nothing of the flesh was carried forth out of the wigwam, though a part might be burnt as food for the dead, and when, of the beasts which were consumed, it was the sacred rule that not a bone should be broken. On their expeditions, they keep no watch during the night, but pray earnestly to their fetiches; and the band of warriors sleep securely under the safeguard of the sentinels whom they have invoked. They throw tobacco into the fire, on the lake or the rapids, into the crevices in the rocks, on the warpath, to secure the good-will of the genius of the place. The evil that is in the world they also ascribe to spirits, that are the dreaded authors of their woes. The demon of war was to be propitiated only by acts of cruelty; yet they never sacrificed their own children or their own friends. The Iro

quois, when Jogues was among them, sacrificed an Algonkin woman in honor of Areskoui, their war-god, exclaiming: "Areskoui, to thee we burn this victim; feast on her flesh, and grant us new victories;" and her flesh was eaten as a religious rite. Hennepin found a beaver robe hung on an oak, as an oblation to the spirit that dwells in the Falls of St. Anthony. The guides of Joutel in the south-west, on killing a buffalo, offered several slices of the meat as a sacrifice to the unknown spirit of that wilderness. As they passed the Ohio, the favor of its beautiful stream was sought by gifts of tobacco and dried meat; and worship was paid to the rock just above the Missouri.

Even now, in the remote west, evidence may be found of the same homage to the higher natures, which the savage divines, but cannot fathom. Nor did he seek to win their favor by gifts alone; he made a sacrifice of his pleasures; he chastened his passions. To calm the rising wind, when the morning sky was red, he would repress his activity, and give up the business of the day. To secure success in the chase, by appeasing the tutelary spirits of the animals to be pursued, severe fasts were kept; and happy was he to whom they appeared in his dreams, for it was a sure augury of abundant returns. The warrior, preparing for an expedition, often sought the favor of the god of battle by separating himself from woman, and mortifying the body by

continued penance. The security of female captives was, in part, the consequence of the vows of chastity, by which he was bound till after his return. Detesting restraint, he was perpetually imposing upon himself extreme hardships, that by penance and suffering he might atone for his of fences, and by acts of self-denial might win for himself the powerful favor of the invisible world.

Nor is he satisfied with paying homage to the several powers whose aid he may invoke in war, in the chase, or on the river; he seeks a special genius to be his companion and tutelary angel through life. On approaching maturity, the young Chippewa, anxious to behold God, blackens his face with charcoal, and building a lodge of cedar-boughs, it may be on the summit of a hill, there begins his fast in solitude. The fast endures, perhaps, ten days, sometimes even without water, till, excited by the severest irritation of thirst, watchfulness, and famine, he beholds a vision of God, and knows it to be his guardian spirit. That spirit may assume fantastic forms, as a skin or a feather, as a smooth pebble or a shell; but the fetich, when obtained, and carried by the warrior in his pouch, is not the guardian angel himself, but rather the token of his favor, and the pledge of his presence in time of need. A similar probation was appointed for the warriors of Virginia, and traces of it are discerned beyond the Mississippi. That man should take up the cross, that sin should be atoned for, are ideas that dwell in human nature; they were so diffused among the savages, that Le Clercq believed some of the apostles must have reached the American continent.

The gifts to the deities were made by the chiefs, or by any one of the tribe for himself. In this sense, each Indian was his own priest; the right of offering sacrifices was not reserved to a class; any one could do it for himself, whether the sacrifice consisted in oblations or acts of self-denial. But the red man had a consciousness of man's superiority to the powers of nature, and sorcerers sprung up in every part of the wilderness. They were prophets whose prayers would be heard. "They are no other," said the Virginian Whit

aker, "but such as our English witches;" and, as their agency was most active in healing disease, they are now usually called medicine men.

Here, too, the liberty of the desert appears. As the warchief was elected by opinion, and served voluntarily, so the medicine men were self-appointed. They professed an insight into the laws of nature, and power over those laws; but belief was free; there was no monopoly of science, no close priesthood. He who could inspire confidence might come forward as a medicine man. The savage puts his faith in auguries; he casts lots, and believes nature will be obedient to the decision; he puts his trust in the sagacity of the sorcerer, who comes forth from a heated, pent-up lodge, and, with all the convulsions of enthusiasm, utters a confused medley of sounds as oracles.

The medicine man boasts of his power over the elements; he can call water from above, and beneath, and around; he can foretell a drought, or bring rain, or guide the lightning; by his spells, he can give attraction and good fortune to the arrow or the net; he conjures the fish, that dwell in the lakes or haunt the rivers, to suffer themselves to be caught; he can pronounce spells which will infallibly give success in the chase, which will compel the beaver to rise up from beneath the water, and overcome the shyness and cunning of the moose; he can, by his incantations, draw the heart of woman; he can give to the warrior vigilance like the rising sun, and power to walk over the earth and through the sky victoriously. If an evil spirit has introduced disease into the frame of a victim, the medicine man can put it to flight; and, should his remedies chance to heal, he exclaims: "Who can resist my spirit? Is he not, indeed, the master of life?" Or disease, it was believed, might spring from a want of harmony with the outward world. If some innate desire has failed to be gratified, life can be saved only by the discovery and gratification of that secret longing of the soul; and the medicine man reveals the momentous secret. Were he to assert that the manitou orders the sick man to wallow naked in the snow, or to scorch himself with fire, he would do it. But let not the wisdom

of civilization wholly deride the savage: the same supersti tion long lingered in the cities and palaces of Europe; and, in the century after the Huron missions began, the English moralist Johnson was carried, in his infancy, to the British sovereign, to be cured of scrofula by the great medicine of her touch.

Little reverence was attached to time or place. It could not be perceived that the savages had any set holidays; only in times of triumph, at burials, at harvests, the nation assembled for solemn rites. Each Choctaw town had a house in which the bones of the dead were deposited for a season previous to their final burial. The Natchez, like their kindred the Taensas, kept a perpetual fire in a rude cabin, in which the bones of their great chiefs were said to be preserved. The honest Charlevoix, who entered it, writes: "I saw no ornaments, absolutely nothing, which could make me know that I was in a temple;" and, referring to the minute relations which others had fabricated of an altar, and a dome, of cones wrapped in skins, and the circle of the bodies of departed chiefs, he adds: “I saw nothing of all that; if things were so formerly, they must have changed greatly." And Adair confidently insinuates that the Koran does not more widely differ from the Gospels, than the romances respecting the Natchez from the truth. The building was probably a charnel-house, not a place of worship. No tribes whatever, east of the Mississippi, or certainly none except those of the Natchez family, had a consecrated spot, or a temple, where there was believed to be a nearer communication between this world and that which is unseen.

Dreams are to the wild man the avenue to the invisible world; he reveres them as divine revelations, and believes he shall die unless they are carried into effect. The capricious visions in a feverish sleep are obeyed by the village or the tribe; the whole nation would contribute its harvest, its costly furs, its belts of beads, the produce of its chase, rather than fail in their fulfilment; the dream must be obeyed, even if it required the surrender of women to a public embrace. The faith in the spiritual world, as re

vealed by dreams, was universal. On Lake Superior, the nephew of a Chippewa squaw having dreamed that he saw a French dog, the woman travelled four hundred leagues, in midwinter, over ice and through snows, to obtain it. Life itself was hazarded, rather than fail to listen to the message conveyed through sleep; and, if it could not be fulfilled, at least some semblance would be made. Happy was the hunter who, as he went forth to the chase, obtained a vision of the great spirit of the animal which he was to pursue; the sight was a warrant of success. But, if the dream should be threatening, the savage would rise in the night or prevent the dawn with prayer; or he would call around him his friends and neighbors, and himself keep waking and fasting, with invocations, for many days and nights.

The Indian invoked the friendship of spirits, and sought the mediation of medicine men; but he never would confess his fear of death. To him intelligence was something more than a transitory accident; and he was unable to conceive of a cessation of life. His faith in immortality was like that of the child, who weeps over the dead body of its mother, and believes that she yet lives. At the bottom of an open grave, the melting snows had left a little water; and the sight of it chilled and saddened his imagination. "You have had no compassion for my poor brother: " such was the reproach of an Algonkin; "the air is pleasant and the sun cheering, and yet you do not remove the snow from his grave to warm him a little;" and he knew no content ment till this was done.

The same motive prompted them to bury with the war rior his pipe and his manitou, his tomahawk, quiver, and bow ready bent for action, and his most splendid apparel; to place by his side his bowl, his maize, and his venison, for the long journey to the country of his ancestors. Festivals in honor of the dead were also frequent, when a part of the food was given to the flames, that so it might serve to nourish the departed. The traveller would find in the forests a dead body placed on a scaffold erected upon piles, carefully wrapped in bark for its shroud, and