Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/173

Rh their backs, or a water-course will be forded at an angle to throw the pursuer off the track. The game is a keen one when those on both sides are well matched.

And how fitted for his uses and his accordance and sympathy with Nature were the surroundings and conditions of the Indian's life! This magnificent domain of earth, water, and sky was his. Here was no desert; seldom a spot inhospitable to an Indian so far as to forbid at least his passage through it. The lake-surface of our own Northwest, with its borderings, is of larger area than the whole European continent. We take in hand one of the latest maps of the United States, that we may trace the course and linkings of its railways. By sections, in the brains of single Indians, and as a whole among their various tribes, there once existed, without map or draft, quite another but as complete and accurate a delineation of previous thoroughfares all over this continent, in its length and breadth, and quite as well suited to previous uses as are our iron highways. The maps which we have now, covering our whole national domain, have been provided at Government expense, as the reachings out of power and enterprise have made necessary. They are the results of patient and laborious exploration with the help of skilled engineers. Take one of those maps, leave all the land surface in blank to represent the original condition of things, and you will have a reticulated system of threading nerves, fibrous and ganglionic, of the lakes and water-courses, which seem to have been disposed as streams and basins respectively to renew and interchange their waters in vigorous and healthful circulation. The waters are generally clear and pure, save as the swelling freshets of the spring tear away the rich mould of their shores and tangle them with huge uprooted trees. One of the main rivers gathers contributions it may be from hundreds of different rills and streams, just as, by a reversed process, a branch of a majestic tree, standing isolated from a forest which might