Aboriginal Race of America, 123 



been so often the subject of analysis as to claim only a passing 

 notice on the present occasion. Among the most prominent of this 

 series of mental operations is a sleepless caution, an untiring vi- 

 gilance which presides over every action and masks every motive. 

 The Indian says nothing and does nothing without its influence : 

 it enables him to deceive others without being himself suspected ; 

 it causes that proverbial taciturnity among strangers which changes 

 to garrulity among the people of his own tribe ; and it is the basis 

 of that invincible firmness which teaches him to contend unrepin- 

 ingly with every adverse circumstance, and even with death in its 

 most hideous forms. 



The love of war is so general, so characteristic, that it scarcely 

 calls for a comment or an illustration. One nation is in almost 

 perpetual hostility with another, tribe against tribe, man against 

 man ; and with this ruling passion are linked a merciless revenge and 

 an unsparing destructiveness. The Chickasaws have been known to 

 make a stealthy march of 600 miles from their own hunting grounds, 

 for the sole purpose of destroying an encampment of their enemies. 

 The small island of Nantucket, which contains but a few square 

 miles of barren sand, was inhabited at the advent of the European 

 colonies by two Indian tribes, who sometimes engaged in hot and 

 deadly feud with each other. But what is yet more remarkable, the 

 miserable natives of Terra del Fuego, whose common privations have 

 linked them for a time in peace and fellowship, become suddenly 

 excited by the same inherent ferocity, and exert their puny efforts 

 for mutual destruction. Of the destructive propensity of the Indian, 

 which has long become a proverb, it is almost unnecessary to speak ; 

 but we may advert to a forcible example from the narrative of a 

 traveller who accompanied a trading party of northern Indians on 

 a long journey, during which he declares that they killed every 

 living creature that came within their reach ; nor could they even 

 pass a bird's nest without slaying the young or destroying the eggs. 



That philosophic traveller, Dr. Von Martius, gives a graphic view 

 of the present state of natural and civil rights among the American 

 aborigines. Their sub-division, he remarks, into an almost countless 

 multitude of greater and smaller groups, and their entire exclusion 

 and excommunication with regard to each other, strike the eye 



