es, and take many scalps, was the height of an
Indian's bliss. Curious to say, the Indians took little precautions to
guard against such surprises, but thought they were protected by their
manitous or guardian spirits.

A spirit of materialism prevailed in all their superstitions. They had
no conception of one all-pervading, omniscient divine being, governing
and watching over humanity, when the missionaries first came among
them. It was only by making use of their belief in the existence of a
supreme chief for every race of animals, that the priests could lead
their converts to the idea of a Great Spirit who ruled all creation.
In their original state of savagery or barbarism, any conception an
Indian might have of a supernatural being superior to himself was
frittered away by his imagining that the whole material world was under
the influence of innumerable mysterious {126} powers. In the stirring
of the leaves, in the glint of the sunbeam amid the foliage, in the
shadow on his path, in the flash of the lightning, in the crash of the
thunder, in the roar of the cataract, in the colours of the rainbow, in
the very beat of his pulse, in the leap of the fish, in the flight of
the birds, he saw some supernatural power to be evoked. The Indian
companions of Champlain, we remember, threw tobacco to the genius or
Manitou of the great fall of the Ottawa. The Manitou of the
Algonquins, and the Okies or Otkons of the Hurons and Iroquois were not
always superior, mysterious beings endowed with supernatural powers,
like the Algonquin Manabozho, the Great Hare, the king of all animals;
or a deified hero, like Hiawatha, the founder of the Iroquois
confederacy, and Glooscap, the favourite of Micmac legends. The
Manitou or Oki might even be a stone, a fish-bone, a bird's feather, or
a serpent's skin, or some other thing in the animate or inanimate
world, revealed to a young man in his dreams as his fetich or guardian
through life. Dreams were respected as revelations from the spirit
world. As Champlain tells us, during his first expedition to Lake
Champlain, the Indians always questioned him as to his dreams, and at
last he was able to tell them that he had seen in a vision some
Iroquois drowning in the lake, and wished to help them, but was not
permitted to do so by the Indians of his own party. This dream, in
their opinion, was a portent in their favour.

A fetich became at last even the object of an Indian's worship--to