one such straggler is described as "a sad wretch; he never heard a sermon but once these fourteen years." The many degenerate white men who lingered among the Southern tribes are spoken of by the naturalist Brickell as "a lost and unfortunate sort of people." These Southern lotus-eaters attributed their long loitering to the waters of Herbert's Spring at the head of the Savannah: whoever drank of this fountain was doomed to spend seven years in the wilderness beyond. The superstition became a fixed one; men fainting with thirst passed by the fatal fountain without drinking, fearing to "pluck the fruit of the forbidden ground."

III.

DECAY OF THE OLD LIFE OF THE INDIAN.

On the other hand, every part of the Indian's life was disturbed by the approximation of civilization. Savages who had not yet advanced beyond the stage of stone hatchets and chronic inter-tribal warfare, were not suffered to develop into that of iron implements and commercial activity through tedious cycles by the slow processes of race culture and natural selection, but were overwhelmed by the premature arrival of a complex civilization out of another world. The flint hatchet and the spear tipped with deer's horn did not grow by degrees into the thousand implements of the world of artificers; they were abolished suddenly while yet the people whose intelligence was gauged by them were incapable of accepting the new life which had engulfed their old. The economic equilibrium of savagery was overturned. The hoe was a helpful addition to the Indian's power, but fire-arms and the white man's commodities broke down the old relation of supply and demand in his life; the necessity for exertion became less strenuous, wild animals were more easily killed with the new weapons, and unwonted supplies could be bought from the trader with furs and deer-skins. Under the augmented demand the fur-bearing animals soon grew scarce; with the increased facilities for capture, game disappeared. By this time new habits had been formed, and new wants aggravated the misery of savage life; the son of the fierce, indolent, and independent warrior found himself a parasite-a hewer of wood for the white man. It is not surprising that, in despair and blind resentment, the Indian tribe sometimes dashed itself to pieces in futile resistance to the incoming civilization. Not that Indian life was, at its best, a desirable or endurable mode of existence for any but one who had the tastes of a savage. It was

squalid, inconvenient, and miserable, with the addition of life-long insecurity growing out of perpetual inter-tribal warfare. Even in the cabins of the Creek tribes, and in the fixed barkhouses of the Iroquois-Huron race, there was no furniture but the rudest implements, and a platform covered with skins or mats for a bed, and used by all the family. There were no provisions for privacy or decency. The higher Algonkins, like the Powhatans and some others, were not better provided for; while the roving tribes of mere hunters had never more of household goods than could be conveniently packed upon the back of a squaw, and carried by a strap across her forehead. If we could assemble the implements and utensils possessed by all the different tribes,

the knives of horn, the baskets of husks and splints, the pails of bark; the mats for doors, house-lining, and beds; the bone awls for sewing and drilling wampum; the canoes of various sorts; the wooden, earthenware, and even soap-stone vessels; the spears, bows, arrows, war-clubs, and stone axes, with the rude threddles of the Muscogees,—we should have a considerable variety. But the number of kinds possessed by any one tribe was small, and the articles owned by any one family were exceedingly few.

The lightly built Indian village was usually removed when the fire-wood became scarce or the corn-ground showed signs of exhaustion; whole tribes would be jostled out of their places by an aggressive enemy, who made their villages too insecure even for the endurance of a savage. By a few reverses, a tribe might be partly exterminated and wholly broken up. Its remaining members were then forced to incorporate with other nations for protection. Thus boundaries, always uncertain, were ever receding, or advancing, or wholly vanishing.

The arrowheads of flint or horn, turkey-spur or eagle-claw, the vessels of earthenware or steatite, the fish-hooks of bone and the richly decorated costumes of buckskin, silk-grass, turkey and other plumage, and of fur,-sometimes skillfully painted on the smooth side, so that "they looked like lace," or decorated with dyed porcupine-quills and the bright-colored skins of ducks' heads,—showed that the Indians possessed ingenuity, and, on occasion, patient application. But the range of their ingenuity was narrow, and their diligence needed the goad of necessity, or the spur of their inordinate passions for revenge and display. There was never among them a spontaneous movement to acquire the arts of the white man. It was enough for them to get, by trade or pilfering, or in war, the articles which the Europeans made. Of all the new

plants brought in by the colonists, the Iroquois adopted only the apple and pear trees, and the Delaware peaches. The Indians often preferred to buy their tobacco of the white man, and they even sometimes depended on trading furs for a supply of maize, thus tending to lose their small agricultural advancement.

Almost every convenience procured from the Europeans brought disturbance to the old mode of living. The dog having been, with the exception of tame birds, the Indian's only brute companion, it was long before his life could be adjusted to the slight addition of a second domestic animal. The Hurons, on receiving horses from the French, were filled with childish delight, and the men volunteered to assist the women in getting fire-wood-the driving of horses was a new diversion for idlers. But the gift was a fatal one at first: the horses ate the unfenced maize, and the village was thrown into consternation. When iron and brass kettles, with poor iron hatchets manufactured on purpose for the Indian trade, could be had in exchange for beaverskins, there was no longer need for the laborious making of earthen pots or stone hatchets; the rudimentary arts of pottery and stone-cutting were quickly forgotten, and the Indian took a step backward in becoming by so much less an artificer and by so much more a mere hunter. Even the shell-beads which the sea-coast Indians manufactured with so much toil and painstaking, for ornament and money, were better made by the Dutch at Hackensack and Albany. The elaborate fur garments were ripped up and sold, and their kind made no more; the duffel cloth, without so much as a hem or seam, was thrown about the shoulder, and the Indian was more than before a savage. His guns, his traps, his knives, his hatchets, his outer garment, and his wampum money, were all purchased in exchange for skins, and thus he lost his skill, exterminated his game, and sacrificed his independence.

What made the lean and hungry fox think his lot better than that of the pampered housedog was the collar-mark on the dog's neck. That which was dearest to the Indian in his rugged life was its entire freedom. From infancy he was subject to almost no authority, either of parent or chieftain. Where there was little property and entire liberty of secession from the band, the control of a chief was of necessity small. The men and women of the tribe were rather managed than governed by their head men. The execution of penalties was left almost always to private revenge; quarrels were settled without the intervention of authority, unless a dispute threatened the

integrity of the band, in which case it was taken in hand and managed by the craft of the chief and the council. If a member of the tribe was troublesome, and his death regarded as desirable for public reasons, suggestions were adroitly thrown out that he was a worker of evil charms, and all the ills that happened in the village came thenceforth to be attributed to his malice and magic; he was at length put to death in obedience to a popular clamor, while the chief men who had purposed his destruction did not appear in the matter. In rare cases of sedition or witchcraft, the council appointed executioners to stab the offender.

It is related that once, among the Hurons of Canada, a public execution was deemed needful under the following circumstances: A man had "cast away" his wife, but she went in the annual hunting-party, accompanied by her brothers. Perceiving by accident that her husband, who was of the party, was watching her, she warned her brothers, and, with the youngest of them, concealed herself at night in a tree near their lodge, where she was witness to a struggle in which the rest of her brothers were slain by her husband and his friends. The woman, after many narrow escapes, contrived to reach the village first, where she related the occurrence to her own family, and then to the council, giving for assurance of the truth of her story the statement that one of the assailants had been badly bitten in the hand. It was not thought best to leave so flagrant a crime to be avenged by a family several of whose warriors had been killed at a blow. A feast was therefore prepared in the council-house in honor of the returning party, who, besides having good luck, were laden with the spoils of the slain. The hunters related their adventures to the guests, as the manner is at such times, and told, with apparent grief, of the irruption of enemies who had cut off those that were missing. The man with a bandaged hand said that a beaver had bitten him. Then, from their concealment behind a mat, were suddenly brought forth the woman and the youth to confront the assassins with the story of their crime. When this circumstantial accusation was finished, young men who had been placed next to the criminals, stabbed them to death, the murderers submitting to their fate without complaint or resistance, after the manner of an Indian doomed by his own tribe.

Under the system of private retaliation for private offenses, and of tribal vengeance for public or foreign ones, the hideous passion of inveterate revenge took the place of patriotism and religion in the brain of the Indian.

It was the pride of an injured man to dissemble, but never to forget-wreaking vengeance long years after the offense. Out of this insatiable lust for revenge came the ever-recurring and almost unintermitting warfare between tribes. Battle was, indeed, a necessary pastime for idle young braves, and peace was irksome, so that war was often sought merely for the sake of excitement, and for the opportunity it gave of acquiring distinction. It was this passion for revenge, uplifted to a patriotic and pious duty, that brought about the cruelty to prisoners which makes the history of Indian wars one long horror of human perdition. In every village through which the captive passed, tortures of one kind or another were inflicted by men, women, and children, who thus consoled themselves for the loss of friends. Sometimes it was the gauntlet, sometimes a widow would solace her spirit by cutting off a joint of a finger, or biting out a nail. If the prisoner did not chance to be adopted as a slave into some cabin, in place of a dead member, he was at last "cast into the fire," under which phrase there lurked the indescribable tortures which were inflicted for dreary hours upon the defiant victim. In some tribes these torture-scenes were conducted by the women. The eating of the flesh of victims burned at the stake seems to have grown out of a desire to wreak a final and ferocious vengeance on his body, though there were warriors who boasted a great relish for human flesh. In war-time, the northern tribesmen were accustomed to "subsist on the enemy" in a literal way. Denonville, Governor of Canada, having vanquished the Senecas in 1687, was horrified at seeing twenty-five of the latter, who had been killed in battle, quartered, boiled, and devoured by his Ottawa allies; and six years later, the New York commander, Major Peter Schuyler, was not pleased to find a Frenchman's hand in the soup served to him in the camp of his Iroquois soldiers.

In war, as at home, the Indian refused discipline, following the leader whom he trusted, and returning home whenever he became discontented with the conduct of the expedition. But, despite his lawlessness and idleness, his freedom was checked on many sides by the unseen bands of traditional custom and tyrannical public sentiment. What he must do in certain contingencies was firmly prescribed for him by the immemorial usage of his race, and it was rare that any Indian was strong enough to break through this chain. Trammeled even in small matters by fixed customs and an intricate etiquette, as well as by superstitions innumerable, he never submitted to any despotism besides. Attempts

of white men to enslave Indians were generally fatal to the savages, who were as unwonted to such restraints as other creatures of the wilderness.

Excitement of some kind was indispensable to relieve the tedium of the idleness in which a great part of savage life was spent. The intervals between hunting and war-parties were filled up by an inconceivable number of ungraceful dances of various kinds, all regulated by a rather complicated etiquette, many mixed with superstition, and some ending in debauch. There were feasts of many sorts, at which those not invited might crowd the door-ways as spectators, or strip off the bark sides of the cabins to see the ceremonies; and there were athletic games, and games of hazard, with dice of bones or cherrystones, in which the excited players would often lose all their possessions, not sparing to wager their wives; the reckless gamester sometimes even staked his own liberty, and became a slave to the winner until his friends could redeem him. Sometimes the lucky arrival of prisoners in transit, who could be beaten as they ran the gauntlet, furnished diversion, and on grand occasions the savage could repair to the council-house as to a theater, to see the long-drawn torture of a captive-a sight as well suited to his taste as bull-fighting to a Spaniard's, or bear-baiting and cock-fighting to that of our English ancestors.

IV.

OBSTACLES TO CIVILIZATION AMONG THE INDIANS.

ATTEMPTS were made in every colony to civilize the Indians, but to these their immemorial and inflexible customs offered in many cases an insuperable barrier. Not only the natural indolence and ferocity of the individual, but the whole economic system of the American tribes tended to promote a barbarous unthrift. All the rewards which civilized life gives to industry and frugality were lacking. The family who had prudently grown a larger supply of corn than its neighbor was compelled by custom to share with those less provident. The inflexible law of savage hospitality assured to the idler a subsistence in the wigwams of his neighbors, and impaired the sense of property. In some of the tribes, at least, the estate of a man deceased was divided by his relatives without regard to his widow and children, who by prescription belonged to another cabin and another "totem," and were not accounted of his kindred in such sense as to inherit his goods.