History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes, published by
Government under his editorship, includes the substance of most of his
previous writings. It is a singularly crude and illiterate production,
stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page
of a striking unfitness either for historical or philosophical inquiry,
and taxing to the utmost the patience of those who would extract what is
valuable in it from its oceans of pedantic verbiage. ]

The primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, [ 1 ] but
he did not always believe in a state of future reward and punishment.
Nor, when such a belief existed, was the good to be rewarded a moral good,
or the evil to be punished a moral evil. Skilful hunters, brave warriors,
men of influence and consideration, went, after death, to the happy
hunting-ground; while the slothful, the cowardly, and the weak were
doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness.
In the general belief, however, there was but one land of shades for all
alike. The spirits, in form and feature as they had been in life,
wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead,
subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the
crouching posture of the sick, and, when night came, hunted the shades of
animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees
and rocks: for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal,
and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.

[ 1 The exceptions are exceedingly rare. Father Gravier says that a
Peoria Indian once told him that there was no future life. It would be
difficult to find another instance of the kind. ]

The belief respecting the land of souls varied greatly in different
tribes and different individuals. Among the Hurons there were those who