They become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it

The predilection of Europeans for Indian ideas went beyond the co-opting of knowledge. Most remarkably of all is that, when captured on the northern frontier of what was to become Maine, fr instance, the English preferred the Indian way if living .... Benjamin Franklin, fir one, was quite clear about this, writing in 1753:

when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

J.H.C. King, Blood and Land: the story of native North America (2016), 183