Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/225

Rh snows or on desert plains, is to commit the pony to the kettle, or to tear his raw flesh. In this extremity, however, the beast like his owner is but a bony skeleton.

Nothing answering to our ideas of instruction or even of training was recognized among the Indians for each generation of the young. All the teaching they received was by the approved method of example; only the example was of a sort merely to reproduce without advance or improvement all the characteristic degradation of the same barbarism which had been perpetuated for an unknown lapse of time. The words home, school, pupilage, discipline, morality, decency, find no place in any of the multiplied Indian vocabularies. The catalogue of qualities which we call virtues did not enter even among the idealities of the savage. With scarce an exception in his favor, all who as intimates and observers have best known the Indians report them as fraudulent, insincere, skilled in all the arts of guile and artifice, with habits filthier and more shameless than those of beasts. Such being the most marked traits of the elders among them, and in the lack of any aim or purpose to improve upon themselves in their children, the utmost we could expect of fathers is that they would be simply indifferent to their pappooses, until, growing up to maturity, the girls were about to be salable as wives, and the boys were to put themselves into training for warriors. A common mode of paternal discipline for an offending youth was to throw water upon him by sprinkling or dashing. Indians, however, are often very fond of their children, and excessively indulgent in the liberty allowed them.

The Indian youth — who had been repressed as an infant, left alone for long hours strapped on his birch or bark cradle leaning against tree or wigwam, and not given to crying, because he learned very early that there was no use in crying — was trusted as a child to growth and self-development. He was inured to cold, hunger, and pain; to rough dealings on the ground, in the air, and in the