Exactly what the religion of the Indians was it would be hard to say. To arrange their fluctuating and hazy ideas into a system would be impossible. Whatever the real mental value of their words “manitou” and “wakan,” or other terms implying deity, or simply used to cover ignorance or express mystery, it is evident that the blind worship of force was the essence of their faith. Living much nearer to the animal creation than the civilized man, they were prone to recognize in the brute either a close kinship or an incarnation of divine power. Extremes meet. The current if not the final philosophy of the scientific mind in our century, and that of the savage, have many points in common. All animated life was linked together, but the red man saw the presence of the deity of his conception in every mysterious movement of animate or inanimate things. Even the rattlesnake was the bearer of bane or blessing according as it was treated. Alexander Henry, the traveller from Philadelphia, relates that on meeting a snake four or five feet long, which he would have killed, the Iroquois reverently called it “grandfather,” blew their tobacco smoke in puffs toward it to please the reptile, and prayed to it to influence Colonel Johnson “to take care of their families during their absence, to show them charity, and to fill their canoes with rum.” When, afterward, they were on the lake and a storm arose, Henry came very near being made a Jonah to appease the wrath of the rattlesnake-manitou, but fortunately the tempest passed and it cleared off. The Indians invented the birch or elm bark canoe, the racket or snow-shoe, the moccasin, all of which the white frontiersmen were quick to utilize when they saw their value. They also taught the settlers the use of new kinds of food, and how to get it from the soil or the water. To tread out eels from the mud, catch fish with the hand or with fish-hooks of bone, and to till the ground, even in the forest, for maize, squashes and pumpkins, were lessons learned from the red man. Frontier and savage life had many points in common, and not a little Indian blood entered into the veins of Americans. There were hundreds of instances of women as well as men rescued from their supposed low estate as captives who preferred to remain with the Indians in savage life. Often white settlers were saved from death by starvation by friendly red men or half-breeds; while half the plots of the savages failed because of the warnings given by friendly squaws, or boys who were usually not full-blooded.