Anecdotes of the American Indians, illustrating their eccentricities of character
History
Anecdotes of the American Indians, illustrating their eccentricities of character
Indians of North America -- Anecdotes
over him, and then told the many people, that in heaven they neither
married nor were given in marriage; that the passions of this world,
the wild chase or the warrior’s joy, could never come there; _there_
was neither chieftain nor slave; that in the love of Christ, who was
the resurrection and the life, all these things would be lost. And
they believed him—those fierce and brutal men—and wept, not for the
dead, but for themselves; “so that the woods,” says a gentleman who
was present, “rang with their sighs and prayers;” he also adds these
words,—“God was with Eliot, and the sword of his word will pierce
deep, in the hand of the mighty.” His opinion of the mental powers
of this people was not a very low one:—“There is need,” he says, in
one of his letters, “of learning, in ministers who preach to Indians,
much more than to Englishmen and gracious Christians; for these had
sundry philosophical questions, which some knowledge of the arts must
help to give answer to, and without which they would not have been
satisfied. Worse than Indian ignorance hath blinded their eyes, that
renounce learning as an enemy to gospel ministers.” So acute were many
of the questions proposed by the Indians, and so deeply expressive of
a gentler and better nature, that more than one educated stranger was
induced to attend regularly the assemblies of the missionary.
LOVEWELL’S FIGHT.
Captain John Lovewell, of Dunstable, raised a volunteer company and
met with great success. At one time he fell in with an Indian trail
and pursued it till he discovered them asleep on the bank of a pond.
They were all killed, and their scalps, stretched upon hoops, served to
decorate their triumphal return. They, of course, received the bounty,
which amounted to ten pounds.
(1725.) Lovewell, having augmented his company to 46 men, again set out
with the intention of attacking an Indian town on the Saco. They built
a fort on the Great Ossapy pond, and then proceeded, leaving one of
their number sick, and eight men to guard the fort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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