Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/621

Rh the sometimes repulsive tasks, the rush and turmoil and fever of life, may so overwhelm and distract the savage as to persuade him that civilization is not for him either to accomplish or to share, and, like all of his race who have come on such errands and seen such sights, he longs to get back to the woods again. If the Indians were not radically unlike the white man in the matter of curiosity and speculation, the report by these braves on their return to their tribes of what they had seen in their strange journeyings would cause a rush of most of the men and women too into our cities, such as would appall us. Yet the returned visitors excite no such curiosity, nor do the white man's ways raise discontent or jealousy in the description.

But it is not in this overwhelming, distracting way that civilization from the first and always has offered its inducements, attractions, and facilities to the Indians. It has presented itself to them in its simpler, more facile, and elementary forms and methods. The first European colonization here in patches of the wilderness, and in each successive stage of its advance through our inner belts and borders, was made by men who, save that they had with them a few tools and implements, were in all outward respects very much on a level with the Indians themselves as to conditions, circumstances, and means of life. The Indians first saw civilization in its inchoate, elemental stages. The early white settlers were glad even to help out their wardrobes with the skins which the Indian wore; to learn from him how to plant and dress corn, how to hunt and trap, how to penetrate the wilderness and to make themselves comfortable. The Indian had, and has had, continually before him the examples of poor, rude white men and women, amid the simplest, the earliest, and the roughest processes of civilization; not ladies and gentlemen, in ceiled houses, costly apparel, with servants and equipages, with furnished kitchens and luxurious tables, but plain