The World is Always Changing

I have been reading the history of the small Mormon town where I grew up in Utah. This was written in 1909, when the last of the original settlers were dying out and someone thought to record something about the pioneers and their struggles with the Native American tribes living in the area when they arrived. Suffice it to say that the world has changed as much since this was written in 1909 as it had from the time when the settlers first arrived in 1850. I don't know what is more stunning, the casual racism or the fact that the supreme, boastful confidence of white settlers has turned almost 180 degrees in two generations.

As for the pioneers, their days are numbered, their life's work is done and that it has been well done none will care to dispute. The rude forces of Nature were made subservient to their will and to minister to our comfort and pleasure. The wild Indian who once owned these fair acres and who roamed at pleasure, hunting and fishing upon the grassy expanses and beside the streams and lake in our beautiful valley, stands now a melancholy specter upon the horizon, as he is about to disappear forever from the haunts of men. But few of the Red-men remain to tell of the rude race that has been supplanted by the restless and progressive Pale-face. The conquest was inevitable. The two races could not live in the same valley, and as Fate has ordained, the weak gave way to the strong. It has been so from the morning of time. The room of the inferior races has been more desirable than their company, and acting upon this theory the superior races have, with almost ruthless hand, swept everything undesirable to themselves, or that retarded their progress, to the wall.