d that
could never come true.

INDIANS

There was not a boy in the Boy's Town who would not gladly have turned
from the town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in
every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of
refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close
to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys'
fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned
in the boys' hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the
woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any
rate, that was their ideal, and they were always talking among
themselves of how they would go farther West when they grew up, and be
trappers and hunters. I do not remember any boy but one who meant to be
a sailor; they lived too hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the
boy who invented the marine-engine governor, and who wished to be a
pirate, would just as soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those
days Oregon had just been opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to
go and live in Oregon, where you could stand in your door and shoot deer
and wild turkey, while a salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging
away at the line you had set in the river that ran before the
log-cabin.

If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anything
else, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they were
willing to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixed
mind about them in the mean time, but perhaps they were not unlike other
idolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they came
pretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer than
they knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites and
the Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to be
British when there were Americans on the other side; in either case you
had to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of some
time seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in the
circus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of them
dreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was at
the arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from the
Wyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the State, on their way
to new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys' fathers must have known