Cherokee Phoenix and Indians' Advocate
Wednesday, October 14, 1829
Vol. II, no. 27
Page 2, col. 2b

 The Indians.- The situation of the Indians of this country, is melancholy in the extreme.  We know the necessity for strict laws in their government, and we are well aware of their inevitable fate.  But who can read the letter of the Creeks to the people of Georgia and Alabama, unmoved?  Who can help thinking we are doing hardly and cruelly by them?  The poor, despised remnant of a noble race once the owners of the soil, address their white brethren in the language of remonstrance; they appeal to our justice and magnanimity.  "Friends and brothers," say they, "we appeal to your feelings of justice and magnanimity, for co-operation in our cause."  Can we be deaf to such a call? "Poor Indians! where are they now?" exclaimed the eloquent author of the British Spy, when surveying the scene of the heroic conduct of Pocahontas.  His question comes with tenfold force at this time.

 "We have extinguished," says another fine writer, "their council fires, and ploughed up the bones of their fathers.  Their population has diminished with lamentable rapidity.  Those tribes that remain, like the lone column of a falling temple, exhibit but the relics of their former strength; and many others live only in the names which have reached us through the earlier accounts of travellers and historians."- And yet, with this picture of desolation before us, we are pressing them heavier & heavier-sinking them deeper and deeper into misery and degradation!  When we look at the subject, although we see some grounds for the course pursued towards them, we are tempted to exclaim--Perish the policy, which makes the Indian an outcast, a vagabond, and a stranger, in his own land!

       Alexandria Gazette

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