40 INDIAN TRIBES. [Chap. I. 



extravagance of some who should have known bet- 

 ter, a counterfeit image has been tricked out, which 

 might seek in vain for its likeness through every 

 corner of the habitable earth ; an image bearing no 

 more resemblance to its original, than the monarch 

 of the tragedy and the hero of the epic poem bear 

 to their living prototypes in the palace and the 

 camp. The shadows of his wilderness home, and 

 the darker mantle of his own inscrutable reserve, 

 have made the Indian warrior a wonder and a mys- 

 tery. Yet to the eye of rational observation there 

 is nothing unintelligible in him. He is full, it is 

 true, of contradiction. He deems himself the cen- 

 tre of greatness and renown ; his pride is proof 

 against the fiercest torments of fire and steel ; and 

 yet the same man would beg for a dram of whiskey, 

 or pick up a crust of bread thrown to him like a 

 dog, from the tent door of the traveller. At one 

 moment, he is wary and cautious to the verge of 

 cowardice ; at the next, he abandons himself to a 

 very insanity of recklessness ; and the habitual 

 self-restraint which throws an impenetrable veil 

 over emotion is joined to the unbridled passions of 

 a madman or a beast. 



Such inconsistencies, strange as they seem in our 

 eyes, when viewed under a novel aspect, are but the 

 ordinary incidents of humanity. The qualities of 

 the mind are not uniform in their action through all 

 the relations of life. With different men, and dif- 

 ferent races of men, pride, valor, prudence, have 

 difi'erent forms of manifestation, and where in one 

 instance they lie dormant, in another they are keen- 



