Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/217

Rh tribe. According to circumstances, too, he will henceforward be on the watch for an opportunity to escape, or, becoming reconciled to his lot, will make the best of it. The methods of torment are graduated by processes leading on through intensified trials of endurance and sensibility to a result which, while stilling the tide of life, shall dismiss the spirit in a quiver of agony. The victims of this barbarity are usually first subjected to the running of the gantlet between two defined goals, the women and the children lining the way, inflicting blows, with bitter taunts.

It is when, under the insults, the lashings, the kicks, and maulings of this preliminary ordeal, and in the fiercer agonies of the stake, the brave can maintain his calm and serenity of countenance, with exalted spirit, taunting his tormentors because their devices are so weak and harmless, boasting of the number of them whom he has treated in the same way, and raising his death-song above their yellings, — it is then that they reward him with their admiration. This may prompt a generous enemy — not in pity perhaps, but in responsive nobleness of spirit — to deal the final blow of deliverance. The coward, who shrinks and weeps, and pleads for mercy, only raises the scorn of his tormentors, and leads them to prolong and multiply the ingenuities of cruelty.

This sketch of the war-customs of the savages conforms more particularly to the periods preceding their intercourse with the Europeans, and to those after the races were brought into their earlier strifes. Among the Western and Northern tribes these war-usages have continued substantially unchanged to our own times; but slight modifications have come into them within this century. There have been occasions in very recent conflicts between the whites and the Indians, when, under the goadings of some deep-felt sense of wrong and perfidy in their treatment, all the most furious passions of the savages