Tocqueville and Beaumont encountered Native Americans
an excerpt from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/race/frames.htmlhttp://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/race/frames.html
Tocqueville and Beaumont first encountered Native Americans in the city of Utica, New York. Both authors seems equally struck that they were witnessing a passing tradition, doomed to extinction. Beaumont says: ""I haven't time to tell you what emotions we experience in traversing this half-wild, half-civilized country, in which fifty years ago were to be found numerous and powerful nations who have disappeared from the earth, or who have been pushed back into still more distant forests; a country where are to be seen, rising with prodigious rapidity, new peoples and brilliant cities which pitilessly take the place of the unhappy Indians too feeble to resist them. Half a century ago the name of the Iroquois, of the Mohawks, their tribes, their power filled these regions, and now hardly the memory of them remains. their majestic forests are falling everyday; civilized nations are established on the ruins until the day when other peoples make them undergo the same destiny..."
In Beaumont's words in a sense of the cyclical nature of dominance of power- -what goes up must come down, and this is especially resonant in the situation in France in 1830.Tocqueville echoes many of the same notions that Beaumont does. "One would say that the European is to the other races of men what man in general is to all animated nature. When he cannot bend them to his use or make them indirectly serve his being, he destroys them and makes the, little by little disappear before him. The Indian races melt away before the presence of the European civilization as the snow before the rays of the sun" (192).
Beaumont recalls an encounter with the first Indian women that they see on the trip. they are visiting Mr. Elam Lynds, the founder of the penitentiary system in Syracuse.
"I did not stop at Oneida Castle but while passing I saw on the road two Indian women walking barefoot. Their hair was black and dirty, their skin coppery, their faces extremely ugly. they wear on their backs a linen covering, although we are in the month of July. I seems to be seeing our French poor, taken among those reduced to the greatest misery. these savages in barbarism did at least have dignity, there was something noble and great in this wholly natural life. Now we seem them degraded and degenerate; they no longer know how to get on without clothes, they have to have liquor which makes them drunk moreover they take but the vices of civilization and the rags of Europe."