Page:The life and adventures of James P. Beckwourth, mountaineer, scout, pioneer, and chief of the Crow nation of Indians (IA lifeadventuresof00beckrich).pdf/9



HOUGH there has been for more than thirty years a vast manufacture of cheap romances of the "Scalp Hunter" and "Bandits of the Plains" description, it is still true that works setting forth the frontier life of America by men who have really experienced it, are actually rare, and this is specially the case as regards real residence on familiar terms among the Red Indians. This is to be regretted, because every student of History will, in another generation, wonder at this indifference as regards a state of society which is, even by us, regarded as intensely interesting. The chief reason for this is that those who were best qualified by experience were in most cases the worst fitted as regards education, to observe, or record, what they had lived through. Young people very generally believe that the mere fact of having seen much of the world, or the having travelled, qualifies anybody to describe well, when, on the contrary, a man who has not keenly cultivated the arts of observation and writing, generally acquires nothing of the kind. On the contrary, as we often see in sailors, constant change makes him indifferent to everything save mere personal interests. Like the stork who had travelled every year of his life from Antwerp to Egypt or India, yet could tell of nothing except where the best swamps and pools were with the fattest frogs and largest worms, so