The wonder of Johansen's and Grinde's research is that they have uncovered so little evidence of the influence of the image the colonists held of the Indian on what Johansen now wants to call the American "character." The sources they cite are few and often bear only a tenuous relationship to the issue at hand. Given the importance of Indians in seventeenthand eighteenth-century American history, much more documentary evidence might have been expected. Everything that the colonists wrote about Indians, of course, has a bearing on the images they held of the Indian and consequently may be evidence of the influence of those images on American institutions, even those institutions they chose not to copy. If, for example, they chose not to replicate the hereditary chieftainship system of the Iroquois League, that surely is of significance. So also is John Adams's (1851: 296) opinion that the form of government embodied in the British constitution should not be abandoned in favor of that of the Indians: