The European and the Indian

 Excerpts from The European and the Indian, James Axtell, Oxford University Press (1981)

". . . they [Indians] seem to have an insurmountable aversion to labour; and though they discover some energy in the chase, wholly want it in husbandry and the arts of life."  So tempting was the native way of life that many Indian converts apostatized because, as the English admitted, “they can live with less labour, and more pleasure and plenty, as Indians, than they can with us.”  In fact, one of the reasons given by colonists who either ran away to the Indians or refused to return from captivity was that amongst the Indians they enjoyed the “most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.” (Axtell, 49)

Ben Franklin wondered that

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first Opportunity of escaping again in the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.  (Axtell, 172)