OF THE RED INDIAN RACE. 437 



nation. Nor did extreme differences of race interfere -vvitli affilia- 

 tion, as in the case of children kidnapped from the White colonists in 

 their vicinity. One interesting example of the latter suffices 

 to illustrate the extent to which such a process tended to affect the 

 ethnical purity of the race. 



In the year 1779, while the Mohawks still dwelt in their 

 native valley in the State of New York, Ste-nah, a "White girl, then 

 about twelve years of age, was captured in one of their marauding 

 expeditions, and adopted into the tribe. In 1868, while still living, 

 she was described to me by an educated Mohawk Indian, as a full- 

 blood Sko-ha-ra, or Dutchwoman. She grew iip among her captors, 

 accompanied the tribe on their removal from the Mohawk Valley to 

 the shores of the Bay of Quinte, and married one of the Mohawk 

 braves. She had reached mature years, and was the mother of Indian 

 children, when an aged stranger visited the reserve in search of his 

 long-lost daughter. He had heard of a captive white woman who 

 survived among the emigrant Mohawks there, and was able, by 

 certain marks, and the scar of a wound received in childhood, to iden- 

 tify his long-lost daughter. But the discovery came too late. As 

 my Mohawk informant told me, she had got an Indian heart. She 

 had, indeed, lost her native tongue ; had acquired the habits and 

 sympathies of her adopted people ; and coldly repelled the advances of 

 her aged father, who in vain recalled his long-lost daughter Christina 

 in the Mohawk white-blood, Ste-nah. If the date of her capture 

 and her estimated age can be relied on, she miist have been in her 

 hundred and fifth year at the time of her death, in December, 1871. 

 I have received through one of her grandsons — himself a Mohawk 

 chief, — a genealogical table of her descendants, from which it appears 

 that there are at the present time fifty-seven of them living and 

 twenty-three dead. It is thus apparent, that by the adoption of a 

 single White captive into the tribe, there are, in the fourth generation, 

 fifty-seven survivors out of eighty members of the tribe, all of them 

 of hybrid character. 



The influence of a single case of admixture of White blood thus 

 followed out to its results in the fourth generation, suffices to show 

 how largely those tribes must be affected who dwell for any length 

 of time in close vicinity to White settlers, and in intimate friendly rela- 

 tions with them. The earlier French and English colonists, like the 

 Hudson's Bay traders of later times, were mostly young adventurers, 



