liberate investigations and comparative examinations,
continued with sober judgment through a long series of years, as are now
offered to the public. We trust that a proper and enlightened patronage
will warrant Mr. Schoolcraft in completing his design. No man,
possessing his qualifications, has enjoyed his advantages. He has been
able to take up, at his leisure, the scattered links of a broken chain,
and fit them together. A chaos of aboriginal facts will be reduced,
under his hand, to some degree of order.

"Mr. Schoolcraft and Mr. Catlin have done more to preserve the fleeting
traits of aboriginal character and history than all their predecessors
in this field of inquiry, and none can follow them with the same
success, as none can have the same range of subjects before them. The
scene is changing with each year, and the past, with respect to the
Savages, does not recur. They fall back with no hope to recover lost
ground; they diminish with no hope to increase again; they degenerate
with no hope to revive in physical or moral strength. Those who have
seen them most during the last few years, have seen them best. After
observers will find mere fragments, or a heterogeneous mass, in which
all original identity is distorted or gone.

"The Tales now published must not be estimated for their intrinsic merit
alone. They may have less variety of construction, less beauty of
imagination, less singularity of incident, than belong to oriental
tales, the productions of more refined times, or more excitable people.
But the estimate must not be comparative. They are to be regarded as
the type of aboriginal mind, as the measure of intellectual power of our
Sons of the Forest; as speaking their sentiments, their hopes and their
fears, whatever they were or are, whether elevated or depressed, whether
raising the race or sinking it in the scale of untutored nations.
Whether they prove a poverty of mental energy, a feebleness of
imagination, a want of invention, or the reverse, cannot affect the
value of these volumes in the opinion of those who look into them for
evidences of the true character of the Indians. Mr. Schoolcraft, or any
other gentleman of taste and skill, might have formed out of these
materials a series of Tales, highly finished in their unity and design,
strikingly colored by fancy, such as would have caught the popular whim.
But this was not his object. He has been honest in his renderings of the
aboriginal sense, wh