Читать книгу A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie онлайн

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Noel M. Loomis.

Minneapolis, Minn., Aug. 25, 1956.

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John Tanner, whose life and adventures are detailed in the following pages, is now about fifty years of age. His person is erect and rather robust, indicating great hardiness, activity, and strength, which, however, his numerous exposures and sufferings have deeply impaired. His face, which was originally rather handsome, bears now numerous traces of thought and passion, as well as of age; his quick and piercing blue eyes, bespeak the stern, the violent, and unconquerable spirit, which rendered him an object of fear to many of the Indians while he remained among them, and which still, in some measure, disqualifies him for that submissive and compliant manner which his dependent situation among the whites renders necessary. Carefully instructed in early youth, in all those principles and maxims which constitute the moral code of the unsophisticated and uncorrupted Indians, his ideas of right and wrong, of honourable and dishonourable, differ, of course, very essentially from those of white men. His isolated and friendless situation, in the midst of a community where the right of private warfare is recognized as almost the only defence of individual possessions, the only barrier between man and man, was certainly in the highest degree unfavourable to the formation of that enduring and patient submissiveness, which, in civilized societies, surrenders so great a share of individual rights to the strong guardianship of the law. Accordingly, to a correct sense of natural justice, he unites a full share of that indomitable and untiring spirit of revenge, so prominent in the Indian character. The circumstances into which he has been thrown, among a wild and lawless race, have taught him to consider himself, in all situations, the avenger of his own quarrel; and if, in the better regulated community into which he has been recently drawn, he has, by the consciousness of aggravated insult, or intolerable oppression, been driven to seek redress, or to propose it to himself, we cannot be surprised that he should have recurred to the method, which long habit, and the paramount influence of established custom, have taught him to consider the only honourable and proper one. He returns to the pale of civilization too late in life to acquire the mental habits which befit his new situation. It is to be regretted that he should ever meet among us with those so destitute of generosity as to be willing to take advantage of his unavoidable ignorance of the usages of civilized society. He has ever been found just and generous, until injuries or insults have aroused the spirit of hatred and revenge; his gratitude has always been as ardent and persevering as his resentment. But it would be superfluous to dwell on the features of his character, which are best displayed in his narrative of those events and scenes, to which he might, with so much propriety, apply the hackneyed motto,