vilized
races are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do,
and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories
as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same
under all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the books of a
man who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number of
works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under
the auspices of the United States Government. This expert--Henry R.
Schoolcraft--was member of so many learned societies that it takes
twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly
assures us[196] that "the value of these traditionary stories appears
to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in
their original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inference
being an assurance that he has so left them; and he adds that in the
collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great
advantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for the
tribes, and a knowledge of their languages.

And now, having given the enemy's battle-ship every possible
advantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my little
torpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (_A.R_., I., 56)
twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect and
interpret the material of the tales united in his volumes; but he does
not tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on the
principle that these stories could claim absolutely no _scientific_
value unless they were verbatim reports of aboriginal tales, _without
any additions and sentimental embroideries by the compilers_. This
omission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to the
value of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, and
allowing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality and
expression of an Indian's love.

Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales
for the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentiments
which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign
to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more
have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, or
the essays of Emerson. In the stories of "The Red Lover," "The Buffalo
King," and "The Haunted Grove,"[197] I have italicized a few of these
suspicious passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is abs