Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/23

Rh tain men, came over the inter-mountain area of ranges and wilderness. They were hardly civilized themselves, and had no object in view but to trade to advantage. The records of the fur company have furnished the most accurate details of life among the Indians; but while they were at times interested in witnessing native ways and studying character, or listening to myths, legends and superstitions that bordered on religious belief, they seem to have made no study of Indian life from an ethnological standpoint. We cannot know as much as would easily have been possible, if connected effort had been made by fairly competent men. . ..

Because we let the old Indians and their long, long recollections pass into irrevocable silence, we missed the great opportunity. All, however, is not lost, as is shown by what modern ethnologists and anthropologists are finding in their magical penetration of the past. The difficulty of civilizing an Indian has had an advantage in this respect; his unwillingness to assimilate new ways has kept his spirit from being completely deprived of retrospect; it has left a concatenation with the old times that full acceptance of the white man's culture may have destroyed. So the more aged of the present day descendants of the old Indians, in the scattered instances when they can be found, re member far more than would be expected —vastly more than a white man would remember under the same circumstances. The combination of these few lingering old people and the wizardry of the modern anthropologist in probing their astonishing memories, has resulted in much literature that was considered irretrievably lost.

Dr. Franz Boas, for instance, was able to collect his Chinook Texts from one Indian. In the summers of