Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/628

608 and caterers. They are happily for the most part root-food, such as the kamask, about the size of an onion, said to be delicious; the courish, or biscuit-root, the size of a walnut, and which is reduced to flour; the jaekap, the aisish, the quako, etc.

Instances innumerable there are on record from the pens of cultivated men, who, in their intercourse with the Indians in their wild, free life, became so fascinated with it and perhaps demoralized by its license, that they have substantially avowed with Baron La Hontan, “The manners of the savages are perfectly agreeable to my palate.”

The Earl of Dunraven, having resided with the Absaruka, or Crows, presents the following summary of his views of the Indians in general: —

“However degrading their religion may be, I doubt if a change ever is morally beneficial to a savage race. Roman Catholicism suits the red men best, with its spiritualism in some respects so like their own; its festivals and fasts at stated times, resembling their green-corn dances and vigils; with its prayers and intercessions for the dead, its ceremonial, its good and evil spirits, its symbolism, its oblations, its little saints and medals. The red Indian does not see such a great difference between the priest and the medicineman. It is a difference of degree, not of kind; and, if backed by a little pork and flour, he is apt to look upon the cross and medal as greater talismans than claws of beasts and bits of rag and skin, and to think that the missionary makes stronger medicine than his priest. The dry, cold philosophy of the Methodist finds little favor with an imaginative race worshipping the Great Spirit in the elements and in all the forms and forces of Nature; thanking the Principle of Good for success in hunting and in war; propitiating the Evil Principle that brings the deep snows, ice, fever, starvation, shadows of the night, thunder-storms, and ghosts. To the Indians mind there is nothing intrinsically good or desirable in the doctrines of the various Christian sects; nor is there anything whatever in our mode of living or in our boasted civilization to prepossess him in favor of the religion of the white race. These red-skinned savages have no respect whatever for the pale faces, — men whose thoughts, feelings, occupations, and pastimes are