In that event, more clearly, perhaps, than it is often given to
us here below, we can see and adore that Providence which thus gave to
millions, long sundered from the rest of man by pathless oceans, the
light of the gospel, and the proffered boon of redemption....
The field was one as yet unmatched for extent and difficulty. That
region now studded with cities and towns, traversed in every direction
by the panting steam-car or lightning telegraph, was then an almost
unbroken forest, save where the wide prairie rolled its billows of grass
towards the western mountains, or was lost in the sterile, salt, and
sandy plains of the southwest. No city raised to heaven spire, dome, or
minaret; no plough turned up the rich, alluvial soil; no metal dug from
the bowels of the earth had been fashioned into instruments to aid man
in the arts of peace and war....
The simplest arts of civilized life were unknown. In one little section
of the Gila and Rio Grande, the people spun and wove a native cotton,
manufactured a rude pottery, and lived in houses or castle-towns of
unburnt bricks. Elsewhere the canoe or cabin of bark or hides, and the
arabesque mat, denoted the highest point of social progress.
Elsewhere the whole country was inhabited by tribes of a nomadic
character, rarely collected in villages except at particular seasons, or
for specific objects, though here and there were found more sedentary
tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of
wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior
to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more
civilized tribe in a state of decadence.
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