r old
domain? Was their destruction a foredoomed conclusion, a calculated
purpose, an acknowledged necessity from the first? or was it slowly and
reluctantly accepted as an inevitable destiny decided by conditions
which overruled and thwarted every scheme and device of philanthropy?
Were the Indians in the way of self-development, working upwards to
intelligent improvement in their means and ways of life? Would they have
retained their heritage here up to this day, had the white man never
come among them? These and many similar questions may be asked, either
by curiosity or in the interest of humanity, or in the service of
ethnologic science. Mr. Parkman contributes more abundant and more
instructive means for discussing and for deciding these questions in the
light of authenticated facts, and of fair deductions from them, than do
all who have preceded him on the subject.

In an Essay, introductory to his present volume, he embodies the results
of many years of study, research, and personal observation concerning
our Northern aborigines,--their tribal, treaty, and confederate
relations, their distribution and numbers, their government, their
family life, their customs, modes of subsistence, and warfare, their
character and traits, their intellectual stage, their superstitions,
their religious notions and observances. It is evident that his task, to
this extent, was made an exacting one, not only by its inherent
difficulties and complications, but by the misleading and guess-work
representations of other writers who have been accepted as authorities.
He makes stupendous reductions from the romance which has invested
Indian character and life. "The noble savage," the ideal of so much
fanciful and morbid sentimentality, becomes in his pages the
representative of quite other qualities than those ascribed to him. In
all that constitutes and ennobles manhood, and in all the conditions
which should elevate the human above the brute creature, the savage and
his lot are wanting.

Mr. Parkman says of the Huron-Iroquois family, that, from average
capacity, superior cranium, and such advancement as is indicated by what
we must call their mode of government, we might look to them, if to any
of the aborigines, for examples of the higher traits popularly ascribed
to Indians. But if we so look, we look in vain. Rather do we find in
them the more repulsive and hideous qualities of the fiercest and the
foulest brutes and reptiles,--a r