Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 101 



tie twigs, dried leaves, and dead branches as silently 

 as the cougar, and they equaled the great wood-cat 

 in stealth and far surpassed it in cunning and fe- 

 rocity. They could no more get lost in the track- 

 less wilderness than a civilized man could get lost 

 on a highway. Moreover, no knight of the Middle 

 Ages was so surely protected by his armor as they 

 were by their skill in hiding; the whole forest was 

 to the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure 

 and ever-present shield. Every tree trunk was a 

 breastwork ready prepared for battle; every bush, 

 every moss-covered bowlder, was a defence against 

 assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they 

 watched with fierce derision the movements of their 

 clumsy white enemy. Lurking, skulking, traveling 

 with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail that only a 

 master in woodcraft could follow, while, on the 

 other hand, they could dog a white man's footsteps 

 as a hound runs a fox. Their silence, their cunning 

 and stealth, their terrible prowess and merciless 

 cruelty, makes it no figure of speech to call them the 

 tigers of the human race. 



Unlike the Southern Indians, the villages of the 

 Northwestern tribes were usually far from the fron- 

 tier. Tireless, and careless of all hardship, they 

 came silently out of unknown forests, robbed and 



one white in a hundred can come near them. In my experi- 

 ence I have known a very few whites who had spent all their 

 lives in the wilderness who equaled the Indian average ; but 

 I never met any white who came up to the very best Indian. 

 But, because of their better shooting and their better nerve, 

 the whites often make the better hunters. 



