While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
My Friend,-I never saw you, but I
have a strong attachment for you. I already wrote you two letters, as yon
know, but to-day I have thought of yon again.
"I had two boys big enough to help me to work, but you
have them now. I wanted them to learn your language, and I want you to look
after them as if they were your boys.
This is all, my friend.
Fat
Mandan
is my name, and I shake your hand."
There are many, no doubt, who will smile at the title
of this article, much as if it had read, " Education for Buffaloes and
Wild Turkeys." Such, however, will be likely to read it, as others
will from a more sympathetic stand-point. For it is evident that, from
one stand point or another, public interest is excited upon the Indian
question now as perhaps never before.
With the opening up of the country, and the
disappearance of the game before the settler's axe and
locomotive whistle-to say nothing of treaty " reconstruction" and
Indian wars-the conditions of, the Indian himself have radically
altered, and perhaps not in all respects for the worse, since the
shrewd Saponi sachem declined William and Mary's classical course for
his young braves, because it would not improve them in deer-stalking
or scalp-lifting, but, not to be outdone in graciousness, offered
instead to bring up the Royal
Commissioners' sons in his
own wigwam, and "make men of them."
Fat Mandan, on the contrary, seems to think that to
make men of them is just what Hampton will do for the boys he is so
proud of, and he looks to them to help him to work, not to hunt. It is
possible that red and white theories of education and manhood have
healthily approximated in fifty or a hundred years.
To a young colonel of the Union army in the late war,
as he stood on the wheelhouse of a transport, with his black regiment
camping down on the deck below him, floating down the Gulf of Mexico
through the double glory of sunset sky and wave, there came, like a
vision shaped half from dreamy memories of his island home in the
Pacific, and half from earnest thought for his country's future, a
plan for a practical solution of one of her troubles, and the
salvation of the race that was its innocent and long-suffering cause.
Four years later the dream which had faded in the stern realities of
war was called into life by the exigencies of the new era, and took
tangible form as a normal and agricultural school for freedmen at
Hampton, Virginia, twenty miles from the port where slaves first
landed in America, and on the very shores where they were first made
free as " contraband of war."
The growth of this institution under the charge of its
originator was described seven years ago in this Magazine, since which
time it has attracted the attention of leading thinkers upon education
and race problems in this and other countries, and become widely known
as an exponent of the value of manual-labor training in education of
men and women-certainly as far as the black race is concerned. Twelve
years have proved its mission in the South to be no "fool's errand."
