Not the least among the sad memories shrouding this wilderness-work, — earnest and sincere in its purpose, but so utterly thwarted and blighted in its time for fruitage, — are those of the Indian boys and young men for whose special use the first substantial building was erected on the grounds of Harvard College. The flavor and restlessness of a forest life were to be extracted from their blood and fibres by a classical and scholarly academic training; though the forest would have been sure to reclaim every one that consumption or the change in diet and habit might spare. Six youths, after a preliminary training in a grammar-school, were in the classes at one time. Of two, who were just about to graduate, one — the most promising, a son of Hiacoomes, the much-esteemed convert at the Vineyard — was murdered on a vacation visit home. The other, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, whose name alone is on the catalogue, graduated in 1665, a classmate of the royal Governor Joseph Dudley. He died within a year, of consumption.
Eliot set up a fortnightly lecture at Natick for the Indians, “in logic and theology,” in their own language. Six young Hurons were contemporaneously taken by the priests into a seminary in Quebec. At the end of five years they had run off into the woods, carrying their Latin with them. The only one who had “commenced Bachelor of Arts” followed after them.
No laments could deepen the melancholy in which this story finds its conclusion. To moralize over it would be to open an inexhaustible theme. There were places where feeble remnants of these partially-civilized natives remained a little longer than at Natick. But the longer they survived the more forlorn was the spectacle they presented. Here and there may be seen in Massachusetts, in these days, a poor pensioner or vagabond, in whose veins are mixed Indian and African blood. Still there are trust-funds for their relief and benefit, which happily are legally available
