Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/315

Rh they were allowed to strut with full complacency in their forest bravery and toggery; their conceit and dignity were not reduced; the meal, the camp-fire, and the bed were shared with them on a footing of perfect equality; they were cajoled and feasted; and, coming and going, were greeted with military salutes, as princely visitors. Quite otherwise was it between the English and the Indians: the distance, often wide and deep in reserve, was never overcome. By this natural — and if at some times assumed — assimilation with the natives, the French won a vast prestige with them. On a signal occasion the French Governor Frontenac, much to the admiration of his barbarous spectators and friends, put himself in Indian array, feathered, greased, and painted, while he howled and yelled and gesticulated in the war-dance in rivalry of any native braves. He has an extraordinarily daring imagination who can present to himself a sober governor of any New England colony in that guise. Sir William Johnson, the British Indian Agent, said, however, that on some occasions he had worn their garb.

The representatives of France among our Indian tribes from her earliest enterprises on the continent were composed of three classes, — priests, fur-traders, and soldiers; but little account being made of colonists, in the full sense of the word, as planters, attaching themselves to spaces of cleared land, from which they intended to draw their full subsistence. The soldiers are no longer here, though they hold such a place in the history of the contests for rival empire on the continent. The priests and the fur-traders have kept themselves in living activity, though with a wasting and less significant hold and range in the developments of the last century.

The traffic of the traders in Canada — distinguishing them from those in Acadia and off the coast as fishermen — was almost exclusively confined to peltry. The trade was a source of constant vexation, annoyance, rivalry, and