La Hontan proceeds to describe, in shocking details, the torments inflicted upon the victim, protracted through three hours, with all the ingenuities of fiendishness, through roasting and maiming, member by member, without drawing forth a tear or sigh or groan, or interrupting his strain of triumphant song. The Huron youth were the tormentors. By a hint or order from Madame Frontenac, a Huron gave the victim a finishing blow with a club, while La Hontan had already turned away from a spectacle which, he says, he had often to witness.
There is full truth in the words of Lafitau, that, “when the French and the English have been naturalized among the savages, they adopt readily all that is bad in their manners and customs without taking the good, so as to become viler than they. The savages know very well how to reproach us for this; and the charge is so true that we do not know how to answer them.”[1]
One may easily account for those barbarous traits in the man of the wilderness, which we are wont to refer to his deprivation of all civilizing influences, by tracing them to the savagism latent in humanity, and which is ever ready to assert itself when the restraints and helps of a surrounding and mastering social oversight are evaded or forgotten.
We are familiar with a form of quackery among us, as adopted by resident or travelling practitioners, who advertise themselves as Indian doctors or doctresses, and who profess to deal with the roots and herbs of the woods. That these simple natural products furnished to our use have their specific virtues, healthful and curative, common science and experience have fully proved. The essential part of the knowledge and use of these drugs of the field and of the forest very soon becomes the common folk-lore of simple people, as it did in the families of our first white colonists all over the country. And as there are progress and development in all such means and uses, and a finding
- ↑ Mœurs, etc., vol. ii. p. 290.
