What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is
capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their
volcanic stronghold will attest. But these were few, and soon went
down. The extinction of the tribes west and south of the Rio Grande
and the Humboldt cannot be many years postponed. The red rover of that
region will disappear as a combatant in the same way, and before the
same weapon, as his brother nomad of Algeria, the earliest victim of
the conoidal bullet. The spherical ball has done its appointed part
in disposing of the aborigines east of the Mississippi, where forests
covered the land and trees generally intercepted the sight at a
hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. With the extension of Caucasian
empire to the Plains came an extension of the range of vision, which
necessitated an advance in the range of the rifle. The weapon of
Sharpe figured for the first time in the van when the woods of
Missouri were passed and the open plains of Kansas reached. There
its office was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white. The
largest possible range, the greatest possible number of shots in a
given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing armies were
seldom within five miles of each other, or more than one man hurt to
five hundred charges of powder burned. How the Lenni Lenape must have
opened their eyes at this reproduction of the drama of a century ago
when the whites, English and French, were fighting each other for the
possession of the Delawares' lands in Pennsylvania! The feeble remnant
of the compatriots of Logan had "moved on," under pressure of a very
urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation not a great
deal larger, when portioned out, than that last reservation allotted
to all men; and the pale-faces who had hung upon his track he now saw
fighting for that.
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