454 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
tude which the Six Nations assumed toward the values of their own 
culture as compared with that of the whites. An anecdote, in several 
forms, appears in his writings which presumably was derived from 
the considered response these Indians made when, during the Lan- 
caster conference in 1744, it was suggested that if they so desired some 
of their boys might be sent to Williamsburg for a white education. 
The Iroquois countered with the proposition that “if the English 
Gentlemen would send a Dozen or two of their children to Onondago, 
the great council would take care of their Education, bring them up 
in really what was the best Manner and make men of them.” ® 
These Indians not only felt secure in their own values; they felt 
free to appraise those of the white man. And the captives who be- 
came “white Indians” discovered that the actual manner of life of the 
natives was something other than the literary images of the noble 
savage or the fiendish red man. The Indian cultures contained values 
which the white child could assimilate, live by, and in adulthood re- 
fuse to relinquish. Old White Boy and all his sons became Seneca 
chiefs. Even aside from captives, there were white men on the frontier 
who became semiacculturated to Indian ways. Sam Houston, in his 
early days, lived with the Cherokees. It has not been sufficiently 
stressed that Leatherstocking, the most famous internationally of all 
characters in American fiction, falls into this category. Although a 
white man by “natur,” he had Indian “gifts.” He is said to have “ac- 
quired some knowledge of most of the Indian dialects.” During his 
early life, he lived among the Delawares and long before they called 
him Deerslayer, he had successively borne three other Indian nick- 
names. On occasion, he identified himself with the Delawares and 
their aboriginal values. When contemplating torture by the Hurons, 
he says he will strive “not to disgrace the people among whom I got my 
training.” And the Huron chiefs, uncertain about his return from the 
brief furlough granted him, entertained “the hope of disgracing the 
Delawares by casting into their teeth the delinquency of one held in 
their villages.” While they would have preferred to torture his In- 
dian comrade Chingachgook, they thought the “pale face scion of the 
hated stock was no bad substitute for their purposes.” Quite aside 
from his characterization as the honest, resourceful, intrepid frontiers- 
man and scout, the uniqueness of Leatherstocking as the first white 
man in fiction represented as acculturated in his youth to Indian 
languages, customs, and values, should not be overlooked. 
From a contemporary vantage point, I believe that our relations 
with the Indians involve one distinct peculiarity which might have 
been difficult to predict at an earlier period of our history. Despite 
our achievement of political dominance, considerable race mixture, 
and the effects of acculturation on the native peoples, neither the In- 
8 Aldridge, Franklin's deistical Indians, p. 399. 
