the new clothing was gayer, but less perfectly adapted to the
purposes of primitive life. Indeed, the buckskin clothing and moccasins
of the Indian were very generally adopted by the white frontiersman. On
the other hand, his spiritual and moral loss was great. He who listened
to the preaching of the missionaries came to believe that the white man
alone has a real God, and that the things he had hitherto held sacred
are inventions of the devil. This undermined the foundations of his
philosophy, and very often without substituting for it the Christian
philosophy, which the inconsistency of its advocates, rather than any
innate quality, made it difficult for him to accept or understand.

A few did, in good faith, accept the white man's God. The black-robed
preacher was like the Indian himself in seeking no soft things, and as
he followed the fortunes of the tribes in the wilderness, the tribesmen
learned to trust and to love him. Then came other missionaries who had
houses to sleep in, and gardens planted, and who hesitated to sleep in
the Indian's wigwam or eat of his wild meat, but for the most part held
themselves aloof and urged their own dress and ways upon their converts.
These, too, had their following in due time. But in the main it is true
that while the Indian eagerly sought guns and gunpowder, knives and
whiskey, a few articles of dress, and, later, horses, he did not of
himself desire the white man's food, his houses, his books, his
government, or his religion.

The two great "civilizers," after all, were whiskey and gunpowder, and
from the hour the red man accepted these he had in reality sold his
birthright, and all unconsciously consented to his own ruin. Immediately
his manhood began to crumble. A few chiefs undertook to copy some of the
European ways, on the strength of treaty recognition. The medals and
parchments received at such times were handed down from father to son,
and the sons often disputed as to who should succeed the father,
ignoring the rule of seniority and refusing to submit to the election of
the council. There were instances during the nineteenth century in the
vicinity of Chicago, Prairie du Chien, Saint Paul, and Kansas City,
where several brothers quarrelled and were in turn murdered in drunken
rows. There was also trouble when the United States undertook to appoint
a head chief without the consent of the tribe. Chief Hole-in-the-Day of
the Ojibways and Spotted Tail of the Brule Sioux