most touching account, by Rev. George Duffield, jr., of piety in an
Indian wigwam, which I would gladly transfer to these pages did their
limits admit. It could be proved by overwhelming testimony, that the
Indian is as susceptible of good as his white brother. But it is not
necessary in this place to urge his claim to our attention on the ground
of his moral and religious capabilities. Setting them aside, he has many
qualifications for the heroic character as Ajax, or even Achilles. He is
as brave, daring, and ruthless; as passionate, as revengeful, as
superstitious, as haughty. He will obey his medicine man, though with
fury in his heart and injurious words upon his lips; he will fight to
the death for a wife, whom he will afterwards treat with the most
sovereign neglect. He understands and accepts the laws of spoil, and
carries them out with the most chivalric precision; his torture of
prisoners does not exceed those which formed part of the "triumphs" of
old; his plan of scalping is far neater and more expeditious than that
of dragging a dead enemy thrice round the camp by the heels. He loves
splendor, and gets all he can of it; and there is little essential
difference, in this regard, between gold and red paint, between diamonds
and wampum. He has great ancestral pride--a feeling much in esteem for
its ennobling powers; and the _totem_ has all the meaning and use of any
other armorial bearing. In the endurance of fatigue, hunger, thirst, and
exposure, the forest hero has no superior; in military affairs he fully
adopts the orthodox maxim that all stratagems are lawful in war. In
short, nothing is wanting but a Homer to build our Iliad material into
"lofty rhyme," or a Scott to weave it into border romance; and as we are
encouraged to look for Scotts and Homers at some future day, it is
manifestly our duty to be recording fleeting traditions and describing
peculiar customs, before the waves of time shall have swept over the
retreating footsteps of the "salvage man," and left us nothing but lake
and forest, mountains and cataracts, out of which to make our poetry