaged in the Surrey for a Southern Railroad to the Pacific Ocean during 1867-8. By William A. Bell, MA., 1LB., Cantab., Fellow of the Royal Geographical and Ethnological Societies. 2 vols. London Chapman and Hall. 1969.

last depot town, which had thus obligingly come by train to supply materials for the next.

But to most readers, the greatest interest of the work will lie in

its details of the various races inhabiting the almost unknown country forming the south-west of the Union, as well as of the remains of those which have gone before. Of the existing races, the most curious beyond question is that remnant of the so- called Aztecs, i.e., of the people which the Spaniards found ruling in the Gulf of Mexico, and on the opposite Pacific coast, which lingers still, divided in five groups, within the present territory of the United States, and is reckoned to com- prise some 16,000 souls in all. These people govern them- selves through their own caciques ; they are peaceful and indus- trious, excellent irrigators ; their men are honest and sober, their women chaste. They live in a state of constant enmity with the wild Indians, and two of the groups at least have so complete a defensive organization, that it is said that their territories are the "only two spots in New Mexico and Arizona where you can be certain of absolute safety." Few of them appear to have been con- verted to more than a nominal Romanism, the great bulk of them clinging to their old heathen faith. Two, indeed, of the five groups, although otherwise retaining many of the elements of civilization, are mere hut-builders, others inhabit villages differing "but little from those of the Mexicans, except that the houses are larger and loftier ;" some of them on the ruins of their old for- tresses, terraced six or seven stories high. One of them, the Papagos, are, Dr. Bell states, "the finest specimens of man, phy- sically," he has "ever seen ;" out of a party of five, not one was less than 61 t. 2in. And over a vast tract of country lie the remains of a mighty empire. "There is scarcely a valley in the Rio Grande basin in which the stone or adobe foundations of villages are not to be found ; there is scarcely a spring, a laguna, or a marsh upon the plateau which is not overlooked by some ruined fortress." These ruins are, indeed, in many cases demonstrably Spanish, but in other cases their similarity to existing Indian buildings, or their mere antiquity, show them to be the work of the indigenous race.

Of the wild Indians, such as the Navajos and Apaches, the writer has little good to tell. The former, "for love of plunder and rapine . . . . have no equals." The latter have "never been known to show the smallest trace either of humanity or good faith." Yet he himself shows that the former, who indeed claim to be of the same stock as the town-building tribes, had attained at least the first step in civilization. "They had fixed abodes in their country, around which they raised crops almost rivalling those of the Pimas [civilized Indians] of the Gila ; they carried one art—the weaving of blankets—to a state of perfection which, in closeness of texture and arrangement of colour, is scarcely equalled even by the laboured and costly seraphes [serapes] of Mexico and South America." Their custom, however, was that "while they left their wives and old men to plant, reap, attend to the stock, and make blankets, the braves spent their lives in traversing the whole country, carrying off the stock of the helpless Mexican farmers, and keeping the entire agricultural and mining population in a state of alarm." And civilized man has simply followed their example against themselves. "The Mexi- cans of one settlement would collect together, and make a raid on a marauding band of Navajos, capturing all they could, not only in stock, but in women and children." The first year of United States' occupation (1846), General Kearney advised the Governor that "full permission should be given to the citizens of New Mexico to march in independent companies against these Indians, for the purpose of making reprisals, and for the recovery of properly and prisoners." And so the Navajos were " humbled " after the following fashion :—

"As soon as harvest-time approached, the soldiers would enter their country, year after year. They say that the corn-fields were splendid, but they cat them all down, and fired the district wherever they went, driving off sheep, sometimes to the number of 70,000 in a single raid, and oxen also by thousands. When there were no crops to destroy, and no apparent enemy to be found or flocks to drive off, the military would encamp at the different springs, and try by this means to destroy the remnant of their stock."

Thanks to this civilizing process, "plunder became to them a necessity of existence, for they had no other means of support." At last, literally starving, the great bulk of the tribe delivered themselves up, and were placed on a reservation where fuel and good water are alike wanting, where they are exposed to constant raids from another tribe, the Comanches, and, where, thinning daily by death, the survivors only plead piteously to be taken back.

The case of the Navajos is exceedingly instructive in respect to the true history of the North American Indians. We have here

a contemporary instance of the final barbarizing of one of their tribes. Writers like Mr. Hepworth Dixon can build fine theories, very complacent to Anglo-Saxon practice, about the necessary decay of nomad races ; nothing is easier than to pronounce the Red Indian "irreclaimable," "untameable," and as such to shove him out of the way. He may be so now, but in too many instances only because he has been made so. It seems highly probable that the Navajos, whom Dr. Bell describes as "bold and defiant, with fall lustrous eyes, and a sharp intelligent expression of countenance," were at one time a part of the great Mexican Indian nation, sharing all its civilization ; that, more warlike per- haps, or better protected by natural circumstances, they escaped subjection at the Spanish conquest, and whilst retaining the prac- tice of agriculture and other arts of peace, continued to harry without remorse the invaders and those of their countrymen who had accepted the yoke. From this condition they became degraded through the absolute wasting of their country into mere nomad plunderers, and are now wasting away themselves, broken-hearted, with disease and vice. But if we look back into the accounts of the early settlers on the Eastern coast, we shall find them closely analogous to those of the Navajos in 1846. Strachey's Historie of Traraile into Virginia Britannia shows us in the beginning of the seventeenth century the Virginian Indians inhabiting wooden houses in the midst of gardens, cultivating maize, tobacco, peas, beans, and fruits, the women and children "continually keeping the ground with weeding,"—some of them breeding up tame tur- keys about their houses; tells of their "great emperor" Powhatau, with his "divers seats or howses and at every howse provision for his entertainment ; " a guard of forty or fifty "of the tallest men his country does afford" ordinarily attending him, sentinels posted every night about his house and shouting every half-hour to each other ; his country divided into provinces, each with a" weroanc" or commander ; receiving tithe of corn, tobacco, and garden fruits, or a tax on fowls, fish, hides, copper, 8cc., and the government such "as that their magistrates for good commanding, and their people for due subjection and obeying, excell many places that would be counted civil!." If we go back nearly a century, to the account of Ferdinand° de Soto's conquest of Florida, we find here too the picture of a settled people, living in towns, cultivating the soil, preserving its products, breeding fowls, mak- ing mantles not only of skins, but of the inner bark of trees and of a grass similar to a nettle. The nearly contemporary voyage of Verazzani to the North-Eastern coast shows us the practice of husbandry extending as far (according to Mr. Winter Jones's iden- tification) as Narraganset Bay, with boat-building and the art of working in copper. All these tribes have either been exterminated already, or are the " untameables " and " irreclaimables " of the present day.

But let us see if the Apaches, who have "never been known to show the smallest trace either of humanity or good faith," may not, on Dr. Bell's own showing, have something to say on their behalf :—

" In 1862 an act of treachery was committed by the troops which brought the Indian hostilities to a climax. 3Iangas Coloradas, who was the greatest chief in the whole country, was induced to enter a military

post on the plea of making a treaty and receiving presents. The soldiers, however, imprisoned him in a hut, and the sentry shot him at night, on the excuse that he feared he would escape. This act roused the whole Apache tribe to vengeance. The Miembres, Apaches, the especial band of the massacred chief, spread themselves far and near over all the country, and every white man they could find was doomed to fall by their silent arrows."

Another story is too long to be given in the writer's words. Suffice it to say that the Apaches of the Chiricahui mountains, till the winter of 1861-2, were on good terms with the American Mail Company. But an officer named Barkett, on a complaint by some Mexicans that they suspected a boy of theirs to have been kidnapped by the Apaches, summoned the chief and the head- men to the camp. They "immediately responded to the summons," "positively denied the charge," and were thereupon ordered to be arrested. The chief escaped, the other six were secured. A man named Wallace, who had long been on friendly terms with the tribe, offered to go and treat with them. He did so, and sent back word that in his opinion the boy had not been stolen by the Apaches, but that he was detained—and surely not unnaturally —as a hostage. Barkett "swore that he would hang the Red men if the boy was not returned that night," and did so. Wallace was hanged in retaliation, and from that time the Apaches of the tribe became " irreclaimables." Considering the lessons of " humanity " and "good faith" which civilized man thus has given them, is it really wonderful that they should have proved such apt pupils?

The subject, however, of the Indian tribes is very far from exhausting the interest of Dr. Bell's book. In the way of exciting narrative in particular, it would not be easy to surpass the story contained in chapter xiii. of the second volume, of the "Passage of the Great Cann of the Colorado, by James White, the Prospec- tor," a fourteen days' raft journey of some 500 and odd miles at the bottom of a frightful gorge, during which the adventurer was, at one time six days, and at the last three days, without food, and after which "his feet, legs, and body were literally flayed, from exposure to drenching from water and the scorching rays of the- sun ; his reason was almost gone, his form stooped, and his eyes. were so hollow and dreary that he looked like an old and imbecile man."