Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/162

142 departments — will exhibit a wonderful variety in the features, the dialects, the costumes, the domestic usages and the employments of the people. The range for all such diversities is restricted for the life even of semi-barbarians. There seems always to have been, as there is now, far more in common as regards all the resources and habits of life among American Indians, certainly in the northern parts of the continent, than there were of local and circumstantial diversities. We can indeed discern among various tribes, when compared with each other, the effects upon them of greater ease or difficulty in obtaining sustenance, of more or less of providence in storing up food, of degrees of ferocity in warfare, and evidences of skill, industry, and art spent upon their weapons and utensils. There were those who lived chiefly on maize and roots; others who gave no labor to the cultivation of the soil, but subsisted wholly by the chase; and others still, on the Pacific coast, and upon its vast rivers, whose diet was of the prodigious supplies of fish, fresh or dried. Of any differences among the savages arising from degrees of mental development we need to make small account.

This uniformity in the resources, methods, and experiences of the lives of the savages facilitates such a general account and description of their occupations, habits, and condition as is required for record in our own or in coming times. Not that these annals are merely “short and simple,” like those of the poor, but that they are uniform, repeating with slight variations similar narrations and incidents.

After all, the savage is best known, understood, and described by his surroundings. He is the child and companion of Nature, its product and its willing subject. The word “savage” is from the root of the beautiful word silva. He is a child and denizen of the woods; the forest, the lake-shore, the river are his nursery, his playthings, his range for life and joy. When, even from a long and weary