By canoe and dog-train among the Cree and Salteaux Indians / by Egerton Ryerson Young.

  • Egerton Ryerson Young
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: By canoe and dog-train among the Cree and Salteaux Indians / by Egerton Ryerson Young. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    such Indian missionaries as Evans, Rundle, McDougall, Steinheur, and others, whose daring, patience, endurance, and successful toil would make their biographies as thrillingly interesting and as valuable to the Church as those of Carey, Judson, Hunt, or Morrison. These missionaries to the aborigines of the American con- tinent deserve all the more credit from the fact that their lives and energies were devoted to the benefit of what is generally considered a vanishing people, a dying race. For the Indian, in too many instances, the gospel of bullets has been preached more loudly than the Gospel of love. More laws have been enacted to legislate him out of existence, than to lift him up into the condition of a loyal citizenship, and the enjoyment of a consistent Christianity. Yery humiliating is the fact, that there are in these so-called Christian lands many who, forgetting the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of humanity, and also that of the universaHty of the Atonement, have become so dwarfed and prejudiced in their minds concerning the red man as to leave him completely outside the pale of humanity, and utterly beyond the reach of God's mercy, and, with dogmatic assurance, have declared that the only good Indian is the dead Indian; or, as it was once brutaUy expressed to me by a military officer: Indians are vermin fit only for extermination. It is a cause of thankfulness, that while ignorance, or terror, or ambition, or greed, has caused too many to have such views, many others have difiered, and have gone to work to do the Indians good; and their lives have not been complete failures. Apart from the efibrts made by the priests who accompanied Cortez, Pizarro, and other military adventurers, very early in the sixteenth century, priests were labouring in Florida, and in the Eio Grande country, for the conversion of the natives, and they counted their converts by thousands long before any considerable settlement of English-speaking people had been formed on the Continent. Then, in the following century, the story of the labours and hardships of the Jesuits, and other organisations of the Church of Rome, among the Hurons of Canada, the Iroquois of New York, the Abenakis of Maine, and various other tribes,
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