NICK OF THE WOODS

Or, Adventures of Prairie Life

by

Robert M. Bird, M.D.

Unenlightened man—­
A savage, roaming through the woods and wilds
In quest of prey, and with th’ unfashiomed fur
Bough clad.

Thompson.

PREFACE.

At the period when “Nick of the Woods” was written, the genius of Chateaubriand and of Cooper had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian character; and the red men were presented—­almost stereotyped in the popular mind—­as the embodiments of grand and tender sentiment—­a new style of the beau-ideal—­brave, gentle, loving, refined, honourable, romantic personages—­nature’s nobles, the chivalry of the forest.  It may be submitted that such are not the lineaments of the race—­that they never were the lineaments of any race existing in an uncivilised state—­indeed, could not be—­and that such conceptions as Atala and Uncas are beautiful unrealities and fictions merely, as imaginary and contrary to nature as the shepherd swains of the old pastoral school of rhyme and romance; at all events, that one does not find beings of this class, or any thing in the slightest degree resembling them, among the tribes now known to travellers and legislators.  The Indian is doubtless a gentleman; but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt, and lives a very miserable life, having nothing to employ him or keep him alive except the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt—­which we dignify with the name of war.  The writer differed from his critical friends, and from many philanthropists, in believing the Indian to be capable—­perfectly capable, where restraint assists the work of friendly instruction—­of civilisation:  the Choctaws and Cherokees, and the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, prove it; but, in his natural barbaric state, he is a barbarian—­and it is not possible he could be anything else.  The purposes of the author, in his book, confined him to real Indians.  He drew them as, in his judgment, they existed—­and as, according to all observation, they still exist wherever not softened by cultivation,—­ignorant, violent, debased, brutal; he drew them, too, as they appeared, and still appear, in war—­or the scalp-hunt—­when all the worst deformities of the savage temperament receive their strongest and fiercest development.

Having, therefore, no other, and certainly no worse, desire than to make his delineations in this regard as correct and true to nature as he could, it was with no little surprise he found himself taken to account by some of the critical gentry, on the charge of entertaining the humane design of influencing the passions of his countrymen against the remnant of an unfortunate race, with a view of excusing the wrongs done to it by the whites, if not of actually hastening the period of