between savages and frontiersmen.  But it has been a very distant business.  To the great mass of the American people it has been little more than interesting news, to be leisurely scanned in the newspaper without any sense of immediate and personal concern.  Moreover, the popular conception of the Indian has for a long time been wildly inaccurate.  We have known him in various capacities, as the innocent victim of corrupt agents and traders, and as the brutal robber and murderer with the vices and force of the Western frontiersman, but without any of the latter’s redeeming virtues.  Last and most important of all, we have known him as the rare hero and the conventional villain of romance, ranging from the admirable stories of Cooper to the last production of the “penny dreadful.”  The result has been to create in the public mind a being who probably never existed anywhere except in the popular imagination, and who certainly is not the North American Indian.

We are always loath to admit that our conceptions are formed by fiction, but in the case of people remote from our daily observation it plays in nine instances out of ten a leading part, and it has certainly done so here.  In this way we have been provided with two types simple and well defined, which represent the abnormally good on the one hand and the inconceivably bad on the other.  The Indian hero is a person of phenomenal nobility of character, and of an ability which would do credit to the training of a highly refined civilization.  He is the product of the orator, the novelist, or the philanthropist, and has but slight and distant relation to facts.  The usual type, however, and the one which has entered most largely into the popular mind, is the Indian villain.  He is portrayed invariably as cunning, treacherous, cruel, and cowardly, without any relieving quality.  In this there is of course much truth.  As a matter of fact, Indians are cunning, treacherous, and cruel, but they are also bold fighters.  The leading idea of the Indian that has come down from Cooper’s time, and which depicts him as a “cowardly redskin,” unable to stand for a moment against a white man in fair fight, is a complete delusion designed to flatter the superior race.  It has been in a large measure dissipated by Parkman’s masterly histories, but the ideas born of popular fiction die hard.  They are due in part to the theory that cruelty implies cowardice, just as we say that a bully must be a coward, another mistaken bit of proverbial wisdom.

As a matter of fact, the records show that the North American Indian is one of the most remarkable savage warriors of whom we have any knowledge; and the number of white men killed for each Indian slain in war exhibits an astonishing disproportion of loss.  Captain James Smith, for many years a captive, and who figured in most of the campaigns of the last century, estimated that fifty of our people were killed to one of theirs.  This of course includes women and children; and yet even in the battle of the Big Kanawha, the Virginia riflemen, although they defeated the Indians with an inferior force, lost two to one, and a similar disproportion seems to have continued to the present day.