t missionaries and travellers among these nations
seldom obtain farther access. It is therefore among the better classes
of the Indians that we must search for records, traditions, and laws. As
for their religion, no stranger will ever obtain possession of its
tenets, unless he is cast among them in early life and becomes one
of them.

Let missionaries say what they please in their reports to their
societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended
ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts from
their tribes.

The traditions of the Shoshones fully bear out my opinion that they were
among the earliest of the Asiatic emigrants; they contain histories of
subsequent emigrations, in which they had to fight hard to retain their
lands; of the dispersion of the new emigrants to the north and south; of
the increase of numbers, and breaking up of portions of the tribes, who
travelled away to seek subsistence in the East.

We find, as might be expected, that the traditions of the Eastern
tribes, collected as they have occasionally been previous to their
extinction, are trifling and absurd; and why so? because, driven away to
the east, and finding other tribes of Indians, who had been driven there
before them, already settled there, they have immediately commenced a
life of continual hostility and change of domicile. When people have
thus been occupied for generations in continual warfare and change, it
is but natural to suppose that in such a life of constant action they
have had no time to transmit then traditions, and that ultimately they
have been lost to the tribe.

We must then look for records in those quarters where the population has
remained stationary for ages. It must be in the south-west of Oregon,
and in the northern parts of Upper California and Sonora, that the
philosopher must obtain the eventful history of vast warlike nations, of
their rise and of their fall. The western Apaches or the Shoshones, with
their antiquities and ruins of departed glory, will unfold to the
student's mind long pages of a thrilling interest, while in their
metaphors and rich phraseology, the linguist, learned in Asiatic lore,
will easily detect their ancient origin.

It is remarkable to observe, how generally traditions and records will
spread and be transmitted among nations destitute of the benefits of the
art of printing. In Europe, the mass were certainly better acquainted
with their ancient hist