The Indian shows no want of acuteness in detecting the characteristic vices, whether real or imaginary, of the civilized world.
“On one occasion, when I had interrogated a Sioux chief, on the Upper Missouri, about their government, their punishments, and tortures of prisoners, for which I had freely condemned them for the cruelty of practice, he took occasion, when I had got through, to ask me some questions relative to modes in the civilized world. He told me he had often heard that white people hung their criminals by the neck and choked them to death like dogs, and those their own people; to which I answered ‘Yes.’ He then told me he had learned that they shut each other up in prisons, where they keep them a great part of their lives because they can’t pay money! I replied in the affirmative to this, which occasioned great surprise and excessive laughter even amongst the women! He told me that he had been to our Fort at Council Bluffs, where we had a great many warriors and braves, and he saw three of them taken out on the prairies and tied to a post and whipped almost to death; and he had been told that they submit to all this to get a little money!
“He put to me a chapter of other questions as to the trespasses (of the Whites) on their lands, their continual corruption of the morals of their women, and digging open the Indian’s graves to get their bones, &c. To all of which I was compelled to reply in the affirmative, and quite glad to close my note book, and quietly to escape from the throng that had collected around me, and saying (though to myself and silently), that these and a hundred others are vices that belong to the civilized world, and are practised upon (but certainly in no instance reciprocated by) ‘the cruel and relentless’ savage!”
It is probable that the finer features of the North American Indian character may be ascribed in a great measure to the elevated nature of their religious belief, which indisputably appears to be quite free from the loathsome and debasing idolatry of the Hindoos and other pagan nations of the Old World.
“I fearlessly assert to the world (and I defy contradiction), that the North American Indian is everywhere in his native state a highly moral and religious being, endowed by his Maker with an intuitive knowledge of some great Author of his being and the universe, in dread of whose displeasure he constantly lives, with the apprehension before him of a future state, where he expects to be rewarded or punished according to the merits he has gained or forfeited in this world.”