Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/130

110 fact and fiction, boasting and lament, stately volumes of legislative, cabinet, and war bureaus, and pages filled with contemplative and serious wisdom. In reading, for information or pleasure, a selection from this mass of books and documents, we have to remind ourselves that white men have dealt with, visited, and treated the Indians in very different ways and for very different ends and purposes, and so have formed very different opinions and made very different reports of them. Thus, besides the poets who give us their dreams and fancies of Indians and Indian life, our informants and authorities about them comprise this wide category, — travellers, tourists, and adventurous pleasure-seekers among the Indians, traders with them, missionaries to them, military officers watching or fighting with them, Government superintendents or agents for their help and protection, and settlers upon the successive frontier lines. We may well expect to find not only variety and variance, but discordance, and wholly incongruous and inconsistent representations of Indians and Indian life, coming from such miscellaneous authorities. One who proposes to make a thorough study of the Indian as known to the white man, will find it helpful to divide all the enormous mass of literature on the subject under six very distinct classes, — guided by this simple suggestion, that different persons coming into contact with the Indians, for very different purposes, on different errands, and under different relations, see them differently, use them differently, and so report them differently. First come the poems, — works of pure fiction and fancy, written in every case by those who never had any intercourse whatever with the wild men, and which always mislead, though the romance may please us. Second, those who have lived on the frontiers, amid Indian raids and captivities, massacres, butcheries, and tortures; who know the Indian yell, his hideous visage, and his tomahawk. Third, the missionary, who has his point of view, and makes his report. Fourth, the Indian or Government agent, who