Jim Fergus said this quote

that's exactly the good thing about the Injun life--you don't have to stop and think about whether or not you're 'happy'--which in my opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks

~ Jim Fergus

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

~ Jim Fergus

...the Sierra, a region so quiet and pristine that we have the sense of being the first human beings ever to set foot in it. We fall silent ourselves in its midst, as if conversation in a place of such primaevl solitude would be like talking in church.

~ Jim Fergus

I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part, I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will--a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul...the bloodiest of mutilations.

~ Jim Fergus