Accustomed from their youth to innumerable hardships, they soon become superior to a sense of danger or the dread of death; and their fortitude, implanted by nature, and nurtured by example, by precept, and accident, never experiences a moment’s allay.
Though slothful and inactive whilst their store of provision remains unexhausted, and their foes are at a distance, they are indefatigable and persevering in pursuit of their game, or in circumventing their enemies.
If they are artful and designing, and ready to take every advantage, if they are cool and deliberate in their councils, and cautious in the extreme either of discovering their sentiments, or of revealing a secret, they might at the same time boast of possessing qualifications of a more animated nature, of the sagacity of a hound, the penetrating sight of a lynx, the cunning of the fox, the agility of a bounding roe, and the unconquerable fierceness of the tyger.
In their public characters, as forming part of a community, they possess an attachment for that band to which they belong, unknown to the inhabitants of any other country. They combine, as if they were actuated only by one soul, against the enemies of their nation, and banish from their minds every consideration opposed to this.
They consult without unnecessary opposition, or without giving way to the excitements of envy or ambition, on the measures necessary to be pursued for the destruction of those who have drawn on themselves their displeasure. No selfish views ever influence their advice, or obstruct their consultations. Nor is it in the power of bribes or threats to diminish the love they bear their country.
The honour of their tribe, and the welfare of their nation, is the first and most predominant emotion of their hearts; and from hence proceed in a great measure all their virtues and their vices. Actuated by this, they brave every danger, endure the most exquisite torments, and expire triumphing in their fortitude, not as a personal qualification, but as a national characteristic.
From thence also flow that insatiable revenge towards those with whom they are at war, and all the consequent horrors that disgrace their name. Their uncultivated mind, being incapable of judging of the propriety of an action, in opposition to their passions, which are totally insensible to the controuls of reason or humanity, they know not how to keep their fury within any bounds, and consequently that courage and resolution, which would otherwise do them honour, degenerates into a savage ferocity.
But this short dissertation must suffice; the limits of my work will not permit me to treat the subject more copiously, or to pursue it with a logical regularity. The observations already made by my readers on the preceding pages, will, I trust, render it unnecessary; as by them they will be enabled to form a tolerably just idea of the people I have been describing. Experience teaches, that anecdotes, and relations of particular events, however trifling they might appear, enable us to form a truer judgment of the manners and customs of a people, and are much more declaratory of their real state, than the most studied and elaborate disquisition, without these aids.
CHAP. XVII.
Of their Language, Hieroglyphicks, &c.
THE principal languages of the natives of North America may be divided into four classes, as they consist of such as are made use of by the nations of the Iroquois towards the eastern parts of it, the Chipéways or Algonkins to the north-west, the Naudowessies to the west, and the Cherokees, Chickasaws, &c. to the south. One or other of these four are used by all the Indians who inhabit the parts that lie between the coast of Labradore north, the Florida south, the Atlantic ocean east, and, as far as we can judge from the discoveries hitherto made, the Pacific Ocean on the west.