Dahcotah | Page 3

whom we have driven before us just as fast as we have required or desired their lands. A few efforts have been made, not only to bring the poetry of their history into notice, but to do them substantial good; the public heart, however, has never responded to the feelings of those who, from living in contact with the Indians, have felt this interest in them. To most Americans, the red man is, to this day, just what he was to the first settlers of the country--a being with soul enough to be blameable for doing wrong, but not enough to claim Christian brotherhood, or to make it very sinful to shoot him like a dog, upon the slightest provocation or alarm. While this feeling continues, we shall not look to him for poetry; and the only imaginative writing in which he is likely to be generally used as material, will be kindred to that known by the appropriate title of "Pirate Literature." Mr. Cooper and Miss Sedgwick are, perhaps, alone among our writers in their attempts to do the Indian justice, while making him the poetical machine in fiction.
Missionaries, however, as well as others who have lived among the aborigines for purely benevolent purposes, have discovered in them capabilities and docility which may put to the blush many of the whites who despise and hate them. Not only in individual cases, but in more extended instances, the Indian has been found susceptible of religious and moral instruction; his heart has warmed to kindness, like any other man's; he has been able to perceive the benefits of regular industry; his head has proved as clear in the apprehension of the distinction between right and wrong as that of the more highly cultivated moralist; and he receives the fundamental truths of the gospel with an avidity, and applies them--at least to the lives and characters of his neighbors--with a keenness, which show him to be not far behind the rest of mankind in sensibility and acuteness. Without referring to the testimony of the elder missionaries, which is abundant, I remember a 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 and romance.
The Indians themselves are full of poetry. Their legends embody poetic fancy of the highest and most adventurous flight; their religious ceremonies refer to things unseen with a directness which shows how bold and vivid are their conceptions of the imaginative. The war-song--the death-song--the song of victory--the cradle-chant--the lament for the slain--these are the overflowings of the essential poetry of their untaught souls. Their eloquence is proverbially soaring and figurative; and in spite of all that renders gross and mechanical their