the lesson which the great mother Nature teaches to her sons through the voices of the night, the forest, and the solitude.  This river, this mountain, this measureless meadow speak to him in a language of their own.  Dwelling with them, he learns their varied tongues, and his speech becomes the echo of the beauty that lies spread around him.  Every name for lake or river, for mountain or meadow, has its peculiar significance, and to tell the Indian title of such things is generally to tell the nature of them also.  Ossian never spoke with the voice of the mist-shrouded mountain or the wave-beat shores of the isles more thoroughly than does this chief of the Blackfeet or the Sioux speak the voices of the things of earth and air amidst which his wild life is cast.

I know that it is the fashion to hold in derision and mockery the idea that nobility, poetry, or eloquence exist in the wild Indian.  I know that with that low brutality which has ever made the Anglo-Saxon race deny its enemy the possession of one atom of generous sensibility, that dull enmity which prompted us to paint the Maid of Orleans a harlot, and to call Napoleon the Corsican robber—­I know that that same instinct glories in degrading the savage, whose chief crime is that he prefers death to slavery; glories in painting him devoid of every trait of manhood, worthy only to share the fate of the wild beast of the wilderness—­to be shot down mercilessly when seen.  But those bright spirits who have redeemed the America of to-day from the dreary waste of vulgar greed and ignorant conceit which we in Europe have flung so heavily upon her; those men whose writings have come back across the Atlantic, and have become as household words among us—­Irving, Cooper, Longfellow—­have they not found in the rich store of Indian poetry the source of their choicest thought?  Nay, I will go farther, because it may be said that the a poet would be prone to drape with poetry every subject on which his fancy lighted, as the sun turns to gold and crimson the dullest and the dreariest clouds:  but Search the books of travel amongst remote Indian tribes, from Columbus to Catlin, from Charlevoix to Carver, from Bonneville to Pallisser the story is ever the same.  The traveller is welcomed and made much of; he is free to come and go; the best food is set before him; the lodge is made warm and bright; he is welcome to stay his lifetime if he pleases.  “I swear to your majesties,” writes Columbus—­alas! the red man’s greatest enemy—­“I swear to your majesties that there is not in the world a better people than these, more affectionate, affable, or mild.”

“At this moment,” writes an American officer only ten years back, “it is certain a man can go about throughout the Blackfoot territory without molestation, except in the contingency of being mistaken at night for an Indian.”  No, they are-fast going, and soon they will be all gone, but in after-times men will judge more justly the poor wild creatures whom to-day we kill and vilify; men will go back again to those old books of travel, or to those pages of “Hiawatha” and “Mohican,” to find that far away from the border-land of civilization the wild red man, if more of the savage, was infinitely less of the brute than was the white ruffian who destroyed him.