REVIEWS — THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 63 



regarding the Island of the Blessed," and he accordingly reproduces 

 an Indian Legend which Longfellow years ago interwove into his 

 "Song of Hiawatha." The comments which this legend elicits are 

 among the most genuine-looking passages of the volumes, though we 

 have read the like before. Let us extract one passage however, as 

 possibly a genuine specimen of the author's own. 



" By such legends have the Indians sought to embellish the doctrine of 

 rewards, and to give it all the power and all the attractio* for imaginations as 

 vivid as those of the Red Men, which would have been wanting in an arbitrary 

 law. It is for the same reason that Catholicism makes so much progress among 

 the populations of the Great Deserts, whilst Protestantism, which rests more on 

 the spirit of analysis than on the feelings of the heart, makes but few jiroselytes 

 among these impressionable people. On several occasions the Indian tribes have 

 written to the President of the United States, begging him to send them ministers 

 of the Great Spirit, of the same religion as those who christianised their ances- 

 tors, to teach them how best to serve the Supreme Being, and to instruct them 

 in the manner of cultivating the earth. Many of the Missions founded by the 

 Jesuit fathers in the seventeenth century in the north of America still exist, or 

 have been established anew ; that of the OttaAva, on Lake Michigan, is without 

 question one of the most interesting, and the Indians have built a very pretty 

 chapel there. 



" Among the tribes formerly visited by the French missionaries, the recollec- 

 tion of the black (towns is very fresh in the minds of the savages. They believe 

 that the true ministers of the Great Sph'it have black gowns, and they have but 

 little sympathy with the married priests of the American sects. The number of 

 Catholics is, in fact, very considerable among the Indians of the United States 

 and of the Great Deserts. Dacotas and Osages have been seen trying to make 

 the sign of the cross with the left hand, because it was nearer the heart than 

 the right. The Catholicism of the Indians possesses all the absolute simplicity 

 and the robust faith peculiar to unspoiled natures." 



The subject thus referred to by the Abbe towards the close, with 

 a tone of genuine sincerity little apparent elsewhere, is one well 

 deserving of greater attention than it appears to receive. Without 

 pretending to any such explorations as would enable us to talk with 

 familiar nonchalance of the secrets of the Great Deserts of America 

 from the Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, we know somewhat of 

 the Red Indian in his native haunts. We have seen the poor remnant of 

 the Hurons, in their little chapel of our lady of Loretto on the banks 

 of the St, Charles, and watched the half-breed trapper kneeling in the 

 picturesque sanctuary of Tadoussac, where, under the favour ot Henry 

 IV., the merchants of Dieppe and Rochelle established their first 

 trading-post near the mouth of the Saguenay, in 1599 ; and some two 



