his ingenuity to devise ways and means of escaping this form of lavish hospitality without doing offense to his hosts.
The great Indian Question absorbed his thoughts perhaps more than any other. He understood it perfectly, and constantly deplores in his letters the terrible position in which the Indian was placed by the encroachment of the whites. It was the same hard question which had been wrestled with in vain since the settlement of the country began - what is to become of the Indian? It mattered comparatively little so long as they were east of the Mississippi, for they could be moved to the vast areas of the West. But now they were all there and the white man kept coming. Back and still farther went the buffalo and the Indian with him. It could not last forever, and Father De Smet saw with unerring vision the fate that must soon overtake them. That it came sooner than he expected is only because no one foresaw how rapidly settlement would occupy the West. The discovery of gold was the knell of the red man. Like a mighty flood, emigration swept over the plains and filled the mountains. Father De Smet had known of gold in the mountains since 1842, and had kept his discovery a secret because he knew that its revelation meant the practical extinction of Indian life in the West. It was yet twenty years before it should become generally known; but when it came it swept all before it. Father De Smet crossed the mountains from the Columbia to Fort Benton in 1859 just before the discovery, and he went back by the same route in 1863 in the midst of the process of discovery. The change was astonishing and ominous. He wrote on this occasion: " One cannot help being anxious for the fate of the Indians on account of the approach of the whites. The treasures concealed in the heart of the mountains will attract thousands of miners from every land; and with them will come the dregs of civilization, gamblers, drunkards, robbers and assassins."
It would be easy to state from Father De Smet's writings every possible phase of the Indian question; but we will give only a few references. The general course of