184 EUROPEAN OBSERVATIONS.

heated for the next day’s use by the Great Manitou.
They all spoke the same language then and resolved
amongst themselves to preserve the chain of alliance in
such a manner, that no time should be able to extinguish
them as one people. They collected together in the West,
and divided the country into districts, and these were al-
lotted to Chiefs and Leaders, during the war with the
pre-occupying natives, and their descendants are now the
various nations of red men.

No people in the world have ever, probably, go com-
pletely mingled up their early history in fictions and
allegories, types and symbols, as the red men of this con-
tinent. Making but little difference between the sym-
bolic and the hostorical, they have left very little distinc-
tion to mark the true from the false. Our notions of a
Deity, founded, apparently, upon some original truth, is
go subtile, and divisible, and establish such a confused
admixture of spirit and matter in every shape, that popu-
lar belief seems to have entirely confounded the possible
with the impossible, and the natural with the super-

natural.
“’Tis a history
Handed from ages down; a nurse’s tale,
Which children, open-ey'd and mouth’d, devour;