THE FORMER RANGE OF THE BUFFALO. 81 
Ka 
as to render it easy for the Indian woman to obey her dusky mas- 
ter when he ordered her to ‘‘ take up her house and walk.” Now 
huge boats, with gilded saloons propelled by powerful steam en- 
gines float on the bosoms of our rivers, then the light canoe made 
of the cotton wood log by the use of the fire and stone ax, or 
the still lighter birch-bark, were the only keels that had ever dis- 
turbed their waters. 
As the sources of information of this character are not accessi- 
ble to many readers of the NarturaList, I may be pardoned for 
freely transcribing from accounts given in Jesuit letters and Re- 
lations, and from the pages of early French writers and voya- 
geurs. Here we see old Illinois—as it was at the end of the 
seventeenth century —the otter, beaver, and wigwams upon the 
banks of its rivers, the panthers, wolves, bears and wild-cats 
in its forests, with its great prairies of wild grass where grazed the 
deer, the elk, and the buffalo, or at noon-tide shielded themselves 
from the summer’s sun under the shade of lonely cotton wood 
trees, or in the beautiful groves that here and there studded the 
plain, like islands upon the bosom of the ocean. Here, too, we see 
primitive man hollowing out his boat by the aid of fire and the 
stone ax, skinning animals and dressing their hides with the flint 
knife, and engaged in war or the chase, armed with the war-club 
and bow, and whose arrows were tipped with bone or flint. Here 
are presented to our view the first effects of the contact of civili- 
zation and barbarism, we see the Indian eagerly exchanging skins 
of the buffalo and beaver, and other articles demanded by civiliza- 
tion, for the iron ax, knife, gun, and kettle, to supply the place of 
the stone ax, flint knife, bow and arrow, and Indian akeek. Here 
we see the gay and volatile French associating upon terms of 
equality with the Indian, each adopting the manners and habits 
of the other and thus assimilating the habits of civilized man 
with the superstitions and customs of the savage, for the ‘* French- 
man forgot not that the uncivilized man as well as the civilized 
man, was his brother and he deported himself as man to man.” 
Here we see the Jesuit, the medicine-man of civilization, strug- 
gling to displace the superstitious rites and ceremonies of the 
medicine-man of the forest, to substitute his own no less whim- 
sical, foolish and absurd rites and ceremonies in their stead; and 
the triumph of the former, when, as on one occasion, after forty 
dogs had been sacrificed to appease ge spirit of destruction, 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. VI. 
