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union and numbers.
In common with the peasantry and ignorant masses of many parts of old Europe the howling of dogs baying at the moon at night is an omen of death and the offending cur is driven away with kicks and low-muttered curses.
The Cañon of the Needles, that forbidding, gloomy [[pathway??]] cut through the solid rock by the Colorado, thousands of years since, in its rush to the sea, is peopled by them with gnomes and terrible shapes beckoning after dark the benighted and trembling indian to an untimely grave in the deep, watery, subterranean caverns extending far under the frowning mountains - and so on "ad infinitum". And yet if the countenance of every nation defines the characteristics of its people, if every human face indicates a moral training as well as the temperament and ruling traits of its owner just as every human form indicates the quality and amount of physical exercise, the Mahhaos, judging from their physiognomy, must be, in a certain way, remarkably intelligent; far surpassing the Sioux, as already stated, in physical development they rank next to them in facial intellectual signs.
Without the least desire to presume, even for a moment, to question the policy pursued by the government in regard to them or of suggesting a better one to replace it, the question may well be asked not only of humanity but also of vaunted Christianity whether, when their aptitude and natural gifts are contrasted with the advances they have made in civilization under the hospices of the whites since their contact with them as represented in the sketch, something better and nobler cannot be done for them with the immense resources of this great nation?

Respectfully submitted,
A.G. Tassin [[his signature]]
2 Lieut 12 Infantry