Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/623

Rh almost entirely the direct opposite of what we should have looked for. Beads, needles, trinkets, very soon became objects of desire by the squaws. The white man's gun and knife and metal kettle, his fire-water and his horse and his woollen blanket, had the same attraction for the wild warrior. But as to everything done or gained by the white man which required industry, toil, labor, he would have none of it, — the thing was not worth its cost. He looked on with a contempt which smothered his curiosity. The white man was a squaw. Perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of an Indian is that he never could be made into a slave. But the most discouraging thing about him is his enslaving himself to himself.

Admitting the generally asserted and acknowledged fact that the Indian has so often, if not in all cases, so dismally disappointed the expectations of what he would or might be as the result of efforts made in his behalf under some processes and stages of civilization, the fact may help us to form more correct views of his actual place on the scale of humanity and of his natural endowments. Much of our disappointment over the failure of efforts for him may be accounted to the fancy into which we had been led by previous false estimates of his latent nature, — to imagine that under the limitations and disablings of his wilderness growth there was a nobleness of being, a wealth of innate and repressed capacity; that he was at the core and potentially a high type of man. We knew that he had the virtues of self-reliance, pride of nature, high self-estimate, courage, fortitude, and a command of the resources of the forest and the wilderness. These qualities we regarded as similar to those presented by the unsightly and rude ores in our mines, in our varied minerals, and in the woods of our forests, — admitting through the smelting process, the grinding, the polishing, the tempering, and the cunning work of hand and brain, of being turned to grand and varied products of use and beauty. So we thought that