Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 2).djvu/20

14 issued in 1791; the second by G. Forster, published in Berlin the following year.

The interest of the work, aside from incidental historical references to expeditions in Canada and Wisconsin during the Revolution, the Loyalist settlements, and the retention of the Northern posts, lies in the author's intimate knowledge of Indian life and customs, especially those of the more primitive and savage tribes of the North; and in the light he incidentally throws on the history of the fur-trade.

It is anything but an engaging picture which Long paints of his Indian friends and companions—they are in the stage of downright savagery, debauched by contact with the dregs of civilization, learning its vices, appropriating its weapons, and dominating the whites by sheer force of numbers, and knowledge of the weakness and greed of the latter. A pleasant contrast is his account of the Canadian mission Indians; but even these proved their savagery during the American Revolution. Of their aboriginal customs, Long's notices of totemism, religious rites and beliefs, courtship and marriage, social customs—games, dances, food, dwellings—habits of hunting, and physical and mental characteristics, are valuable because original and the result of immediate observation.

Scarcely less dark is the picture presented by Long, of the fur-trade and the traders. This was the period of unlicensed and almost ruinous competition between the great company at the North, and the independent merchants from Canada—the latter acting each for him- ————