Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/35

Rh and Lafitau reported another sort of people whose heads, if they really had any, were snugly buried between their shoulders, and others still who had but one leg.

This grand and majestic scale on which the objects and features of the continent were proportioned, gives a tone of expanse and of unbounded, vaguely-defined locality in the designation of vast territories. Such terms as “the head-waters” of one or more rivers, or their valleys, or a “stretch” of plains, are used as if defining the range for a pleasant walk, while months of toil and risk would be requisite for coursing them. One of the charms which will always invest the perusal of the journals of the old explorers, deep in the recesses of the continent, will be found in noting these large epithets of description and locality, and in comparing them with the reduced terms, the definite and detailed bounds and limits, by which we find it necessary to refer to them. The Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains represented once uniform and comprehensive lines of elevation, longitudinally continuous and compacted as barrier walls. They are distributed now into irregular ranges, distinguished by peaks and valleys, while skill and fancy are tasked to give them titles.

The new comers, however, knowing well what they came for and what they were in search of, very soon set upon the prizes for which they were seeking. It is curious to mark how, from the very first, different aims and objects, respectively characteristic of the Europeans of the three leading nationalities, were manifested and pursued here, and were followed down to our own times. The aim and greed of the Spaniard were for gold, silver, and pearls, the spoils of the heathen; not at all for laborious occupancy of