IXXX INTRODUCTION. 



The primitive Indian believed in the immortality of 

 the soul,i \yjj^^ i^Q (j^(j j^Qi always believe in a state of 

 future reward and punishment. Nor, when such a belief 

 existed, was the good to be rewarded a moral good, or 

 the evil to be punished a moral evil. Skilful hunters, 

 brave warriors, men of influence and consideration, went, 

 after death, to the happy hunting-ground ; while the sloth- 

 ful, the cowardly, and the weak were doomed to eat s'er- 

 pents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness. 

 In the general belief, however, there was but one land of 

 shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature as 

 they had been in life, wended their way through dark 

 forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and 

 rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouch- 

 ing posture of the sick, and, when night came, hunted 



safely be affirmed that an Indian will respond with a grunt of acquies- 

 cence to any question whatever touching his spiritual state. Loskiel and 

 the simple-minded Heckewelder write from a missionary point of view ; 

 Adair, to support a theory of descent from the Jews ; the worthy theo- 

 logian, Jarvis, to maintain his dogma, that all religious ideas of the heathen 

 world are perversions of revelation ; and so, in a greater or less degree, 

 of many others. By far the most close and accurate observers of Indian 

 superstition were the French and Italian Jesuits of the first half of the 

 seventeenth century. Their opportunities were unrivalled; and they 

 used them in a spirit of faithful inquiry, accumulating facts, and leaving 

 theory to their successors. Of recent American writers, no one has 

 given so much attention to the subject as Mr. Schoolcraft; but, in view 

 of his opportunities and his zeal, his results are most unsatisfactory. 

 The work in six large quarto volumes, History, Condition, and Prospects 

 of Indian Tribes, published by Government under his editorship, includes 

 the substance of most of his previous writings. It is a singularly crude 

 and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giv- 

 ing evidence on every page of a striking unfitness either for historical or 

 philosophical inquiry, and taxing to the utmost the patience of those 

 who would extract what is valuable in it from its oceans of pedantic 

 verbiage. 



1 The exceptions are exceedingly rare. Father Gravier says that a 

 Peoria Indian once told him that there was no future life. It would be 

 difficult to find another instance of the kind. 



