y. Elijah, who still
retained the imitative sense and adaptability to surroundings which
belong to most lazy, impressible natures, and in striped yellow and
vermilion features looked the chief he personated, met the agent with
silent and becoming gravity. The council was carried on by signs.
Never before had an Indian treaty been entered into with such perfect
knowledge of the intentions and designs of the whites by the Indians,
and such profound ignorance of the qualities of the Indians by the
whites. It need scarcely be said that the treaty was an unquestionable
Indian success. They did not give up their arable lands; what they did
sell to the agent they refused to exchange for extravagant-priced shoddy
blankets, worthless guns, damp powder, and mouldy meal. They took pay in
dollars, and were thus enabled to open more profitable commerce with the
traders at the settlements for better goods and better bargains; they
simply declined beads, whiskey, and Bibles at any price. The result
was that the traders found it profitable to protect them from their
countrymen, and the chances of wantonly shooting down a possible
valuable customer stopped the old indiscriminate rifle-practice.
The Indians were allowed to cultivate their fields in peace. Elijah
purchased for them a few agricultural implements. The catching, curing,
and smoking of salmon became an important branch of trade. They waxed
prosperous and rich; they lost their nomadic habits--a centralized
settlement bearing the external signs of an Indian village took the
place of their old temporary encampments, but the huts were internally
an improvement on the old wigwams. The dried fish were banished from the
tent-poles to long sheds especially constructed for that purpose. The
sweat-house was no longer utilized for worldly purposes. The wise and
mighty Elijah did not attempt to reform their religion, but to preserve
it in its integrity.

That these improvements and changes were due to the influence of one man
was undoubtedly true, but that he was necessarily a superior man did
not follow. Elijah's success was due partly to the fact that he had been
enabled to impress certain negative virtues, which were part of his own
nature, upon a community equally constituted to receive them. Each was
strengthened by the recognition in each other of the unexpected value of
those qualities; each acquired a confidence begotten of their success.
"He-hides-his-face," as Elijah Martin was