We must be cautious how we put faith in the remarks of missionaries and travellers upon a race of people little known.  They seldom come into contact with the better and higher classes, who have all the information and knowledge; and it is only by becoming one of them, not one of their tribes, but one of their chiefs, and received into their aristocracy, that any correct intelligence can be gained.

Allow that a stranger was to arrive at Wapping, or elsewhere, in Great Britain, and question those he met in such a locality as to the religion, laws, and history of the English, how unsatisfactory would be their implies; yet missionaries and travellers among these nations seldom obtain farther access.  It is therefore among the better classes of the Indians that we must search for records, traditions, and laws.  As for their religion, no stranger will ever obtain possession of its tenets, unless he is cast among them in early life and becomes one of them.

Let missionaries say what they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts from their tribes.

The traditions of the Shoshones fully bear out my opinion that they were among the earliest of the Asiatic emigrants; they contain histories of subsequent emigrations, in which they had to fight hard to retain their lands; of the dispersion of the new emigrants to the north and south; of the increase of numbers, and breaking up of portions of the tribes, who travelled away to seek subsistence in the East.

We find, as might be expected, that the traditions of the Eastern tribes, collected as they have occasionally been previous to their extinction, are trifling and absurd; and why so? because, driven away to the east, and finding other tribes of Indians, who had been driven there before them, already settled there, they have immediately commenced a life of continual hostility and change of domicile.  When people have thus been occupied for generations in continual warfare and change, it is but natural to suppose that in such a life of constant action they have had no time to transmit then traditions, and that ultimately they have been lost to the tribe.

We must then look for records in those quarters where the population has remained stationary for ages.  It must be in the south-west of Oregon, and in the northern parts of Upper California and Sonora, that the philosopher must obtain the eventful history of vast warlike nations, of their rise and of their fall.  The western Apaches or the Shoshones, with their antiquities and ruins of departed glory, will unfold to the student’s mind long pages of a thrilling interest, while in their metaphors and rich phraseology, the linguist, learned in Asiatic lore, will easily detect their ancient origin.