No. L.
To those well read in the sad records of Indian history, the names of Powhatan, Opechancanough, Massasoit, Alexander, Philip, Canonchet, Logan, Pontiac, and the never-to-be-forgotten Tecumthè, will suggest memories fully justifying the above assertion. The name of Tecumthè signifies "a tiger crouching for his prey." He was equally great in council and in war, noble and generous in spirit as commanding in intellect. He bore the commission of Chief of the Indian Forces in the British army during the late war. He did not, however, join the ranks of the white men until the failure of several admirably contrived projects convinced his sound and enlightened judgment that opposition to the white race was vain. Pontiac was an Ottawa chieftain, who in 1763 succeeded in the next-to-impossible scheme of uniting all the scattered and often hostile Indian tribes distributed throughout the colonized districts of North America in one grand confederacy against their European invaders. Their first step was the projected extinction of all the white man's posts along a thousand miles of frontier; and he actually succeeded so far as to cut off, almost simultaneously, nine out of twelve of these military establishments. The surprise of Michillimackinac, one of these stations, is thus narrated in a public document. (It was a period of profound peace between the Europeans and Indians):
"The fort was then upon the main land, near the northern point of the peninsula. The Ottawas, to whom the assault was committed, prepared for a great game of ball, to which the officers of the garrison were invited. While engaged in play, one of the parties gradually inclined toward the fort, and the other pressed after them. The ball was once or twice thrown over the pickets, and the Indians were suffered to enter and procure it. Nearly all the garrison were present as spectators, and those on duty were alike unprepared as unsuspicious. Suddenly the ball was again thrown into the fort, and all the Indians rushed after it. The rest of the tale is soon told: the troops were butchered, and the fort destroyed." This extensive and well-laid scheme failed, from Pontiac himself being betrayed at the fort of Detroit. He has been accused of great cruelty; but, in contests waged between the red and white races, this is a word of doubtful import. His generosity and heroism are undeniable.
As a compliment, Major Rogers had sent Pontiac a bottle of brandy. His counselors advised him not to take it: "It must be poisoned," said they, "and sent with a design to kill him;" but Pontiac laughed at their suspicions. "He can not," he replied, "he can not take my life; I have saved his!"
No. LI.
But a far truer insight into the religious state of the American Indian will be obtained by observing how peculiarly and emphatically he is, in the words of the apostle, "a law unto himself." I mean, how distinctly he evinces, in the whole moral conduct of his life, that he lives under a strong and awful sense of positive obligation. It is of little matter with what doctrines that sense of obligation connects itself. It often appears to connect itself with none. The Indian can not tell why a burden is laid upon him to act in this or that manner. He obeys a law undefined, unwritten, but mysteriously binding upon his spirit. All the compulsive force which what we call the law of honor had upon the conscience of a man of the world—I had almost said which religious sanctions have upon the man of principle—is scarcely to be paralleled with that kind of moral necessity which seems in some cases to actuate his proceedings. If religion be what its name implies, id quod relligat, that which binds the will, and enforces self-denial and self-devotion (be the object or motive held out what it may), then no people taken in the mass is to be compared, in this respect, to the savages of America. "After all," says Mr. Flint, "that which has struck us, in contemplating the Indians, with the most astonishment and admiration, is the invisible but universal energy of the operation and influence of an inexplicable law, which has, where it operates, a more certain and controlling power than all the municipal and written laws of the whites united. There is despotic rule without any hereditary or elected chief. There are chiefs with great power, who can not tell when, where, or how they became such. There is perfect unanimity on a question involving the existence of a tribe, when every member belonged to the wild and fierce democracy of nature, and could dissent without giving a reason. A case occurs where it is prescribed by custom that an individual should be punished with death. Escaped from the control of his tribe, and as free as the winds, this invisible tie is about him, and he returns and surrenders himself to justice. His accounts are not settled, and he is in debt. He requests delay till he shall have finished his summer's hunt. He finishes it, pays his debt, and dies with a constancy which has always been, in all views of the Indian character, the theme of admiration."—Flint's Geography of the Mississippi Valley, p. 125.
In the expressive words of Penn, "What good might not a good people graft, where there is so distinct a knowledge both of good and evil?"—Report on Aborigines, 1837, p. 116.
Mr. Merivale adds, "I would not insert the following high-colored expression in a work edited by Washington Irving, were it not for the remarkable agreement between all capable observers of the uncontaminated races of Indians upon this subject. 'Simply to call these people religious (some tribes of the Rocky Mountains) would convey but a faint idea of the deep hue of piety and devotion which pervades the whole of their conduct. They are more like a nation of saints than a horde of savages.'"—Adventures of Captain Bonneville.
No. LII.
Catlin gives the same account of the appropriation of the Manitou or guardian angel as Lafitau and Charlevoix. He applies to it the term of Mystery, or Medicine-bag, and thus explains the derivation of the modern term: