"Pleasant as be the pastures in which their children have sported, and the slopes that hold the bones of their dead, they must leave them for the land of the stranger, and stand not upon the order of their going. There is gold in the hills and rivers of the region, and the white man desires to take possession of it. What, to the roaming Yankee, are the links that bind the red man, to the home of his fathers. He is but an episode in the advance of the Caucasian. He must decrease that the new comers may grow in wealth. Happy for him the day when the last of his tribes shall fold his blankets around his shrunken limbs, and take his final sleep, to waken in the eyes of the Great Spirit."
Chicago Inter Ocean, on the discovery of gold in the Dakota Hills in the 1870s.
Son of the Morning Star: Custer & the Little Bighorn
Evan S. Connell
(c) 1984
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