CHAPTER VI

It is the custom of sentimentalists sometimes to talk as if the North American Indian had been killed off by the white man. So he was,—but not directly: he was killed off by natural selection, acting through the white man's diseases and narcotics. In 1841 Catlin wrote, "Thirty millions of white men are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life over the bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of whom have fallen victims to small-pox." Small-pox is an old story to the white race, and the death of the least resistant strains in each generation has left a population that is fairly resistant. It was new to the natives of America, and history shows the result. Alcohol, too, counted its victims by the thousand, for the same reason. The process of natural selection among the North American Indians has not yet stopped; if there are a century from now any Indians left, they will of necessity belong to stocks which are relatively resistant to alcohol and tuberculosis and the other widespread and fatal diseases which were unknown upon this