Freedom of limb and strength of mind eliminated much disease from the native races. Deformity amongst Amerinds was rare. There were seldom cases of diseased spine, blindness, insanity, squinting eyes, deafness, or any deficiency or excess of the organs.[312] Sitting Bull was a fine specimen of the Amerind, and he was a man of great ability. Such men could not be enslaved, and from the first the European efforts to reduce the red race to slavery were failures. They held their own in most localities, and often compelled governments to treat with them as with a sovereign power. Where the treaties were kept by the other side the Amerind seldom violated them. Penn never had any difficulty because he treated the Amerinds fairly and honourably. Oñate, in his long journey across Arizona, had no conflict with the natives, but found them without exception friendly, and this was the experience of other explorers who were just. The native was a child. He expected absolute fidelity and truthfulness from the whites, though he did not always give this in return; once let him detect prevarication or deceit, and his confidence vanished. He never forgave a white man for talking “crooked,” and those who have been invariably truthful and honourable toward him have commanded trust and respect. I know two men who had great influence over the Navajos because they had always been fair and just to them. “We call them cruel,” says George Bancroft, “yet they never invented the thumb-screw, or the boot, or the rack, or broke on the wheel, or exiled bands of their nations for opinion’s sake; and never protected the monopoly of a medicine man by the gallows, or the block, or by fire. There is not a quality belonging to the white man which did not also belong to the American savage; there is not among the aborigines a rule of language, a custom, or an institution which when considered in its principle has not a counterpart among their conquerors.”[313] Throughout the continent there was a general homogeneity of customs and ceremonies which separates the Amerindian races from the rest of the world, and argues an immense period of isolation from all other people. [Illustration: A PAWNEE IN BATTLE ARRAY Photographed by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geological Survey ]