LETTER XIV. LEWISTON-VISIT TO THE TUSCARORA VILLAGE-APPEARANCE THEIR ANCIENT Niagara, October, 1818. I CROSSED from Queenston to Lewiston on a very beautiful afternoon shortly before sunset. The current of this river is here very powerful, and although the ferryman, a stout fellow from Ireland, pulled with all his strength against the stream, the boat fell considerably down before we reached the opposite shore. Lewiston enjoys several local advantages, as a point of communication with Canada. It stands at the commencement of the lower navigation of the Niagara; and at the end of the ridge road, which extends in a pretty direct line from the neighbourhood of Canandaigua. This road, as its name imports, traverses an elevated line of rock, and of course is exempt from all the horrors of swamps and log causeways. Lewiston shared deeply in the eventful vicissitudes of last war. It was the head. quarters of the army which crossed to attack General Brock, when that gallant officer fell; towards the latter part of the war it was like Buffalo burned to the ground. Its present appearance does not betoken much wealth in its inhabitants; but the whole of this district, both on the American and British side of the river, exhibits symptoms of considerable exhaustion. After breakfast on Sabbath morning I set out in a small waggon for the Tuscarora village; I had previously ascertained that the Indians did not meet for worship till noon. The village is about four miles from Lewiston, on the south of the ridge road; the log huts are scattered at some little distance from each other, on the brow of the slope which forms the continuation of the heights of Queenston. Leaving the waggon at a small inn by the road side, I entered the first Indian hut and enquired for the church. An old Indian to whom I addressed myself understood my question, but he was able to speak but little English, and his answer was made intelligible more by gestures than by words. Following the path to which he pointed me, I reached after traversing two or three fields a log hut of larger dimensions than the rest, which I could perceive to be the church from a few Indians and others who were beginning to assemble CHURCH-APPEARANCE OF THE TUSCARORAS. 63 about it; the female Indians were all going in, but the men waited outside for the minister's arrival. Seating myself on the trunk of a tree, between a fine looking old Indian and a white man, I looked round with feelings of lively interest on the unwonted scene. Deep forests bounded the prospect in every direction, but for a considerable space around, the axe had been busy, and log huts and rail fences marked the habitations and im provements of man. Fields ripe for harvest, and others already stripped, showed that the red children of the forest had at least to a certain degree abandoned the chase, for the less precarious support of agriculture. There were no reapers however in the fields; the peacefulness of the day of christian rest was not violated in the Indian village, and before me was an humble log hut appropriated to the worship of the christian's God, and to the instruction of the despised aborigines of America. "The sound of the church-going bell" was indeed wanting; but an old Indian at the porch was winding a long blast upon a horn, and as its echoes rung through the woods Indians and white men, old and young, assembled at the sum mons. There was an obvious difference between the appearance of these Indians, and that of the Oneydas and Senecas whom I had previously seen. The scattered remnants of the ancient proprietors of the soil, which are met with here and there in the settlements of the whites, are generally in a state of miserable degradation, and afford no means whatever of correctly appreciating the true Indian character. We might as well estimate Englishmen by the inmates of a bridewell or a convict ship. Idleness and dissipation have ruined all that was noble in this wonderful people. Squalid and dispirited you see them wandering about wrapped in the remains of a dirty blanket, miserable dependants on the bounty of those who have stripped them of their hunting grounds, and almost extirpated their race. "Their spirits are debased by conscious inferiority, and their native courage completely daunted by the superior knowledge and power of their enlightened neighbours. Society has advanced upon them like a many-headed monster, breathing every variety of misery. Before it went forth pestilence, famine and the sword; and in its train came the slow but exterminating curse of trade. What the former did not sweep away, the latter has gradually blighted. It has increased their wants, without increasing the means of gratification. It has enervated their strength, multiplied their diseases, blasted the powers of their mind, and superinduced on their original barbarity the low vices of civilization. Poverty, repining and hopeless poverty-a canker of the mind unknown to sylvan life-corrodes their very hearts. They loiter like vagrants through the settlements, among spacious habitations replete |