The contents of the present volume, from the pen of the celebrated Missionary of the Rocky Mountains, will be found, by the reader, to be fraught with extraordinary interest. The manners and customs of the North American Indians—their traditions, their superstitions, their docility in admitting the maxims of the gospel, and the edifying lives of thousands who have received the grace of baptism and instruction, are described with a freshness of coloring, and an exactness of detail, that will render them invaluable not only to our own times, but, especially, to posterity. He travels through those vast and unexplored deserts, not merely as a missionary, filled with the zeal which characterized the apostles of the primitive Society to which he belongs, but with the eye of a poet, and an imagination glowing with a bright yet calm enthusiasm. Hence the exquisite descriptions of scenery, of incidents, of events; descriptions which breathe the spirit of a mind imbued with the loftiest conceptions of nature, and chastened with the sacred influences of faith.
{xii} The reverend author having, before his recent departure for his native land, left the supervision of this work to my care, I feel bound, in justice to his modesty, to state, that the Introduction, taken from the Catholic Almanac, is not from his pen: and he is not, therefore, accountable for the epithets of praise (so eminently deserved, and yet so repugnant to his humility), which, through it, are occasionally coupled with his name.
The lithographic sketches that accompany this Volume, are copied from the original drawings of the Reverend Father Point, S. J.;[114] drawings of such exquisite perfection, that they would do honor to any master: and the more admirable, from the circumstance of their having been executed with the pen, in the midst of the privations and difficulties of his remote and arduous missions.
In conclusion, I cannot but express the pleasure, instruction, and edification, I have derived from the careful perusal of these beautiful letters: and I feel convinced that they will prove, to all who read them, a source of interest and delight which few volumes of the same dimensions can open to the intellectual and Christian reader.
C. C. P.
New-York, August 1st, 1847.