Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/79

 been so fatal to the interest of the aborigines, from the conquest of Cortes to the present moment. The Delawares cautioned me against the Shawnees, among whom they were continually hunting, and stigmatized them as rogues; I found them, however, all equally honest in their dealings, as far as I had any intercourse with them; still the history {42} of the Shawnees, on many occasions, has long proved the truth of the character which is given of them by the Delawares. Scarcely any of the Indian tribes have migrated so often and so far, as the restless and intriguing Shawnees; who, since their first discovery on the banks of the Savannah, in Georgia, have, in the space of a century, successively migrated through the western states to the further bank of the Mississippi. Ever flying from the hateful circle of civilized society, which, probably in their own defence, they have repeatedly scourged, so as, indeed, to endanger their safety; averse to agriculture and systematic labour, they still depend upon the precarious bounty of the chase for their rude subsistence. Retreating into the forests of the western interior, according to their own acknowledgment destitute of lands, they are reduced to the misery of craving the favour of hunting ground from the Cherokees and Osages,[53] excepting the uninhabitable wilds of the Mississippi, which, as in former times, still continue the common range of every tribe of native hunters.

These Indians possess the same symbolical or pantomimic language, as that which is employed by most of the nations with which I have become acquainted. It appears to be a compact invented by necessity, which gives that facility to communication denied to oral speech.