It was impossible that this sort of English protectorate over the native tribes, which was an inevitable result of the situation, should be other than irksome and irritating to the Indians.  They could not but see that the white man stood there as master, and even in the utter absence of provocation, this fact alone must have made them hate him.  It is difficult, moreover, for the civilized man and the savage to understand each other.  As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking about.  When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened at the promptness with which “slaves” came running at his beck and call; but all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways, they felt that the mystery was solved.  Evidently this palace was the communal dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr. Gushing was a great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly sway there!  The Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote and primitive phase of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of barbarism.  The gulf between their thinking and that of white men is wide because there is a wide gulf between the experience of the two. [Sidenote:  Difficulty of the situation in New England] [Sidenote:  It is hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one another]

This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions of the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears and prejudices.  I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot.  His design in founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree benevolent and noble; but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them.

Eliot’s converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe, the smallest and weakest of all.  The Plymouth converts came chiefly from the tribe next in weakness, the Pokanokets or Wampanoags.  The more powerful tribes—­Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans—­furnished very few converts.  When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white tribe as a means of increasing their military strength.  At any rate, such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind, whereas the nature of Eliot’s design lay quite beyond its ken.  As the Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends, they must of course interpret their conduct in such light as savage experience could afford.  It is