Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/261

 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN AGENT. 253 from such an exodus. But an excision in an Indian tribe is governed by selective affinities and repulsions of various sorts, amounting sometimes to as profound a division as is contem- plated by a separation of the sheep from the goats. This may account, in great part, for the difference in character of con- tiguous tribes of the same stock, as experienced by travellers ever since the settlement by Europeans began. Indeed, it is not a hard task for one given to the exercise of imagination, to fancy an exodus of two or three families distinguished for kindly dispositions and more than ordinary altruistic traits, tending continuously in that direction, and others of an op- posite character progressing in conformity with its predomi- nant traits. If it were not so, then we must suppose that the environment was corrective of the divergence, which is highly improbable. INDIAN CHARACTERISTICS. The differences observable in the various tribes and races of mankind are not, as many suppose, radical variations, that is, something of a different kind, but merely degrees of the same kind. The negro in his native state, hugging his fetish as a preventive of disease or other misfortune; the idolaters bowing down to blocks of wood or stone, to appease the wrath of their gods, as they read it in the earthquake, tornado, pestil- ence or famine, seem to strike us at first as indicative of an- other kind of creature, but upon more mature reflection we see in all such a different though a ruder manifestation of the same human faculties, veneration and fear, as modified by intelligence, or rather by ignorance. Perhaps the educated Christian, wearing his crucifix suspended by a golden neck- lace, would protest against being linked with the savage, whose desire for immunity from disease or other calamity causes him to wear a charm, and as respects the beautiful work of art worn by the former and the bag of stink worn by the latter, I would think the protest well taken, but the actuating and basic sentiment finding expression in one by enlightened and in the other by barbaric means, is evidently the same quality of human nature.