"Do they never drink too much whisky?"
"Well, I guess they drink too much whisky sometimes."
There was a single wigwam in the village, apparently a supplement to one of the log-cabins. We looked in and saw two Indian looms, from which two unfinished mats were depending. Mrs. Speight, the wife of the missionary, told us that, a few days before, the village had been full of these lodges; that the Indians delighted in them greatly, and always put them up during the mosquito season; "for a mosquito," said the good lady, "will never enter a wigwam;" and that lately, the mosquitoes having disappeared, and the nights having grown cooler, they had taken down all but the one we saw.
We passed a few minutes in the house of the missionary, to which Mrs. Speight kindly invited us. She gave a rather favorable account of the Indians under her husband's charge, but manifestly an honest one, and without any wish to extenuate the defects of their character.
"There are many excellent persons among them," she said; "they are a kind, simple, honest people, and some of them are eminently pious."
"Do they follow any regular industry?"
"Many of them are as regularly industrious as the whites, rising early and continuing at their work in the fields all day. They are not so attentive as we could wish to the education of their children. It is difficult to make them send their children regularly to school; they think they confer a favor in allowing us to instruct them, and if they happen to take a little offense their children are kept at home. The great evil against which we have to guard is the love of strong drink. When this is offered to an Indian, it seems as if it was not in his nature to resist the temptation. I have known whole congregations of Indians, good Indians, ruined and brought to nothing by the opportunity of obtaining whisky as often as they pleased."
We inquired whether the numbers of the people at the mission were diminishing. She could not speak with much certainty as to this point, having been only a year and a half at the mission, but she thought there was a gradual decrease.
"The families of the Indians," she said, in answer to one of my questions, "are small. In one family at the village are six children, and it is the talk of all the Indians, far and near, as something extraordinary. Generally the number is much smaller, and more than half the children die in infancy. Their means would not allow them to rear many children, even if the number of births was greater."
Such appears to be the destiny of the red race while in the presence of the white—decay and gradual extinction, even under circumstances apparently the most favorable to its preservation.