THE RED INDIANS OF THE WEST.* MR. ASCOTT HOPE has
given to his book the second title of "Romance and Adventure on the Plains," but his " romance " is not fiction, but simple truth, often equalling, indeed, the inventions of the tale-writer in strangeness, but without owing anything to imagination. We have, to put the matter shortly, an account of the Indian wars waged during the last thirty- three years by the United States Government. The story is told by Mr. Hope with admirable force ; indeed, clever writer as he has often proved himself to be, we have seen nothing from his pen that can be matched with Redskin and Paleface. The Indians with whom he deals are, it must be understood, the Indians of the West and of the Plains, as distinguished from the Indians of the East and the Backwoods. The latter have for some time ceased to be a force ; the former have within this generation been strong enough to cause something like a panic. It was only last year that a threatened rising renewed the terrible recollections of scenes witnessed by men who have scarcely yet passed middle age. The characteristic of these " Plain " Indians are described in a very picturesque chapter. Mr. Hope's pen does not flatter them. On the whole, they are figures even less attractive than their kinsmen of their Back- woods, and even more remote from the ideal pictures which have been drawn of them. If they fell short in any bar- barity, it was not for want of will. They did not, as a rule, burn their prisoners, for instance ; but it was simply because their supply of fuel was scanty. The first outbreak described by Mr. Hope was that of the Sioux in Min- nesota in 1862, under the chief Little Crow. The settlers were almost wholly unprepared, and the military force, which a painful experience has taught the United States Government since that time to increase, was lamentably small. All the barbarities of which the New England • settlers of two centuries before had had a dark experience were renewed. Yet even in Indian warfare time had made a change. The savages hoisted a white flag on a hill to which they carried their wounded for treatment. When the war was at an end, the prisoners were tried by court-martial ; three hundred were condemned to death, and when President Lincoln commuted the sentence to imprisonment except for thirty-nine, the murmurs in Minnesota were loud. Some stories of prisoners, notably of a Mrs. Kelly, captured in 1864 by the Sioux, form the subject of another chapter. Before long we come upon a name famous in the annals of Western warfare, George Custer. Caster could wield the pen as well as the sword, and he has told his own story, though the closing scene, when he perished with all his command, has necessarily remained undescribed. No one knows how he fell, though it has been suggested that he put an end to his own life rather than fall into the hands of his enemies. But the tale of the campaigns which he conducted with such brilliant success, is striking in the extreme. We have never seen a narrative more stirring than that which describes how the Indian camp was surprised after a march through the snow among the Whichita Mountains. Custer's last fight was in 1876, and it heightens our regret when we find that, according to the deliberate judgment of the historian, he fell for an unrighteous cause. The white man's greed was the
• Redskin and Paleface. By Aseott B.. Hope. London : John Hogg.
cause of the outbreak. The Government could or would not check the rapacity of its citizens. There are many horrors in the book, and we should not put it indiscriminately in the hands of all young readers. Still, they might do far worse than read the stirring story which is told so well in its pages.
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