These frontiersmen, it is to be remembered were of a race of men who professed to be guided by principle. "There were wild and headstrong characters among them," Mr. Roosevelt admits; but he reminds us that they "sprang from the loins of the Irish Calvinists." They were not only Calvinists of the Calvinists, but their fathers were Cromwell's men, who had been taught "to trust in God, and to keep their powder dry." Their Calvinistic ministers had gone with them, and were sharing all their toils and all their dangers. They had studied the Old Testament as well as the New, and in all seriousness really believed that "they were dispossessing the Canaanites, and were thus working the Lord's will in preparing a land for a race which was more truly His chosen people than was that nation which Joshua led across the Jordan. They were well read in the wars of the Chosen People, and felt that they were battling with a heathen enemy more ruthless and terrible than ever was Canaanite or Philistine." They had no Hampton or Carlisle, to which they could send the Indians to be civilized and Christianized. They had no United States army to call upon for protection. Alone in the woods they had to stand in their lot and do the best they could to protect their wives and their children. It is all very easy for us, sitting in our comfortable houses-with a blue-coated policeman within call to moralize about the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, and talk about the cruel way in which those men treated the Indians. But-kind-hearted reader-what would you yourself have done, if when working in the field you had suddenly been aroused by a cry, and, looking back, had seen the flames bursting from the roof of your house, and a band of savages chasing your wife and children, as they ran to you for protection? It is not so very long since such sights were not uncommon even in our own New England, and in many a family here there still survive traditions of just such bloody deeds, done by the red man.

The "Hunters of Kentucky" have, at last, had some one to speak for them, and he does not hesitate to speak also for the frontiersmen of the present day! He has been one of them, and he declares that the nature of the wild Indian has not changed. He says that the atrocities committed by the hostile

Indians of the Plains, during the last ten or fifteen years, on men and women who have fallen into their power, are "literally too horrible to mention." "Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot look another in the face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out-these tortures can be mentioned; but there are others equally customary which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims. Those Indians east of the Mississippi, who made concubines of the women whom they captured, were not so horrible in their treatment of them as are these modern Indians of the Plains. Statements of this kind are undoubtedly thoroughly revolting to the reader, but it is necessary to make them. They cannot be passed over, for they form an important part of the defence of the frontiersman. Mr. Roosevelt says: "Again and again, on the frontier, we hear of some such unfortunate who has been fairly crazed by his wrongs, and has devoted all the remainder of his wretched life to the one object of taking vengeance on the whole race of the men who have darkened his days forever."

We should leave a very erroneous impression if we did not call special attention to the fact that Mr. Roosevelt admits that the Indians often have suffered great wrongs, both from individuals and from the government. But he says: "The purely sentimental historians have taken no account of the difficulties under which the frontiersmen have labored. These writers have passed over the wrongs and provocations the white man has endured, and grossly magnified those which he has himself committed, for which without doubt he deserves to be held responsible." Chief among those who have done the most harm, he designates the author of a book which has been widely read-"A Century of Dishonor, by H. H. (Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson)." He admits that the purpose of that lady was good, but he says "the spirit in which the book is written cannot be called even technically honest." The present writer has himself no sufficient knowledge of the facts to enable him to criticise this statement. But it should be understood that

He

this frontiersman-this hunter-who has the confidence of the public, and who is to be supposed, from his life on the frontier, to know something about what he affirms, declares, without any softening of his language, that it is not too much to say that the book of Mrs. Jackson is thoroughly untrustworthy from cover to cover, and that not a single statement it contains should be accepted without independent proof, for even those that are not absolutely false are often as bad on account of so much of the truth having been suppressed. He says that the book is marked "by hysterical indifference to facts." says, moreover, that "as a history, it would be beneath criticism, were it not that the high character of the author, and her excellent literary work in other directions, have given it a fictitious value." He says that one effect of her exaggerations is that when she speaks of the undoubted wrongs that the Indians have suffered, she utterly fails to impress those who know anything about the subject, because she lays so much stress on what she calls "wrongs," that are non-existent, and on the equally numerous cases where the wrong-doing was wholly the other way. "To get an idea of the value of the book, it is only necessary to compare her statements about almost any tribe with the real facts, choosing at random." It will be seen that this frontiersman is very much in earnest, and does not hesitate to make his charges in the most unqualified manner. He says further: "These foolish sentimentalists not only write foul slanders about their own countrymen, but are themselves the worst possible advisers on any point touching Indian management. They would do well to heed General Sheridan's bitter words, written when many Easterners were clamoring against the army authorities, because they took partial vengeance for a series of brutal outrages: 'I do not know how far these humanitarians should be excused on account of their ignorance; but surely it is the only excuse that can give a shadow of justification for aiding and abetting such horrid crimes.""

We have already stated that Mr. Roosevelt admits that, as a people, we have without question treated the Indians in numberless instances with "terrible injustice." In particular, he says that "the conduct of the Georgians in their dealings with

the Cherokees, in the early part of the present century, and the whole treatment of Chief Joseph and the Nez Percés, have left an indellible stain on our fair fame." He is himself in full sympathy with the philanthropic efforts that are being made to Christianize and civilize those wild people. But, he says, the root of the protracted difficulties that so long existed between the white man and the red man was not so much in any dispute about the ownership of hunting grounds, or in any deeds of violence committed by the white man which provoked the Indians to retaliation. The difficulty lay deeper. The frontiersman was brought face to face with a race of merciless savages, whose highest ideal of life was to take scalps, to steal horses, and to plunder. They hunted human game in the same spirit that the white man hunts the wild beasts of the forest for the pleasure of it! They took delight in the sufferings which they inflicted on their captives, and respected neither age nor sex. Had the white man remained east of the Alleghanies, Mr. Roosevelt claims that the Indians would have attacked him there. The struggle between the races was unavoidable. The red man's idea of happiness was to make war. This frontiersman-speaking in defence of the men of his class-has now told us their side of the story. He says that the provocations which the white men have received. were simply unendurable. The frontiersmen were obliged to protect their hearthstones.

Since the times described by Mr. Roosevelt, a hundred years have passed. Before the Capitol of Kentucky—we have been told-has been placed a statue of one who by unanimous consent has been long known as the typical backwoodsman— Daniel Boon! Attired in his fringed hunting shirt, with his rifle in his hand, he will remind successive generations of that noble band of men to whom we all owe so much. The difficulties and dangers which the descendants have to meet are very different from those which confronted the fathers. It is to be hoped that they will be inspired to meet them with the same bold and joyous spirit displayed in their day by the "Hunters of Kentucky" who were the "winners of the West."

WILLIAM L. KINGSLEY.

ARTICLE II.-FROM THE NOTE-BOOK

OF A YALE

STUDENT DURING A RESIDENCE AMONG THE ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN: THE RODS OF MEMORY: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF MNEMONICS.

IN the course of travel in lands little known and less liked by those who do know them, in daily association with some of the fiercest and most cruel cannibals, I yet found an interest in a somewhat careful study of the people themselves in their individual and familiar relations. Living for many months with the wild islanders of the Western Pacific, leading much their own life and striving in every way to put myself upon a plane of appreciation and intelligent comprehension of their habits of thought, I soon found that they made daily use of much that in our own more advanced civilization has become matter of mere method and empty ceremony. My savage tutors daily threw interesting side lights upon civilization. Nightly my note-book was charged with interesting memoranda, and from that source is drawn the following narrative.

Not long after leaving college I found myself on one of the most picturesque of the Fiji islands, a spot of much interest to the philologist and linguist as marking the easternmost limit of the Sub-Papuan migration, which drove before it the Sawaiori race and, in this group, intimately mingled with the rear guard of the retreating brown race. From this mingling it has come to pass that Fiji is peopled with a Melanesian race speaking a dialect closely approximating that Polynesian tongue in vogue from Hawaii on the north to New Zealand on the south, and eastward as far as Rapa iti, the Easter Island of the charts. No place offers such advantages for the student of the SubPapuans, not the least of which is to be found in the fact that the former prevalence of virtual enslaving of the Melanesians has spread the Fijian language so extensively that it is generally available as a means of inter-communication westward from the one hundred and eightieth meridian, and as far as the