Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/212

192 from the superstitious suspicions of the natives. Cases of individual disease did not alarm them; but anything like an epidemic, contagious, or prevailing malady they always ascribed to an evil charm. They bent a lowering gaze upon the missionary as he went on his errands of mercy, suspecting him of communicating disease. Often did the zealous Father in cunning secrecy draw the sign of the cross on the forehead of the sick infant; for even baptism came to be dreaded under some circumstances, as if that also were a charm. The darker passions of treachery, revenge, cherished animosities, cunning watchfulness for opportunity to gratify a grudge, and the practice of dissimulation were, of course, as human proclivities, found in their full power among the men of the woods. Among the romantic views which enter into the prevailing conceptions of savage life is that which attributes to the Indian a somewhat remarkable exercise of gratitude in keeping in long remembrance any service or favor towards him, and waiting for an opportunity to repay it. Much will depend upon the sort of service or favor thus to be compensated. But there is nothing peculiar to the savage in this manifestation.

The advocates of a resolute and vigorous military policy by our Government, as alone effective in the management of our Indian tribes, would pronounce it a most serious omission from a volume covering our whole subject if it failed to draw strongly, and in full and harrowing detail, the horrors and barbarities of Indian warfare, and the characteristic qualities of the savage as above all things a born fighter, blood-thirsty, ferocious, and destitute of all human feelings in his brutal conflicts with his own race or with the whites. Perhaps as much as most readers will care to peruse has been already put before them on previous pages in reference to the inhumanity and barbarity of the savage in warfare, to his fiendish torturings of his victims, and to his frenzied passion, unslaked even by the