early character made himself the
greatest of representative Americans.

The character of the Dunkard, or Tunker, as a wandering school-master,
may be new to many readers. Such missionaries of the forests and
prairies have now for the most part disappeared, but they did a useful
work among the pioneer settlements on the Ohio and Illinois Rivers. In
this case we present him as a disciple of Pestalozzi and a friend of
Froebel, and as one who brings the German methods of story-telling into
his work.

"Was there ever so good an Indian as Umatilla?" asks an accomplished
reviewer of the "Log School-House on the Columbia." The chief whose
heroic death in the grave of his son is recorded in that volume did not
receive the full measure of credit for his devotion, for he was really
buried _alive_ in the grave of his boy. A like question may be asked in
regard to the father of Waubeno in this volume. We give the story very
much as Black Hawk himself related it. In Drake's History of the Indians
we find it related in the following manner:

"It is related by Black Hawk, in his Life, that some time before the War
of 1812 one of the Indians had killed a Frenchman at Prairie des Chiens.
'The British soon after took him prisoner, and said they would shoot him
next day. His family were encamped a short distance below the mouth of
the Ouisconsin. He begged permission to go and see them that night, as
he was _to die the next day_. They permitted him to go, after promising
to return the next morning by sunrise. He visited his family, which
consisted of a wife and six children. I can not describe their meeting
and parting to be understood by the whites, as it appears that their
feelings are acted upon by certain rules laid down by their
_preachers_!--while ours are governed only by the monitor within us. He
parted from his wife and children, hurried through the prairie to the
fort, and arrived in time. The soldiers were ready, and immediately
_marched out and shot him down_!' If this were not cold-blooded,
deliberate murder on the part of the whites I have no conception of what
constitutes that crime. What were the circumstances of the murder we are
not informed; but whatever they may have been, they can not excuse a
still greater barbarity."

It belongs, like the story of so-called Umatilla in the "Log
School-House on the Columbia," to a series of great legends of Indian
character which the poet's pen and the artist's brush would do well