The Caughnawagas, however, were surrounded by cheap and useless possessions acquired from the white man, so that their houses were cluttered with trash. In place of furs, they used tawdry calicoes and stamped cloths. The garments of the men were incongruous, and worn without rhyme or reason—buckled shoes with the toes slashed to give the feet greater freedom; breeches without stockings; shirts hanging outside the breeches; shapeless beaver hats, too small for the wearers, tilted forward on long and greasy hair; cinnamon-colored coats disgustingly wrinkled and spotted.

I know now that this happens to all Indians, with a few exceptions, when they have the benefit of the white man’s civilization, religion and education. It was as Verrieul said: the closer they are to civilization, the worse they become. Good Indians, he insisted, grew constantly fewer in number, and those who are avaricious, treacherous, debauched, diseased and brandy-ridden multiply like rabbits. The same state of affairs, I find, is likely to occur among whites who are encouraged, as Indians have always been, to expect gifts and to be free with brandy.

The Caughnawagas who greeted us when our canoe landed remembered Verrieul and were overjoyed to see him. They led us at once to the house of Mr. Tarbull, the oldest chief among the Caughnawagas.

That was how he was called—Mr. Tarbull. He was an old man, decently dressed in buckskin. His hair was white and he himself nearly so. He had been captured by Indians, he told us, seventy-five years before, in the town of Groton. He asked, from time to time, whether any of us had ever been in Groton, and although we always said No, he hopefully continued to ask the same question.

With Mr. Tarbull lived his son, Captain Phillips, and his grandson, John Phillips, and a number of female relatives, all of whom had Indian blood. Captain Phillips had a shifty eye; and I gathered that he would accept military titles or gifts from English, French and Americans, indiscriminately, and fight for or against any or all of them on the following day, provided he happened to feel like fighting.

The grandson, John Phillips, had an open admiration for Verrieul. He too had been to Dartmouth College, though from his dress and behavior nobody would have suspected he had ever been ten feet from Caughnawaga—and that, too, I discovered, was another Indian peculiarity. No matter how much they might be educated to follow the customs of the white man, they never permanently acquired those customs. In Dartmouth, Verrieul said, Indians behaved like white men much of the time, but when they went back to their own people, they instantly became Indians again, not only in the way they acted, but in the way they thought.

A dozen young men came to speak to Verrieul; and though all of them had been his fellow-students at Dartmouth, they would have been unhesitatingly called savages by the sorriest fisherman in Arundel.