THE INDIAN. "Lo, the poor Indian!" Pope. PROVIDENCE Seems to have ordained that by an act of poetical justice many races that have been conquered and even exterminated by foreign invaders, should nevertheless survive in the names of the great landmarks of their native land. Thus the ancient Briton still speaks to us in the mountains and rivers of England, and the Indian in the geography and natural history of the United States. The prairie and the backwoods, once the home of the Red man, are full of his memory, and objects abound there, known to us by names which are indigenous and peculiar among so much that is of foreign origin or common to many countries. The North American savages play no unimportant part in our literature; they have their war-whoops and yells, their paint and their feathers, in prose as well as in poetry, in Hiawatha and in Cooper's novels. These names and these things-though, perhaps, not legitimately included in a very strict definition of the term Americanisms-are almost the only really old things which we have, the only relics left to remind us that human beings roamed over our hills and floated on our waters before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth and brave Captain Smith sailed in his frail boat up the Potomac. It is much to be regretted, that the proportion of these really ancient names is not larger, especially in our geography; for we could well have submitted to it, that the unfortunate race, after becoming the victims of Anglo-Saxon enterprise, should have taken their conquerors captive and imposed upon them their own favorite words. Their names are so musical and full of meaning, and ours so harsh and commonplace, that we should have been the |