In an old number of Harper's Magazine, will be found a little poem upon the subject of Joseph, the chief of the Nez Perces. There is a kind of mellow and subdued heroic light cast over the final defeat of this great North American horse thief, which is in perfectly pleasing harniony with the New England idea of the noble unlettered relic of a defunct race. This soft-voiced poet, who probably knows about as much of the true occidental pig-stealer, as the latter does about the Electoral College, starts out this little brass-mounted epic in the following elegant style of prevarication:

From the northern desolation,

Comes the cry of exultation,

It has ended—he has yielded, and the stubborn fight won.

Let the nation in its glory,

Bow with shame before the story

Of the hero it has ruined, and the evil it has done.

It is too true that here in the wild West people haven't the advantages that are accorded to the East, and in our uncouth ignorance, and meager facilities for obtaining information, we are, no doubt, too prone to ascribe to the hostile inebriate of the plains a character which does not compare very favorably with the boss hero in the poem hereto attached, and marked "Exhibit A." But the people on the frontier should not set themselves up to judge what they know nothing of. Why should frontiersmen, without colleges, without observatories, without telescopes, or logarithms, or protoplasms, or spectroscopes, or heliotropes, how should they, I ask, who can lay no claim to anything but that they are poor, unsophisticated, grasshopper sufferers; with nothing to refer to but the naked facts—the ruins of their desolated homes, and the ghastly, mutilated corpses of their wives and children—try to compete with the venerable philosophers who live where the Patent Office reports are made, and within the shadow of the building in which the Illustrated Police Gazette and other such reliable authorities have their birth, and in which are illustrated with graphic skill, the Indian raids of the border, using the same old cut which is taken from the "Death of Captain Cook," to illustrate every Indian outbreak from Nebraska to Oregon.

Is it nothing forsooth for a nomadic race of buffalo slayers and maple sugar makers and cranberry pickers to rise from the dust and learn to love the wise institutions of a free government? To lay aside the old hickory bow of the original red man and take up the improved breech-loader? To take kindly to mixed drinks and Sabbath school picnics and temperance lectures and base-ball matches? To live contentedly about the agencies, playing poker for the whiskies during the cold and cruel winter? Then when the glad song of the robin awakes the echoes in spring, and the air is filled with a thousand nameless odors, among which may be detected the balmy breath of the government sock, to hie him away to the valleys with his fishing rod and flies (and other curious insects), or to spend the glorious days of midsummer at the camp-meeting or the horse-race? We can never know how his poor heart must burn to kick off his box-toed boots and throw aside his dress coat and suspenders, and gallop over the green hills and kick up his heels and whoop and yell, and tear out the tongues of a few white women and be sociable.

They are indeed the nation's wards, a little frisky and playful at times, to be sure, but we must overlook that. There can be no reason nor justice in forbidding these freeborn descendants of these mighty races the inalienable right to lock up their front doors at the agency and put the key in their pockets, and light out, if they wish to, across the country, spreading gory desolation along their trail, eating the farmers' hard earned store, pillaging his home, murdering his household, burning his crops, riding their war horses over his watermelon vines, eating his winter preserves, scalping the hired man and wearing away the farmer's red-flannel undershirt wrong side to, and wrong side up if they want to. And if any ignorant upstart of the frontier, who feels a little sore over the loss of his family, undertakes to defraud these wild, free sons of the forest of any or all of their rights, let the lop-eared, slab-sided, knock-kneed, crosseyed, spavined, lantern-jawed, sway-backed, mangy, flannelmouthed poet of the educated and refined East write poetry about him till he is glad to apologize.