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Rh the Stone Age, though not without art, especially where the ceremonial of life was concerned. The tribes were organized for war as for peace, and indeed, if hunting was the vocation, war was the avocation of every Indian man: warlike prowess was his crowning glory, and stoical fortitude under the most terrible of tortures his supreme virtue; the cruelty of the North American Indian—and few peoples have been more consciously cruel—can be properly understood only as the reflection of his intense esteem for personal courage, to the proof of which his whole life was subjected. For the rest, a love of ritual song and dance, of oratory and the counsel of elders, a fine courtesy, a subtle code of honour, an impeccable pride, were all traits which the Forest Tribes had developed to the full, and which gave to the Indian that aloofness of mien and austerity of character which were the white man's first and most vivid impression of him. In the possession of these traits, as in their mode of life and the ideas to which it gave birth, the forest Indians were as one people; the Algonquians were perhaps the more poetical, the more given to song and prophecy, the Iroquoians the more politic and the better tacticians; but their differences were slight in contrast to an essential unity of character which was to form, during the first two centuries of the white men's contact with the new-found race, the European's indelible impression of the Red Man.

Men's beliefs are their most precious possessions. The gold and the furs and the tobacco of the New World were bright allurements to the western adventure; but it was the desire to keep their faith unmolested that planted the first permanent English colony on American shores, and Spanish conquistadores and French voyageurs were not more zealous for wealth and war than were the Jesuit Fathers, who followed in their footsteps and outstayed their departure, for the Christianizing of