Their literary faculty is further demonstrated in the copiousness of their vocabularies, their rare facility of expression, and their natural aptitude for the acquisition of other languages. Theophilie Gautier used to say, that the most profitable book for a professional writer to read is the dictionary; that is, that a mastery of words is his most valuable acquirement. The extraordinarily rich synonomy of some American tongues, notably the Algonkin, the Aztec, and the Qquichua, attests how sedulously their resources have been cultivated. Father Olmos, in his grammar of the Aztec, gives many examples of twenty and thirty synonymous expressions, all in current use in his day. A dictionary, in my possession, of the Maya, one of the least plastic of American tongues, gives over thirty thousand words, and scarcely a hundred of them of foreign extraction.
This linguistic facility is shown also in the ease with which they acquire foreign languages. "It is not uncommon," says Dr. Washington Matthews, speaking of the Hidatsa, by no means a specially brilliant tribe, "to find persons among them, some even under twenty years of age, who can speak fluently four or five different languages."[3] Mr. Stephen Powers tells us that, in California, he found many Indians speaking three, four, five or more languages, generally including English;[4] and in South America, both Humboldt and D'Orbigny express their surprise at the same fact, which they repeatedly observed.[5]
But the most tangible evidence of both their linguistic and literary ability is the work some of these natives have accomplished in European tongues. It does not come within the limits of my plan to enter fully into an examination of this branch of literature; but it is worth while mentioning some of the more prominent native writers, who have composed in European languages, as their productions are an easy test of what the faculties of the red race are in this direction.
As the colonizers of the New World have been chiefly from Spain and Great Britain, so naturally the English and Spanish languages have been brought most widely to the knowledge of the natives. The half-civilized tribes, within the area of the United States, have produced several authors of merit. Perhaps the earliest of these was David Cusick, who, in 1825, printed his _Ancient History of the Six Nations_. He was a full blood Tuscarora, and his English is far from correct. Yet the arrangement of his matter is skillful, and some passages quaintly vivid and forcible. Another member of the Iroquois confederacy, Peter Dooyentate Clarke, has taken up the _Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts_, and has made a readable little book (published at Toronto, 1870); while still more lately, Chief Elias Johnson, of the Tuscaroras, has published a _History of the Six Nations_, very creditably composed. (Lockport, 1881.)