As a rule the one does not know what the other is thinking
about. When Mr. Hamilton Gushing a few years ago took some of his Zuni
friends into a hotel in Chicago, they marvelled at his entering such a
mighty palace with so little ceremony, and their wonder was heightened
at the promptness with which "slaves" came running at his beck and call;
but all at once, on seeing an American eagle over one of the doorways,
they felt that the mystery was solved. Evidently this palace was the
communal dwelling of the Eagle Clan of palefaces, and evidently Mr.
Gushing was a great sachem of this clan, and as such entitled to lordly
sway there! The Zunis are not savages, but representatives of a remote
and primitive phase of what Mr. Morgan calls the middle status of
barbarism. The gulf between their thinking and that of white men is
wide because there is a wide gulf between the experience of the two.
[Sidenote: Difficulty of the situation in New England] [Sidenote: It is
hard for the savage and the civilized man to understand one another]
This illustration may help us to understand an instance in which the
Indians of New England must inevitably have misinterpreted the actions
of the white settlers and read them in the light of their uneasy fears
and prejudices. I refer to the work of the apostle Eliot.
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