the characters of these groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and
adventurous warriors. It was inevitable that they should borrow many
traits from their savage friends and neighbors. Hospitable, but bigoted
to their old customs, ignorant, indolent, and given to drunkenness, they
spoke a corrupt jargon of the French tongue; the common people were even
beginning to give up reckoning time by months and years, and dated
events, as the Indians did, with reference to the phenomena of nature,
such as the time of the floods, the maturing of the green corn, or the
ripening of the strawberries.[33] All their attributes seemed alien to
the polished army-officers of old France;[34] they had but little more
in common with the latter than with the American backwoodsmen. But they
had kept many valuable qualities, and, in especial, they were brave and
hardy, and, after their own fashion, good soldiers. They had fought
valiantly beside King Louis' musketeers, and in alliance with the
painted warriors of the forest; later on they served, though perhaps
with less heart, under the gloomy ensign of Spain, shared the fate of
the red-coated grenadiers of King George, or followed the lead of the
tall Kentucky riflemen.

1. "Travels by William Bartram," Philadelphia, 1791, pp. 184, 231, 232,
etc. The various Indian names are spelt in a dozen different ways.

2. Reise, etc. (in 1783 and 84), by Johann David Schopf, 1788, II. 362.
The Minorcans were the most numerous and prosperous; then came the
Spaniards, with a few creoles, English, and Germans.

3. J. D. F. Smyth, "Tour in the United States" (1775), London, 1784,
II., 35.

4. _Do_.