We must be cautious how we put faith in the remarks of missionaries and
travellers upon a race of people little known. They seldom come into
contact with the better and higher classes, who have all the information
and knowledge; and it is only by becoming one of them, not one of their
tribes, but one of their chiefs, and received into their aristocracy,
that any correct intelligence can be gained.

Allow that a stranger was to arrive at Wapping, or elsewhere, in Great
Britain, and question those he met in such a locality as to the
religion, laws, and history of the English, how unsatisfactory would be
their implies; yet missionaries and travellers among these nations
seldom obtain farther access. It is therefore among the better classes
of the Indians that we must search for records, traditions, and laws. As
for their religion, no stranger will ever obtain possession of its
tenets, unless he is cast among them in early life and becomes one
of them.

Let missionaries say what they please in their reports to their
societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended
ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts from
their tribes.

The traditions of the Shoshones fully bear out my opinion that they were
among the earliest of the Asiatic emigrants; they contain histories of
subsequent emigrations, in which they had to fight hard to retain their
lands; of the dispersion of the new emigrants to the north and south; of
the increase of numbers, and breaking up of portions of the tribes, who
travelled away to seek subsistence in the East.