REVIEWS THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 67 



So recently as 1857, the Church of England Missionaries among 

 the Six Nations (the loyalist Indians who accompanied the English 

 refugees to Canada at the close of the xlmerican War), replied to the 

 query of the Indian commissioners : " What number are still pagans ?" 

 Ans. — " A large majority of the Cayugas, and a part of the Ononda- 

 gas and Senecas ; " and similar answers indicate a like condition 

 among other settled tribes. The missions in more than one locality, 

 and especially among the populous islands of Lake Huron, have been 

 discredited by unseemly controversies between Church of England and 

 other Missionaries, while the Roman^ Catholic Church embraces 

 the greater number of the Indian converts. Meanwhile, impartial 

 observers are tempted to ask in what respects many of such " Christian 

 Indians " present any favourable elements of comparison with the 

 wild Pagan tribes ? To this pertinent query, Sir Francis B. Head 

 furnished a tolerably plain-spoken answer in one of the most singular 

 documents addressed by him to the Home Government during his 

 official residence in Canada, Writing to Lord Ig in 1836, he 



says : " If we attempt to christianize the Indians, and for that sacred 

 object congregate them in villages of substantial log-houses, lovely 

 and beautiful as such a theory appears, it is an undeniable fact, to 

 which unhesitatingly I add my humble testimony, that as soon as the 

 hunting season commences, the men (from warm clothing and warm 

 houses, having lost their hardihood) perish, or rather rot, in numbers, 

 by consumption. While as regards their women, it is impossible for 

 any accurate observer to refrain from remarking, that civilization, in 

 spite of the pure, honest, and unremitting zeal of our missionaries, 

 by some accursed process, has blanched their babies' faces. In short, 

 our philanthropy, like our friendship, has failed in its professions. 

 Producing deaths by consumption, it has more than decimated its 

 followers ; and under pretence of eradicating from the female heart 

 the errors of a Pagan creed, it has im.planted in their stead the 

 germs of Christian guilt." 



On all this, it must be confessed, the colonist looks with wondrous 

 apathy. The miserable, dirty, sem'-^ivilized Indian who haunts the 

 outskirts of the clearings, has no more romance about him in the eyes 

 of the settler, than the straggling remnants of the forest, which^he 

 clears away as an encumbrance to the land. Familiarity speedily 

 breeds contempt, and it seems in vain to hope for any ^enthusiastic 

 efforts on his part in the evangelization of the Indian. But the ele- 



