pressed more closely around him than he liked, and he struck one of the Indians in the face with his drum-stick so sharply that the blow drew blood. The Indians, much offended, went to the interpreter and demanded apologies and a present, according to their custom. “No,” said the interpreter, “our custom is to punish the offender; we will punish the boy in your presence.” When the Indians saw the child stripped for the flogging they began immediately to beg for his pardon; but as the soldiers continued their preparations for whipping the lad, one of the Indians suddenly stripped himself and threw his robe over the boy, crying out, “Scourge me, if you choose, but do not strike the boy!” The good Father Le Jeune, who tells this story, adds that this unwillingness of the Indians to see any child chastised “will probably occasion trouble to us in the design we have to instruct their youth.”
As far back as 1587 we find evidence that the Indians were not without religion. Thomas Hariot, an employé of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, writing from the Virginia colony, says of the Virginia Indians: “Theye beleeve that there are many gods, which theye call Mantaoc, but of different sorts and degrees; one onely chief and Great God, which hath been from all eternitie; who, as theye affirme, when hee proposed to make the world, made first other gods of a principall order, to bee as means and instruments to bee used in the creation and government to folow; and after the sunne, moone, and starres as pettie gods, and the instruments of the other order more principall.”
“In general,” says Hunter, “a day seldom passes with an elderly Indian, or others who are esteemed wise and good, in which a blessing is not asked, or thanks returned to the Giver of Life, sometimes audibly, but more generally in the devotional language of the heart.”
All the employés of the North-west Fur Company bear the same testimony to the fidelity and honesty of the Indians.
General H. Sibley once said to Bishop Whipple that for thirty years it had been the uniform boast of the Sioux in every council that they had never taken the life of a white man.
