e among the American Indians as a
race.

Thus, even though it be contrary to the general judgment, it appears
that we should be justified in pronouncing the morality of the Indian
race, judged by their standards and not by those of our civilization, to
have been of at least average excellence. With the coming of the white
men, however, this state of affairs altered rapidly for the worse. Stern
moralists as the Puritans may have been in theory, they were not always
so in practice; and Antinomianism, at one time so prevalent among them,
may have had much for which to answer. If the cold Puritans were not
guiltless in this wise, what could be expected from the Cavaliers or the
warm-blooded sons of France? The theory of King James and his
councillors, that marriages with Indian maidens would be desirable, was
put into at least semi-practice in many of the colonies, and the
relations thus established were not continued strictly "under the rose."
The consequence of this immorality on the part of the Caucasians, who
were held at first by the Indians as a superior race in all ways,
reacted upon the aboriginal thought, and the standard of morality became
lowered among the redskins, particularly among their women. Here also we
find a cause of the retrogression of the Indian woman in all ways.

It is, however, a curious fact that in one instance white immorality was
the cause of great and lasting benefit to a white nation. After the
occupation of North America by the English and French had become a
settled fact, and while there was yet dispute between the two nations
for dominance on the continent, there arose among the Indians a man of
wonderful ability and wide influence over his race. He was an Ottawa,
Pontiac by name; and though by right chief of only his own tribe, he had
before long brought many other tribes to acknowledge him as their head.
Soon after the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham, the
English took possession of Detroit, until then held by the French, and
the Indians in the vicinity soon found cause to complain most bitterly
of the change in the masters of the region. Pontiac assembled the
neighboring tribes and proposed to drive the English from the country.
He believed, and not impossibly with reason, that if the British were
dealt a severe blow by the Indians, the French, notwithstanding their
recent discomfiture and the treaty of peace, would finish the work; and
as a preliminary step he proposed to