One hundred years ago
The correspondent of The Times who accompanies Lord Lorne through the Far West of Canada bears emphatic testimony to the English plan of managing the Indians. He says that on American territory the savages who attack every American will not molest an Englishman, he being a King George's man and a friend. In Minnesota, in one instance, an Englishman's house was exempted from a general massacre, the attacking chief laying his bow and arrows across the threshold, to mark that the exemption was not accidental. Among English Indians, of course, an Englishman is as safe as at home, and the peace of a vast country is kept by 300 mounted police, under Colonel Herschemer, who have repeatedly arrested chiefs accused of capital crime in the midst of their armed followers without resistance. The cause of this pacific tone is partly that the Government never breaks an engagement, and partly that it insists on the Indians being treated as human beings. The American backwoodsmen, who, no doubt, have often frightful provocation, are apt to regard an Indian as a dangerous wild beast, and being themselves the local government, there is no redress.
Spectator, 22 October 1881
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