Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/202

Rh intercourse, beyond the command of a few words of ordinary range, which has been reached between red men and white men, has been by the white man's learning the language of the red man. The missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, when their work was most fresh and earnest and hopeful, gave themselves with devoted zeal to a mastery of the Indian tongues for instruction and preaching. For the lowest forms and uses of intercourse, — as in contention and traffic and barter, — it was comparatively easy for a savage and a European to learn how to quarrel with each other, to cheat and be cheated; but when it came to the higher ends of intercourse, — in instruction, — the white man found his task to lie in mastering such resources as the Indian had for the communication of thought, and in supplying or devising methods or words for conveying ideas, suggestions, and lessons to an Indian on objects and themes wholly new to him. New England in its early years furnished several examples of whites who preached with great facility in the Indian tongue, while the fact has been mentioned that the first funds of Dartmouth College were largely raised by an Indian preaching in Great Britain.

A most apt and curious device, in almost universal use among the Indians, and showing an amazing acuteness and vivacity of mind in them, is their power to communicate with each other, with full intelligence, by sign and gestures and symbols. Very many white experts agree in describing to us the wonders and the perfection of this sign-language. In the multiplicity and variety of their own native tongues and dialects, as they roamed abroad, it would have been utterly impossible for those of different tribes to have held any intelligible communication by words: they would have been as deaf-mutes, had it not been for a similar conventional sign-language. This had no resemblance whatever to the taught finger-alphabet used by deaf-mutes; it was wholly of gesture and symbol. Shakspeare — who has