Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/383

Rh includes infinite variety in feature, array, fortune, character, errand, and experience, will answer to that race of pioneers, borderers, or frontiersmen? They have been like the people in our cities and towns, — the best and the worst, and of all shades and textures. Looking to the promptings which move white men to turn their back upon all civilized scenes, we have to recognize alike what is noble and what is base in them, besides all those impulses which are indifferent as regards moral qualities, and partake simply of restlessness, enterprise, a love of adventure and variety. Misanthropes, outlaws, desperadoes, and barbarized Christians (so called) have sought the woods and wilds, and have moved on farther as they have heard behind them the tread of any followers who may represent humanity. It is curious to note how soon individuals taken prisoners, lost in the woods, or dropped out from the company of the first European explorers, — Spanish, French, and English, — long after they had been given up as dead, found a home among the natives, and became themselves Indians. From time to time we meet strange surprises in the old histories, as we read how these lost men, hardly preserving enough of the look and language of their former life to make themselves known or intelligible to their countrymen, turn up at the right moment to serve as interpreters to a later company of venturesome white men. Thus De Soto, on his first march into Florida from Tampa Bay, sent a detachment to charge upon a body of the natives, in 1539. An officer was startled by the cry, — seeming to come from one of them, — “Slay me not: I am a Christian!” The cry came from the man named on a previous page, Juan Ortiz, a native of Seville in Spain, who had eleven years before been taken prisoner by the Indians in the expedition of Narvaez. He had just the accomplishments which De Soto required in the emergency, and proved invaluable to him. Instances of like character were frequent; and such cases suggest the number of that