Where a community is also limited in
number, and forms one great patriarchal family, as in an Indian
tribe, the injury of an individual is the injury of the whole,
and the sentiment of vengeance is almost instantaneously
diffused. One council-fire is sufficient for the discussion and
arrangement of a plan of hostilities. Here all the fighting-men
and sages assemble. Eloquence and superstition combine to inflame
the minds of the warriors. The orator awakens their martial
ardor, and they are wrought up to a kind of religious desperation
by the visions of the prophet and the dreamer.
An instance of one of those sudden exasperations, arising from a
motive peculiar to the Indian character, is extant in an old
record of the early settlement of Massachusetts. The planters of
Plymouth had defaced the monuments of the dead at Passonagessit,
and had plundered the grave of the Sachem's mother of some skins
with which it had been decorated. The Indians are remarkable for
the reverence which they entertain for the sepulchres of their
kindred. Tribes that have passed generations exiled from the
abodes of their ancestors, when by chance they have been
travelling in the vicinity, have been known to turn aside from
the highway, and, guided by wonderfully accurate tradition, have
crossed the country for miles to some tumulus, buried perhaps in
woods, where the bones of their tribe were anciently deposited,
and there have passed hours in silent meditation.
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