Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/627

Rh for three centuries: a vastly larger number of white men and women have been barbarized by contact and life with the Indians than there ever have been of Indians won to civilized ways. The tendency of single white persons when living for any considerable time with the Indians to conform to and adopt their habits, is not only natural, but often unavoidable and irresistible. Besides the charms and license of release from all conventionalities, the throwing off of all artificial and galling restraints, the very necessities of the case compel this conformity. Toilet arrangements, garb, dress, food, and the ways of cooking and eating it are matters in which one has at once to part with all squeamishness. So also whether sleep be found in the open air, or round the camp-fire, or in a crowded and filthy lodge, with humanity, dogs, smoke, and vermin, the frontiersman, the trapper or hunter, already used to rough and coarse ways, becomes very soon a full conformist. And those who have been wonted to finer and cleanlier usages, even to luxuries, yield to the influences of scene, condition, and company. Our own army officer, Captain Bonneville, who found in Irving a sympathetic editor for his journal across the continent, yielded himself to this outburst: —

The captain and others try to persuade us that there are even delicacies in Indian cookery, though of course the wilderness appetite brought to them is a stimulating sauce. We read of some of these Rocky Mountain delicacies to which it may be well to call the attention of our city