The simplest arts of civilized life were unknown.  In one little section of the Gila and Rio Grande, the people spun and wove a native cotton, manufactured a rude pottery, and lived in houses or castle-towns of unburnt bricks.  Elsewhere the canoe or cabin of bark or hides, and the arabesque mat, denoted the highest point of social progress.

Elsewhere the whole country was inhabited by tribes of a nomadic character, rarely collected in villages except at particular seasons, or for specific objects, though here and there were found more sedentary tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more civilized tribe in a state of decadence.  Around each isolated tribe lay an unbroken wilderness extending for miles on every side, where the braves roamed, hunters alike of beasts and men.  So little intercourse or knowledge of each other existed, so desolate was the wilderness that a vagabond tribe might wander from one extreme of the continent to another, and language alone could tell the nation to which they belonged.

The whole country was thus occupied by comparatively small, but hostile tribes, so numerous, that almost every river and every lake has handed down the name of a distinct nation.  In form, in manners, and in habits, these tribes presented an almost uniform appearance:  language formed the great distinctive mark to the European, though the absence of a feather or a line of paint disclosed to the native the tribe of the wanderer whom he met.

The country itself presented a thousand obstacles:  there was danger from flood, danger from wild beasts, danger from the roving savage, danger from false friends, danger from the furious rapids on rivers, danger of loss of sight, of health, of use of motion and of limbs, in the new, strange life of an Indian wigwam....

Once established in a tribe, the difficulties were increased.  After months, nay, years, of teaching, the missionaries found that the fickle savage was easily led astray; never could they form pupils to our life and manners.  The nineteenth century failed, as the seventeenth failed, in raising up priests from among the Iroquois or the Algonquins; and at this day a pupil of the Propaganda, who disputed in Latin on theses of Peter Lombard, roams at the head of a half-naked band in the billowy plains of Nebraska.

[Footnote 44:  This writer is much distinguished for his numerous works, most of which relate to the early missions of the Roman Catholic church in America.  He is a native of New York.]

* * * * *

From “Introduction to Early Voyages,” etc.

=_148._= EXPLORATION OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.