provided with two
types simple and well defined, which represent the abnormally good on
the one hand and the inconceivably bad on the other. The Indian hero
is a person of phenomenal nobility of character, and of an
ability which would do credit to the training of a highly refined
civilization. He is the product of the orator, the novelist, or the
philanthropist, and has but slight and distant relation to facts. The
usual type, however, and the one which has entered most largely into
the popular mind, is the Indian villain. He is portrayed invariably
as cunning, treacherous, cruel, and cowardly, without any relieving
quality. In this there is of course much truth. As a matter of fact,
Indians are cunning, treacherous, and cruel, but they are also bold
fighters. The leading idea of the Indian that has come down from
Cooper's time, and which depicts him as a "cowardly redskin," unable
to stand for a moment against a white man in fair fight, is a complete
delusion designed to flatter the superior race. It has been in a large
measure dissipated by Parkman's masterly histories, but the ideas born
of popular fiction die hard. They are due in part to the theory that
cruelty implies cowardice, just as we say that a bully must be a
coward, another mistaken bit of proverbial wisdom.

As a matter of fact, the records show that the North American Indian
is one of the most remarkable savage warriors of whom we have any
knowledge; and the number of white men killed for each Indian slain
in war exhibits an astonishing disproportion of loss. Captain James
Smith, for many years a captive, and who figured in most of the
campaigns of the last century, estimated that fifty of our people were
killed to one of theirs. This of course includes women and children;
and yet even in the battle of the Big Kanawha, the Virginia riflemen,
although they defeated the Indians with an inferior force, lost two
to one, and a similar disproportion seems to have continued to the
present day.

The Indian, moreover, not only fought well and to the death, if
surrounded, but he had a discipline and plan of battle which were
most effective for the wilderness. It seems probable that, if the
experiment had been properly tried, the Indians might have been turned
into better soldiers than the famous Sikhs; and the French, who
used the red men skillfully, if without much discipline, found them
formidable and effective allies. They cut off more than one English
and