The White Scalper by Gustave Aimard

Far from us the thought of making humanitarian theories with reference to a fight in the heart of the desert between two savage tribes, for it has too long been a principle among civilized nations that the Indians are ferocious brutes, possessed of nothing human but the face, and who should be destroyed, like all other noxious animals, by all possible means, even by those which are too repugnant to humanity for us to attempt for a single moment to defend.

Still, much might be said in favour of these unhappy peoples, who have been oppressed ever since humanity decreed that a man of genius should find once more their country which had so long been lost. It would be easy for us to prove, if we thought proper, that these Peruvians and Mexicans, treated so haughtily and barbarously by the wretched adventurers who plundered them, enjoyed, at the period of the conquest, a civilization far more advanced than that of which their oppressors boasted, who had only one advantage over them in the knowledge of firearms, and who marched cased in steel from head to foot against men clothed in cotton and armed with inoffensive arrows.