Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/402

382 such was buried with pomp and with the rites of the Church; “for when the passion of Christ crucified by the Jews was explained to him he said to me, ‘Oh! had I been there, I would have revenged his death and brought away their scalps!’ ”

A good illustration of the perplexity of mind in an intelligent savage, caused by the proffer of religious instruction by the various Christian sects, is found in the calm judgment uttered by a high chief in the Red River region. Catholics and Protestants had rival missions around him. The chief said to Father Derveau, the priest: “You tell us there is but one religion that can save us, and that you have got it. Mr. Cowley, the Protestant minister, tells us that he has got it. Now, which of you white men am I to believe?” After a long pause, — smoking his pipe, and talking with his people, — he turned round and said: “I will tell you the resolution I and my people have come to; it is this: when you both agree, and travel the same road, we will travel with you; till then, however, we will adhere to our own religion: we think it the best.” Missionaries had been stationed, Catholic and Protestant, for more than thirty years, twenty-seven in number, within the Red River region of two hundred miles, at a charge on Christian benevolence of £50,000 sterling. The judgment is that the labor had been nearly fruitless, the system defective, the method radically wrong. The Hudson Bay agent and explorer, Samuel Hearne, in his “Journey from the Prince of Wales's Fort to the Northern Ocean,” in 1771, gives the following account of his meeting with some Copper River Indians, and of the impression he made upon them: —