If the myriad details of this new-world migration could be summarized with
like genius, we should have a drama to put beside the exodus of Israel
from Egypt and their conquest of Canaan--a drama, less picturesque and
highly colored than that of the flight of the Tartars--their Oriental
costumes, their fierce horses, their camels and tents, showing, unhidden
of tree against the snowy or sandy desert--but infinitely more
consequential in the history of the human race.
The Indians, hostile to this horde that built cabins upon their hunting-
grounds and devoured their forests, were to the wilderness migrants,
driven, not of the hand of man but, as De Tocqueville says, "of the hand
of God" made manifest in some human instinct, some desire of freedom, some
hatred of convention, some hope of power or possession, what the Kirghese
and Bashkirs and Russians were to those Asiatic migrants, pursuing them
day and night like fiends for thousands of miles. And the myriad
sufferings of the American migrants from hunger and thirst, from the
freezing cold and the blasting, blistering, wilting heat, from the fevers
of the new-broken lands, from the ravages of locust and grasshopper, and
chinch-bug and drought, from isolation from human friendships, from want
of gentle nursing--even De Quincey's improvident travellers did not endure
more, nor the children of Israel, to whose thirst the smitten rock yielded
water, to whose hunger the heavens ministered with manna and the earth
with quail, whose pursuing enemies were drowned in the sea that closed
over their pathway, and whose confronting enemies in the land they entered
to possess were overcome by the aid of unseen armies that were heard
marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, or were seen by friendly
vision assembling their chariots in the skies above.
Pages:
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211