TERRIBLE PICTURE OF LIFE AMONG THE INDIANS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVI, Issue 5490, 21 June 1879, Page 7

TERRIBLE PICTURE OF LIFE AMONG THE INDIANS.

Colonel J. S. Ford, a member of the Texas Legislature, gave the following vivid account of his experience among the ludians in the course of a recent speech:—" Au incident forces itself upon my memory. Thirty years ago, Doe Sullivan, Alph Neal, and myself, accompanied by Major R, S. Neighbors, Indian Agent, went on an exploring expedition to tho quite unknown region of El Paso. Wespsnt several month* in the Comanche camp and with tho people of that tribe. We were encamped on Brady's Creek, about 120 miles above and west of Austin. The bands of Shauaco and Yellow Wolf were united; warriors., women, audchildren numbered about 5,000. I saw a woman mounted on ahorse, and recognized hi'ras an American. She had a fair complexion, blue eyes, aud auburn hair. Captain Jim Shaw, a Delaware Indian, the United States interpreter, gave timely warning not to speak to her, that the penalty was death. I gaz-d upon her in mute indignation aud pity. The whole figure was an apt and forcible personification of despair. Anguish was depicted iu every lineament of her face, the eye seemed an index of a heart bereft of hope and abandoned to sorrow and a sense of utter desolation. To her the past was lost, the present an abject misery, the future a dark page to be filled in with letters of grief and incidents of pain, pri- ! vation, and torturing pangs of recollection. Those eyes had looked upon a home rich in endearments, that heart had throbbed with love, and those lips had expressed the joyous feeling; but, alas ! alas ! in an evil hour, all was changed—the loved one was snatched from all the heart held dear, to become the c >erced bride of a sivage warrior, the unwill-i'-H mother ofynung barbarians, the servant d. signed to perform menial services to a Comanche, to be punished by the lash, dragged by the lasso, and sold as a beast of burden. It may be reprehensible in me to say it—l have done some tolerably rough Indian fighting, but I have never led a headlong charge without having the figure of that woman before my mind's eye just as she appeared on Brady's Creek, and my conscience does not accuse me of a failure to avenge her sad fate. I wish to God she could be permitted to stand before this Senate and appeal to its members with the mute eloquence of grief to protect the exposed families which constitute the advance-guard of progress and civilization, and to allow human blood and human suffering to be placed in the one scale and money in the other, and then to be instru. mental in causing the sordid metal to weigh, down that which ia too sacred to be valued in dollars and cents, which is above all price."