%62.  Traits of Character.%—­Living an outdoor life, and depending for daily food not so much on the maize they raised as on the fish they caught and the animals they killed, the Indians were most expert woodsmen.  They were swift of foot, quick-witted, keen-sighted, and most patient of hunger, fatigue, and cold.  White men were amazed at the rapidity with which the Indian followed the most obscure trail over the most difficult ground, at the perfection with which he imitated the bark of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the call of the moose, and at the catlike tread with which he walked over beds of autumn leaves the side of the grazing deer.

[Illustration:  Ornamental pipe]

[Illustration:  Quiver, with bows and arrows]

Courage and fortitude he possessed in the highest degree.  Yet with his bravery were associated all the vices, all the dark and crooked ways, which are the resort of the cowardly and the weak.  He was treacherous, revengeful, and cruel beyond description.  Much as he loved war (and war was his chief occupation), the fair and open fight had no charm for him.  To his mind it was madness to take the scalp of an enemy at the risk of his own, when he might waylay him in an ambush or shoot him with an arrow from behind a tree.  He was never so happy as when, at the dead of night, he roused his sleeping victims with an unearthly yell and massacred them by the light of their burning home.

%63.  The French and the Indians.%—­The ways in which French and English colonists acted towards the Indian are highly characteristic, and account for much in our history.

From the day when Champlain, in 1609, joined his Huron-Algonquin neighbors and went with them on the warpath against the Iroquois, the French held to the policy of making friends with the Indians.  No pains were spared to win them to the cause of France.  They were flattered, petted, treated with ceremonial respect, and became the companions, as the women often became the wives, of the Frenchmen.  Much was expected of this mingling of races.  It was supposed that the Indian would be won over to civilization and Christianity.  But the Frenchmen were won over to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life.  They lived in wigwams, wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot.

%64.  Coureurs de Bois.%—­There soon grew up in this way a class of half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers and lakes of the interior.  Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade, these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and French influence over the whole Northwest.  Where the trader and the coureur de bois went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon mission houses and forts were established at all the chief passes and places suited to control the Indian trade.