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the death struggle of these will be disastrous to all around them. We steal the Indian's lands and their hunting grounds and all that they have to subsist upon, and we are not punished; but when a few individuals amongst them, where they have no power or laws to punish, retalliate, they (and not they alone, but the innocent with the guilty) are punished with indiscrinate death---cut down with sabers and shot down with revolvers by the cavalry of our country---killed to the last man, and that by a secret and cowardly surprise!

    These 173 Piegans, to have been destroyed whilst they killed but one soldier, must have been attacked in their sleep, and without their weapons at command; and if so, could have been captured as prisoners of war, and the guilty punished. How much more this would have tended to the peace of the frontier, and comported with the honour and magnanimity of a great and invincible nation
    It is a mistaken (though a popular) notion, that "striking these people hard", (slaughtering them indiscriminately as has been seen) is the surest mode of keeping the peace: but when the world will have learned as much of the Indian character as I have learned, they will find that such murderous and cowardly attacks are the surest means of throwing the whole frontier into the most horrible and unrelenting state of warfare.
    If I am speaking strong it is because the time has come for speaking strong, and because my words are on the side of policy and humanity, and not of blood and butchery. I have no shame or fear in speaking plainly for an oppressed and murdered people, and who cannot speak for themselves. These assassinated people were my friends. Look into the catalogue of my Indian portraits, and the Piegan chief, Stu-mik-o-suks will be found, and his wife and grandson, who was to have been his successor. These people treated me with kindness, and my heart sickens at the fate they have met at the hands of an artful, designing, and wicked enemy.
    By no system of jurisprudence on the face of the Earth, excepting in our great and glorious country, is theft (or even murder) punished indiscriminately with death--the innocent with the guilty, and that on onesided evidence, without a hearing, and without judge or jury; nor is there any military code recognized by the laws of nations, by which towns and cities (even of nations actually at war) with their inhabitants, to the last man, woman and child, are destroyed, their houses burned, and their horses driven off as booty--nor does the Constitution of our own, or any other country, rest in its Secretary oat War or Generals of its armies, a power over the life and death of whole communities or individuals, either in time of war or of peace; and we would be to any crowned head tyrant or not, in the old world, who would sentence to death on onesided evidence, and issue an order for their secret execution, an entire community of 173 persons.