Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/385

Rh use of these semi-barbarized white residents among the Indians, in their very responsible functions as interpreters. Grave consequences, very serious issues, costly money bargains, and complicated covenants in sum and detail have often been set in very risky dependence upon the intelligence, the skill, and the integrity of these interpreters. There is no question but that on very many important occasions of treaty and agreement in settling feuds and entering into stipulations, sometimes the Government, sometimes the Indians, sometimes both parties, have suffered from the incompetency or dishonesty of these interpreters. It has been comparatively easy for these men, living with and adopting the habits of the Indians, to catch the few words in common use, — names of persons and objects, terms of ordinary occurrence in the converse of the camp, the hunt, and the woods, — while at the same time the interpreter, if himself capable of evolving abstract ideas and of the higher processes of thought, explanation, and argument, would be wholly unable to make them matters of intelligible expression in the language or dialect of a rude tribe. And there are occasions in which an interpreter may find his account in deceiving and bringing about a serious misunderstanding between the parties with whom he is supposed to be a competent and trustworthy medium. Many shrewd agents and army officers have agreed with a remark made by Colonel Dodge, in his “Life on the Plains,” that there are special occasions on which there ought to be several interpreters present, so that each might, out of the hearing of others, give his version of what is said on either side.

But these individual whites and half-breeds who have affiliated and assimilated themselves with the Indians (outlaws, desperadoes, adventurers, or merely trappers, hunters, and restless roamers) are precursors of another set of men, — a class of frontiersmen, who are in the advance of actual settlers with their families on our shifting