William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[313] is a mongrel. Frank Overton, the Chickasaw chief, is a mongrel, and a handsome fellow. In these halfwild tribes the chiefs are nearly all of mongrel blood. The Indians hate these chiefs, but fear them more than they detest. Not so with the Chino and the Zambo. These poor creatures are both hated and despised. No living creature can be held in greater scorn than a Black man is held by a Red.

“Not many weeks ago,” says the son of Strong Buck, “ I went up to the Capitol, in Washington, to hear a grand palaver on the policy to be adopted towards my nation, and I found a Negro in the Speaker's chair!” While saying so, the young Red chief is sad; sad, to use his own phrase, as a wood in autumn. He knew the Negroes as a servile race, and the man whom he saw presiding over this debate, of so much moment to his tribe, had been a slave. “A coloured man,” sighs Boudinot, “ and yesterday a slave!”

That men of the White race, leaders of old and mighty States, should sit under a Black fellow and obey his nod, seems to the son of Strong Buck very strange. Yet this strange sight was not so galling to the Cherokee as the fact that a coward and a slave