Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/626

606 instinct stirs a couple or a group of young men, for a summer change, to go for an interval into some primitive spot and try to live awhile as the Indians lived, repudiating the effeminacies of civilization. True, there is often an intrusion of that ubiquitous quality which we bluntly call “humbug” in these restorations of savagery. If we looked sharply into the equipments of some of these camping-out and tenting trampers, we should detect certain suspicious appliances which the Indians never carried with them, in fact never had, — the comfortable India-rubber blanket, for dew and rain, and rest on the damp earth; the salt and other condiments; the pork firkin, the canned meats, and certain cases which need to be “handled with care.” Yet these campers — perhaps carrying with them the works of their patron saint Thoreau — persuade themselves that they have got nearer to the lap and nursing bosom of Mother Nature; that they like game flavors, the smoky smell of food cooked in ashes, to see the sun rise after they are up; and when they have deigned to conform to civilized ways again, and have had a bath, put on their “store-clothes,” and lunched at some luxurious restaurant, they will tell you that “the Indians do not have such a bad time of it after all.” So far goes the reversionary instinct of civilized man back to barbarism. An occasional draught of milk at the farmhouses on their way has preserved these campers-out from a thorough and hopeless relapse to savagery. If from exhaustion under the fretting tasks, and sometimes from vexation and disgust under the shams and frivolities of conventional life, there is a strange zest which might even be prolonged beyond a temporary trial in this reversion to the rude simplicities of existence, we cannot wonder that the mature savage prefers the condition into which he was born.

Much to the point it is in connection with the Indian's aversion from civilization to note this fact of which the evidence is varied and abounding, and has been accumulating