Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/218

198 seem to have been kindled into an intensified rage and desperation. Military officers now in service, and frontiersmen on our border lines, testify that the war-spirit, with all its attendant savage characteristics, has not been mollified or subdued in some of the tribes, but has rather been exasperated by the experience of the white man's potency, and by the dark forebodings of destiny for the red race. The slaughterings which we call massacres, when wrought by the Indians, have been as hideous and as comprehensive in their fury within the lifetime of the present generation as were any on the records of the past. Our military men have found their savage foes as quick in stratagem and as artful in their devices as if they had been learning in their own school something equivalent to the modern civilized advance in the science of soldiery. Our campaigners against a body of hostiles, when seeking to conceal their motions and trackings, have learned to look keenly towards all the surrounding hill-tops to discover any of the “smoke-signals,” made from moist grass and leaves with a smouldering fire, by which the ingenious foe, hidden in their retreats, make known to their separate watch-parties the direction and the numbers of their jealously observed white pursuers. The frontier settler, telling his experiences of the prowling Indian thief, incendiary, and murderer, will not admit that the savage has been either awed or humanized by feeling the power or influence of the white man. The ingenuity of the Indian is taxed in arraying himself in war-paint, especially as he has no mirror to aid him. Very few of our natives seem to have practised tattooing, except of some small totem-figure on a limb. Le Moyne, in his illustrations, represents the Florida Indians as elaborately and even artistically tattooed over the whole body, except the face.

The first fire-arms that came into the hands of our savages, giving them the aid of the white man's