instituted as a pure amusement, and as one of the means of quickening and strengthening the body, and accustoming the young warriors to close combat. It was emphatically a sport, and brought out the very finest physical attributes of the finest made men in the world,—the impetuosity and vigor of a wild nature let loose; and compelled its votaries, in its intense exercise, to stretch every power to the greatest extreme.
The hunters and warriors looked and longed for the grand anniversaries, when through dense forests, and in bark canoes, hundreds would return from the chase and the war-path to be present at the Lacrosse tournaments. Among some tribes, ball-play was, as Basil Hall tells us, "the chief object of their lives," so absorbed were they in its excitement; and in every tribe it developed an amount of splendid physical energy sufficient to have made their race masters of this continent for ever, had mind not been so entirely subservient to body, nor destiny so inevitably pointed against them.
All the education of an Indian from the cradle to manhood tended to physical development and inurement; and however much we may pity the strapped
