to him merely artificial wants. Surrounded by a fertile country, the Indian, without ever being either rich or independent, finds it difficult to obtain subsistence, trespasses upon his neighbours, lives in insecurity, and in implacable enmity with those of his own race. A {182} stranger to our ideas of honour, he destroys his enemies by the meanest stratagems, and levels, in his revenge, all distinctions of age and sex. Such is the general character of the Osages, and such even that of the Cherokees, after all their external approaches towards civilization.
To give my Reader some idea of the laborious exertions which these people exercise to obtain a livelihood, I need only relate, that the Osages had now returned to their village from a tallow hunt, in which they had travelled not less than 300 miles up the Arkansa, and had crossed the Saline plains, situated betwixt that river and the Canadian. In this hunt, they say, that 10 villages of themselves and friends (as the Kansas, who speak nearly the same language) joined for common safety. They were, however, attacked by a small scout of the Pawnees, and lost one of their young men who was much esteemed, and, as I myself witnessed, distractingly lamented by the father, of whom he was the only son. They say, the country through which they passed is so destitute of timber, that they had to carry along their tent poles, and to make fire of the bison ordure.
The activity and agility of the Osages is scarcely credible. They not uncommonly walk from their village to the trading houses, at the mouth of the Verdigris, in one day, a distance of about 60 miles.
The Osages, in their private conversations, do not appear still to be on an amicable footing with the Cherokees. One of their chiefs insisted on the hunting boundary
