so terribly from these savage visitations, is as natural as their hostility to the prowling beasts of prey.

It is a matter of notoriety that for years past tribes of Indians living in Kansas under treaty with the United States Government and receiving its annuities have been at war with Texans as if we were a foreign people. They regularly stole from our frontier hundreds upon hundreds of valuable animals, and found a market for them at the Government forts and agencies both in and out of Texas.

It is equally notorious that on numerous occasions the women of our State have been taken prisoners, and, after being subjected to every outrage that the brutal passions of the savage could prompt, they were murdered in cold blood, and their scalps used to ornament the shields of the Indian warriors. As one of the hundreds of sad proofs of such scenes of horror I have myself seen an Indian shield on which were the scalps of twenty-two different unfortunate women, paraded as emblems of the Indian murderer's valor and prowess. Further, I present you the shield of an Indian chief who was killed by myself in a hand-to-hand conflict in the month of June, 1860, in Throckmorton County, Texas, after he and his marauding party had perpetrated several murders in my immediate neighborhood. It is ornamented, you will see, after the usual fashion of the Indian warrior, with a scalp - a woman's fair tresses - those of a young American lady, thought to be a Miss Jackson, who had been murdered during one of the frequent raids. I respectfully request that it be sent to His Excellency the President, to enable him to judge whether there is not some cause for the bitter feelings I, in common with the people of our frontier, entertain toward the Indians. As I write there is now in the city of Houston a young lady from whose lips you can hear a tale of Indian atrocities which she herself witnessed, wherein a lady of respectability was the victim of the most deliberate and fiendish cruelty, which is but one of scores of similar outrages that have desolated the homes of my friends and brother frontiersmen for years.

But I need not dilate further on this point. A full and detailed record of the whole series of Indian atrocities perpetrated on the frontier settlers of Texas is now on file in the State archives at Austin. It is the result of the investigations of a board of commissioners composed of some of the most respected, reliable, and intelligent gentlemen of the State, appointed by the Governor for the express purpose of ascertaining all the facts as to the repeated reports of Indian cruelties inflicted on our frontier. It is a simple, unvarnished narrative, but furnishes a fearful tale of sorrow and suffering. Women and children are the principal sufferers in the atrocities it depicts, and its perusal would, I am certain, arouse the coldest heart and feeblest arm to unsparing hatred of a relentless, merciless, and treacherous foe, and a natural desire to see them driven utterly from the face of the earth.

I would here add, as an additional motive for the intense hostility of the thousands of Texas frontiersmen for the Indians, that the tribes which have inflicted such losses on them are with few exceptions wilder, fiercer, and more untamable than any known to exist in North America. They are more nomadic even than the Arabs of the desert; they live exclusively on meat, and some tribes it is well known are cannibals.

The late United States Government attempted, however, from the most praiseworthy motives, to tame and reclaim the savages. With a perseverance and a liberality worthy of better objects for such efforts and such expenditure that Government for seven years in Texas persisted in its efforts, based, as experience has shown, on a falser philan-