of something abnormal, something new and strange, and
certainly unexampled in Canadian verse. For here was a girl whose
blood and sympathies were largely drawn from the greatest tribe of
the most advanced nation of Indians on the continent, who spoke
out, "loud and bold," not for it alone, but for the whole red race,
and sang of its glories and its wrongs in strains of poetic fire.

However aloof the sympathies of the ordinary business world may be
from the red man's record, even it is moved at times by his fate,
and stirred by his persistent, his inevitable romance. For the
Indian's record is the background, and not seldom the foreground,
of American history, in which his endless contests with the invader
were but a counterpart of the unwritten, or recorded, struggles of
all primitive time.

In that long strife the bitterest charge against him is his
barbarity, which, if all that is alleged is to be believed--and
much of it is authentic--constitutes in the annals of pioneer
settlement and aggression a chapter of horrors.

But equally vindictive was his enemy, the American frontiersman.
Burnings at the stake, scalping, and other savageries, were not
confined to the red man. But whilst his are depicted by the
interested writers of the time in the most lurid colours, those of
the frontiersman, equally barbarous, are too often palliated, or
entirely passed by. It is manifestly unjust to characterize a whole
people by its worst members. Of such, amongst both Indians and
whites, there were not a few; but it is equally unfair to ascribe
to a naturally cruel disposition the infuriated red man's reprisals
for intolerable wrongs. As a matter of fact, impartial history
not seldom leans to the red man's side; for, in his ordinary and
peaceful intercourse with the whites, he was, as a rule, both
helpful and humane. In the records of early explorers we are told
of savages who possessed estimable qualities lamentably lacking
in many so-called civilized men. The Illinois, an inland tribe,
exhibited such tact, courtesy and self-restraint, in a word, such
good manners, that the Jesuit Fathers described them as a community
of gentlemen. Such traits, indeed, were natural to the primitive
Indian, and gave rise, no doubt, to the much-derided phrase--"The
Noble Red Man."

There may be some readers of these lines old enough to remember
the great Indians of the plains in times past, who will bear the
writer out in saying that such trait