s which
he had succeeded in uniting, came flocking around him, ready to do his
bidding, as one commissioned by the Great Spirit to be their leader and
deliverer. Never, since their first landing on the Continent, had the
whites beheld arrayed against them, by the energy and power of one mind,
a league of the Indian tribes so formidable and wide-spread.

That the sachem was in error, there can of course be no doubt--all are
who undertake to withstand the progress of a Christian civilization; but
no less certain is it that he erred not because his heart was wrong, but
that his mind was unenlightened. And in fair truth, with such limited
views as to the right and wrong in human motive and action as the rude,
narrow sphere in which his lot was cast enabled him to make, what other
course could he in his own judgment have chosen, without dishonor to
himself and injury to the people whose weal he most assuredly had
earnestly at heart. Had his mind--crude as his own wilderness, as vast
too, and as fertile and varied--been duly cultivated and enlightened, he
would not have viewed the progress of civilization as a destroying
flood, against which it behooved him as a patriot to array his people,
lest thereby they be swept away from the earth. Rather would he have
perceived that it was a life-giving, beneficent light, into which it was
his highest duty, as a lover of the great brotherhood of man, to lead
his people, that with it they might spread themselves over the earth,
and in it grow strong and prosperous and happy.

During all this time, though his labors were of a nature to keep the
wrongs and woes of his people and the power and pride of their white
oppressors continually fresh in his mind, never did the savage hero lift
the hand of violence against the aged, the helpless, or the unarmed. To
his magnanimous spirit, Indian heathen though he was, the captive was a
sacred trust, and many a man of the hated race, thrown by the chances of
war within their direful grasp, did he rescue from horrible death at the
hands of his injured and exasperated countrymen. The booty taken by his
hands from the whites in their raids across the border was immense; but
the spoils of war, though he might well have claimed the lion's share,
he left, with magnificent generosity, to his followers--the glory of war
being all that a true hero could covet.

In his habits of life the sachem was abstemious even to austerity, yet
frank end popular in his