instruments to aid man
in the arts of peace and war....

The simplest arts of civilized life were unknown. In one little section
of the Gila and Rio Grande, the people spun and wove a native cotton,
manufactured a rude pottery, and lived in houses or castle-towns of
unburnt bricks. Elsewhere the canoe or cabin of bark or hides, and the
arabesque mat, denoted the highest point of social progress.

Elsewhere the whole country was inhabited by tribes of a nomadic
character, rarely collected in villages except at particular seasons, or
for specific objects, though here and there were found more sedentary
tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of
wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior
to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more
civilized tribe in a state of decadence. Around each isolated tribe lay
an unbroken wilderness extending for miles on every side, where the
braves roamed, hunters alike of beasts and men. So little intercourse or
knowledge of each other existed, so desolate was the wilderness that
a vagabond tribe might wander from one extreme of the continent to
another, and language alone could tell the nation to which they
belonged.

The whole country was thus occupied by comparatively small, but hostile
tribes, so numerous, that almost every river and every lake has handed
down the name of a distinct nation. In form, in manners, and in habits,
these tribes presented an almost uniform appearance: language formed the
great distinctive mark to the European, though the absence of a feather
or a line of paint disclosed to the native the tribe of the wanderer
whom he met.

The country itself presented a thousand obstacles: there was danger from
flood, danger from wild beasts, danger from the roving savage, danger
from false friends, danger from the furious rapids on rivers, danger of
loss of sight, of health, of use of motion and of limbs, in the new,
strange life of an Indian wigwam....

Once established in a tribe, the difficulties were increased. After
months, nay, years, of teaching, the missionaries found that the fickle
savage was easily led astray; never could they form pupils to our life
and manners. The nineteenth century failed, as the seventeenth failed,
in raising up priests from among the Iroquois or the Algonquins; and at
this day a pupil of the Propaganda, who disputed in Latin on theses of
Peter Lombard, roams a