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When the squaws had done with him, he was taken up into the council house of the village, where he was dressed in a new ruffled shirt, leggins trimmed with ribbons and wrought with beads, and moccasins embroidered with porcupine quills. His face was painted afresh, and his scalp lock tied up with red feathers; he was given a pipe and tobacco pouch and seated upon a bear skin, while one of the chiefs addressed him in the presence of the assembled warriors. “My son,” so the speech was interpreted to Smith, “you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. You are taken into the Caughnewaga nation, and initiated into a warlike tribe; you are adopted into a great family… in the room and place of a great man. After what has passed this day, you are now one of us by an old strong law and custom. My son, you have now nothing to fear; we are now under the same obligations to love, support, and defend you, that we are to love and defend one another; therefore you are to consider yourself as one of our people.”

A grand feast of boiled venison and green corn followed, and Smith took part in it on the same terms as all the rest of his tribe and family. In due time he found out that no word the chief had addressed him was idly spoken, and he began to live the life of the savages like one of themselves, under the affectionate care and constant instruction of his brethren. He was given a gun, at first, and sent to hunt turkeys, but he came upon the trace of buffalo, and was lured on by the hope of larger game, and so lost his way. The Indians found him again easily enough, but as a punishment for his rashness his gun was taken from him, and for two years he was allowed to carry only a bow and arrows. Once when the hunters had killed a bear and he went out with a party to bring in the meat, Smith complained of the weight of his load; the Indians laughed at him, and to shame him they gave part of his burden to a young squaw who already had as much as he to carry. At another time, he went to the fields with some other young men to watch the squaws hoeing corn; one of these challenged him to take her hoe, and he did so, and hoed for some time with the women. They were delighted and praised his skill, but when he came back to the village, the old chiefs rebuked him, telling him that he was adopted in the place of a great man, and it was unworthy of him to hoe corn like a squaw.

Smith owns that he never gave them a chance to chide him a second time for such unseemly behavior. After that he left all the hard work to the squaws like a true Indian, and guarded his dignity as a hunter. He was never trusted, or at least he was never asked, to take part in any of the forays against the white frontier, when from time to time parties were sent to the Pennsylvania borders to take scalps and steal horses. It was a sorrowful thing for him when his savage brethren set forth on these errands of theft and murder among his kindred by race, and it was long before he could make the least show of returning their affection.

It was not until they gave him back some books which they had brought him from other prisoners, but had then taken from him for some caprice, that he says he felt his heart warm towards them. They pretended that the books had been lost, but declared that they were glad they had been found, for they knew that he was grieved at the loss of them. “Though they had been exceedingly kind to me,” he says, “I still as before detested them, on account of the barbarity I beheld after Braddock’s defeat. Neither had I ever before pretended kindness, or expressed myself in a friendly manner; but now I began to excuse the Indians on account of their want of information.”