Among those tribes which have been placed in contact with the Whites, individuals, generally Chiefs, have acquired all the advantages of a European education, to which in most of these instances are united, dignified and gentlemanlike feelings and manners, qualities which seem to belong to the native American character. Some tribes have been nearly extipated by the use of fermented liquors. But some sections of the Indian population have been converted to Christianity, and adopted the habit of total abstinence; others have become industrious cultivators of the soil. Where this race has rejected the benefits of civilization, it seems almost invariably to have arisen from the prejudices naturally excited in their minds by the vices of the worst part of the white population, and the calamities which they have caused by the introduction of ardent spirits! Even those excellent men who have devoted their lives to the religious instruction of the Indians, and by whose efforts it may be inferred that some Tribes have been saved from extinction, have too often found in these prejudices, an obstacle which might perhaps be removed were the missionaries generally to commence by offering to teach some of the simplest arts of civilized life—information of which the benefits would be immediately appreciated—as a means of paving the way for obtaining that confidence which, as religious instructors, they require. The life of constant war and peril to which the Indians are exposed is incompatible with _actual_ Social advancement. But proofs of a spontaneous _tendency_ to civilization may be gleaned, as I conceive, from the grace and tastefulness of their dresses—the beautiful lodges many of the Tribes build—and other indications, &c. But of this truth, a still more decisive example occurs, as I venture to think, in the account given by Mr. Catlin of a very interesting tribe, the Mandans, whom, from the evidence of language already noticed and other considerations, he has conjectured to be descendants of Madoc’s Colony, and whose personal character and appearance he thus describes: