E-text prepared by Olaf Voss, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Or, Adventures of Prairie Life
by
Unenlightened man—
A savage, roaming through the woods and wilds
In quest of prey, and with th' unfashiomed fur
Bough clad.
At the period when "Nick of the Woods" was written, the genius ofChateaubriand and of Cooper had thrown a poetical illusion over theIndian character; and the red men were presented—almost stereotyped inthe popular mind—as the embodiments of grand and tender sentiment—a newstyle of the beau-ideal—brave, gentle, loving, refined, honourable,romantic personages—nature's nobles, the chivalry of the forest. Itmay be submitted that such are not the lineaments of the race—thatthey never were the lineaments of any race existing in an uncivilisedstate—indeed, could not be—and that such conceptions as Atala andUncas are beautiful unrealities and fictions merely, as imaginary andcontrary to nature as the shepherd swains of the old pastoral school ofrhyme and romance; at all events, that one does not find beings of thisclass, or any thing in the slightest degree resembling them, among thetribes now known to travellers and legislators. The Indian is doubtless agentleman; but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt, and livesa very miserable life, having nothing to employ him or keep him aliveexcept the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt—which wedignify with the name of war. The writer differed from his criticalfriends, and from many philanthropists, in believing the Indian to becapable—perfectly capable, where restraint assists the work of friendlyinstruction—of civilisation: the Choctaws and Cherokees, and theancient Mexicans and Peruvians, prove it; but, in his natural barbaricstate, he is a barbarian—and it is not possible he could be anythingelse. The purposes of the author, in his book, confined him to realIndians. He drew them as, in his judgment, they existed—and as,according to all observation, they still exist wherever not softened bycultivation,—ignorant, violent, debased, brutal; he drew them, too, asthey appeared, and still appear, in war—or the scalp-hunt—when all theworst deformities of the savage temperament receive their strongest andfiercest development.
Having, therefore, no other, and certainly no worse, desire than to makehis delineations in this regard as correct and true to nature as hecould, it was with no little surprise he found himself taken to accountby some of the critical gentry, on the charge of entertaining the humanedesign of influencing the passions of his countrymen against the remnantof an unfortunate race, with a view of excusing the wrongs done to it bythe whites, if not of actually hastening the period of that "finaldestruction" which it pleases so many men, against all probability, ifnot against all possibility, to predict as a certain future event. Hadthe accusation been confined to the reviewers, he might not, perhaps,have thought it safe to complain; but currency was given to it in aquarter which renders a disclaimer the more reasonable or the lesspresumptuous. One may contend with a brother author who dares not resistthe verdict of the critics. In the English edition of the novel,published at the same time as the American, in a preface furnished by Mr.Ainsworth, the distinguished author of "Rookwood," "Crichton," &c. &c.,to whom he is indebted for many polite and