5. As a conclusion, therefore, I am forced to recognize that, in a much larger measure than we are ready to admit, our educational system is superficial, is a cramming process instead of a drawing-out--_educere_, educational--process, and no education so-called can be really effective, really helpful, that thus inverts the natural requirements of the mind. And that, when our system ignores the physical health of the student, no matter what his age, it is a criminal, a wicked, a wasteful system that had better speedily be reformed or abolished. All these ideas are practically the result of my association with the Indian and watching his methods of instruction. His life and that of his family out of doors color all that he and they learn. I think it was John Brisbane Walker who once wrote a story, when he edited and owned the _Cosmopolitan_, about some college men, thoroughly educated in the academic sense, who were shipwrecked at sea. He showed the helplessness and hopelessness of their case because of their inability to take hold and do things. The Indian can turn his hand to anything. When out of doors few things can feaze him. He knows how to build a fire in the rain, where to sleep in a storm, how to track a runaway animal, how to trap fish, flesh, or fowl, where to look for seeds, nuts, berries, or roots, how to hobble a horse when he has no rope,--that is, how to make a rope from cactus thongs, how to picket a horse where there is no tree, bush, fence, bowlder, nor _anything_ to which to tie it. What college man knows how to picket a horse to a hole in the ground? Yet I have seen an Indian do it, and have done it myself several times.[3] He knows how to find water when there is none in sight and the _educated_ white man is perishing for want of it, and he knows a thousand and one things that a white man never knows. [3] See “Indians of the Painted Desert Region,” Little, Brown, & Company, p. 15. As I shall show in the chapter on the Indian and art work, the Indian basket-weaver far surpasses the white woman of college education in invention of art-form, artistic design, variety of stitch or weave, color harmonies, and digital dexterity, or ability to compel the fingers and hands to obey the dictates of the brain. Education is by no means a matter of book-learning. It is a discipline of the eye, the hand, the muscles, the nerves, the whole body, to obey the dictates of the highest judgment, to the end that the best life, the happiest, the healthiest, and the most useful, may be attained, and if this definition be at all a true one I am fully satisfied that if we injected into our methods of civilized education a solution of three-fifths of Indian methods we should give to our race an immeasurably greater happiness, greater health, and greater usefulness. CHAPTER XII THE INDIAN AND HOSPITALITY