WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, 1857
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willing to assail him, invade the peace of his family, and destroy every hope that has bloomed around him. You have only to do justice to the Indians, and you will have no trouble. I have before maintained in the face of the Senate, and in the face of nations and of nature, that an Indian tribe never, never, as a community, violated a treaty. I defy confutation of this assertion. I do not say that the whites, as a community have violated Indian treaties, but it has been done by aggressors on the Indians who abound on their borders. I have gone back for fifty years, and traced with accuracy your intercourse with the Indians. I was stationed at one time within six miles of their border. I have seen eruptions that took place, and by tradition I can transmit them to after times; but they are not accurately detailed in the newspapers. The white man has the advantage of the types, and he gives them the white man's complexion; he tells not the truth with them. Thus it is that the Indian is never vindicated when he does right, or when he is harmless. If an isolated Indian commits an act of depredation, it is bruited about through the community. The cry is raised, "the Indians have made war upon us." Then the whites congregate together; they pass to the Indian border; the poor Indians, unconscious of the injury that has been done, unaware of any agitation among the whites, or of any impending conflict, are set upon by these men, who are thirsty for blood, and the women and children are mas- sacred to appease the wrath of this vagabond crew. This I know to be true in some instances-how many I will not detail. This is a part of the history of fifty years back. Suppose a man should come from an adjacent county, and commit a murder in Washington city: would you immediately raise a force, and go out and take summary vengeance on the first whites you met in that county? No, sir, you would not. Apply the same principle to the Indians. An outlaw may leave his tribe, and commit a depredation; but that is not the infrac- tion of a treaty by the community that entered into it; and I say the Indians, as communities, never violate treaties-the whites are the aggressors. Sir, we have had brought to our notice to-day a most astonish- ing instance. A refined, enlightened, civilized man, educated at West Point, with all the embellishments of literature, with all the adornments of science, taught by preceptors possessing the highest amount of esprit de corps, with the associations of gentlemen- he, a proconsul in a distant province, violates every principle of
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