The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
THE INDIAN. — HIS ORIGIN, NUMBERS, PERSON, AND CHARACTER.
It would have been but reasonable to have expected that
the opening of an inhabited continent — more than half the
land surface of the globe — to the intelligent curiosity of
the representatives of the civilization of the Old World,
would have contributed largely to the sum and the
elements of our knowledge of the origin and history of our
human race. Anything that was to be learned of aboriginal
life here would have been invaluable to the archæologist,
and might have served towards solving the problems
yet left unfathomed by all the skill of science and all the
monumental relics on the other continents. Whether either
of these halves of the globe had originally received its
human inhabitants from the other half, or had been stocked
each by its independent ancestry, an unknown lapse of ages
had transpired without intercourse between them. We
might have looked at least for the means of deciding this
alternative of unity or diversity in the origin of our race.
The means for that decision would have been sought in
traditions and tokens of a primitive kinship and history,
while any radical and heterogeneous characteristics
running through the inhabitants of either half of the globe
would have brought their unity of origin under serious
question. Regrets have often been expressed that this
question was not at once made the subject of keenly
intelligent investigation by the first Europeans in their intercourse with the aborigines. It is taken for granted that
the opportunity would have favored the acquisition of some
positive and helpful knowledge which has since failed. It
is very doubtful, however, whether the lapse of the last four
centuries has really deepened what was then the obscurity
that covered these inquiries. What are supposed to be the
oldest crania and other human relics on the continent
generally crumble to dust when exposed to light and air.
One of our archæologists tells us that some bones of the
mastodon, antedating the age of the Mound Builders, when
excavated from a peat-swamp, yielded gelatinous matter
for constituting a rich
soup.[1] But there are no such juices
left here in the relics of primeval man. It was only after
long intervals of time that different longitudinal and latitudinal
sections of this northern half of our continent were
reached by white men. About a century intervened
between the first intercourse of the Spaniards with the southern
tribes and that of the French with the northern tribes.
Cabeza de Vaca, of the company of Narvaez, is accredited
as the first European who stood on the banks of the Mississippi,
and crossed the continent from sea to sea, in 1528.
The Sieur Nicolet was the first of Frenchmen who, in 1639,
reached the waters of that river from the north. The first
pueblo captured in Mexico by Cortes was in 1520. Coronado's
expedition against the “Seven Cities of Cibola” was in
1540. Some Village Indians in New Mexico are thought
to be in the present occupancy of the adobe houses of their
predecessors at the Conquest. This term, “Village
Indians,” is expressive of a distinction gradually coming to
the knowledge of the whites between sedentary and roving
tribes of the aborigines. Our information is very scanty as
to the characteristics of difference, in gross and in detail,
between various tribes of Indians originally, and
immediately subsequent to their first intercourse with the whites.
We know but little of the conditions of proximity, relationship, and necessity which drew them into fellowships, with
common interests among themselves, called by us “tribes,”
or to what extent alliances existed among them for peace
and war. There were needful limitations in the size of
those fellowships, imposed by the conditions of their
existence. The Natchez and Arkansas tribes are regarded as
among the most advanced of those of our northern section
when first known to Europeans.
The late Lewis H. Morgan, partly through the interpretation of facts, and partly with the inferences from a reasonable theory, has contributed valuable aid to our understanding of aboriginal life. He maintains that their household life was constructed on the communal system, uniting affiliated families as a gens. When the Five Nations, or Iroquois, inhabiting central New York, were first visited by Europeans, they were found to be gathered in family groups of twenty, forty, or even larger households, all literally under one roof. A “Long House,” constructed strongly and for permanency of wood and bark, with a continuous passage through the middle, one door of entrance, provision for the necessary number of fires, and partitions dividing the area, was the common home it might be even of a hundred or more persons. The inmates shared together the yield of the harvest and the hunt. Starting from this well-certified fact, Mr. Morgan proceeds to draw reasonable inferences that this communal system for life, for affiliated families or companies of the aborigines, — generally, and indeed universally, except where circumstances might have withstood it, — prevailed among them. It was once supposed that the extensive adobe structures in New Mexico and in Central America — with their walled enclosures unpierced in the lower story by door or window, and terraced by two, three, or more stories reared upon them, to which access was gained by ladders — were the remains of the palatial residences of chiefs and caciques, and that they were then surrounded with clusters of more humble abodes, making villages for the tribes. These, being of frail structure, had left no vestige. But these supposed palatial residences are now believed to have answered to the Long Houses of the Iroquois, and to have been of communal use, — some of them capable of accommodating from five to eight hundred families. It is a further easy inference from the starting point of fact, to affirm that the “dirt lodges” of the Mandans, the caves of the Cliff Dwellers, and the Mounds of our western valleys bear witness to the same communal mode of life of our aborigines. It is supposed that those mounds of earth — a substitute for stone where it was not available for the purpose — were simply the base for the erection over them of dwellings of wood or bark, which have perished. This theory also suggests and favors a method for distinguishing several stages or types in savage life, between extreme barbarism and approximations towards civilization.
It would simply embarrass the mainly narrative purpose of this volume to attempt here any elaborate or even concise statement of the distribution, classification, organization, and designation by names or localities of our aboriginal tribes. Such information — not by any means always accordant — as special inquirers and writers on these intricate and perplexed themes have furnished, is easily accessible in our abounding literature of the subject. Very few of the names originally attached by the first Europeans here to the tribes earliest known to them are now in use. The same tribes were known by different appellations assigned to them by the French, the Dutch, and the English. There has been a steady increase of appellations for bands and tribes, as the whites have extended their intercourse and relations with them. Within the last two or three decades each year has added new titles on the lists of the Reports of the Indian Commissioners. Some of the earliest known tribes — as the Pamunkeys of Virginia, the Lenape of Pennsylvania, the Narragansetts, the Mohicans, the Pcquots, and the Nipmucks of New England — have become extinct, or such surviving remnants of their stock as may exist have been merged in other tribes; what there are of the Lenape are now known as Delawares. The same processes of the absorption or extinction of tribal names, which began among the aborigines on the sea-coast, have followed the extension of invasions and settlements through the whole breadth of the continent. One tribe has adopted the remnant of one or more other tribes, giving to them its own name, or appropriating a new one. Many of the original and of the existing tribes were and are known by an alias. Such titles as the Nez-Perces, the Gros-Ventres, and the Diggers speak for themselves as conferred upon, not assumed by, those who bear them. Remnants of seventeen tribes, collected from Oregon and Northern California, are consolidated in the Grande Ronde agency in Oregon. Such matters as are of chief importance and interest on these points will present themselves in subsequent pages.
What is the relative place on the scale of humanity to be assigned to the average North American Indian? Certainly, not near the top of that scale; as certainly, not at the foot of it. The scale is a full and varied one. We know far better than our ancestors knew, at the time when they first saw our aborigines, how many links there are on the chain of a common humanity. The anatomy of the skeleton, the outlines of the form, and the possession of any ray of that intelligence which we distinguish from instinct in animals, — these are in general the certificates of a claim for men over brutes. In assigning a place on the human scale to any tribe or race of human beings, we must first have defined to ourselves the specimens which mark its highest and its lowest. Nor in either case must we accept an ideal as a specimen. The loftiest definition ever given of the being called man is in the Scripture sentence, that he is but “a little lower than the angels, and is crowned with glory and honor.” The greatest of poets has expanded this high strain: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God!” But we have to say, using one of the trickeries of language of our time, “There are men, and there are men.” If we should search for the lowest specimen of humanity to offset the topmost one, whether ideal or real, we should by no means find that lowest specimen in an average North American Indian. Stanley would furnish us from the interior of Africa lower grades than have ever been classified before. The archipelagoes of the Pacific, especially the Fijian, revealed the lowest known to us. In one point of view, from Mr. Darwin's position, it would seem as if the evolution theory might prove itself from the fact that there are really no “missing links” in the gradations from brute to man. Yet, not so. The line between human beings and brute creatures may be blurred; but it is not obliterated or untraceable. This, however, is certain, — that there are now hordes and tribes and groups of such beings as we have nevertheless to call human, which present to us man far, far below the average type of the North American savage when he first came to the knowledge of Europeans.
The full, fair product of a civilized human being is the result of all possible favoring circumstances of place, opportunity, and advantage in a long lapse of time. Some English essayist has dropped what he would call the clever remark, that it takes a hundred years to work up a perfect, smooth, grassy lawn, and three hundred years to breed a lady or a gentleman. After the same manner we may say that it has taken six thousand historic years to produce a race of humanized, civilized, and thoroughly developed men and women; and that the process is not yet complete. It might be argued that, two or three thousand years behind us, the refining influences of intelligence and culture and high art had carried a classic people beyond our present stage in one range of civilization: and allowances would also need to be made for arrests and reversionary processes in the advance of a progressive race caused by conquest, by change of masters, and by the risks attending emigration to new countries. Yet there is no question but that we overestimate the average of intelligence in the ordinary human stock. We take our standard at too high a level. The mass of men and women, even in a favored and generally advanced community, are not so well furnished in mind or wisdom as we assume that they are or ought to be. The “common sense” which in compliment to the large majority we suppose to be in possession and use by them, is often missed where we expected to find it. The credulity, the narrowness of view, the facility with which they yield themselves to stark delusions and to appeals to their ignorance and prejudice, often warn us against setting so high as we do the average human intelligence. As a general thing we expect and demand too much of our fellow-men, seeing that they are what they are and as they are. The clear-headed and practical sage, Dr. Franklin, observing in one of his long journeys abroad the shiftlessness, thriftlessness, and bungling of a number of persons on whose ways his searching eyes glanced, wrote down this rather caustic remark: “I am persuaded that a very large number of men and women would have got along much better if they had been furnished with a good, respectable instinct — like animals, birds, and insects — instead of with the intelligence of which they boast so much, but of which they make so little use.”
Acute writers who have wrought upon the theme have confessed themselves unable to draw at any point a sharp dividing line, or to define any one single trait, quality, or condition which shall distinguisli between a state of civilization and a state of barbarism or savagery.
Our latest science, alike archæological and speculative, fails to give us positive knowledge about the origin of the red man and his relation to the other races of human beings on the other continents. Lack of knowledge stimulates guessing and theorizing: for these the range is as free as ever. The theories are so varied and conflicting that one becomes confused and wearied with them to such a degree as to be impatient of rehearsing them. The favorite view of the Protestants, especially of our Puritan ancestors — in their love of the old Hebrew Scriptures — was that the Indians were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, whom, Cotton Mather suggested, Satan might have inveigled hither to get them away from the tinkle of the gospel bells. It was under the prompting of this idea, which was largely and learnedly argued, that the Puritans quickened their zeal to reclaim and convert the savages. Many ingenious attempts have been made to trace among the Indians usages and institutions akin to those of the Mosaic law. The French Jesuit missionaries, not being especially partial to the Old Testament, did not lay stress on this motive for converting the savages. Roger Williams in his day could write, “From Adam and Noah that they spring, it is granted on all hands.” But all do not grant that now. So free and wild has been the guessing on the origin and kinship of the Indian race, that resemblances have been alleged to exist, in their crania and features, with the Tartars, the Celts, the Chinese, Australasians, Romans, and Carthaginians. This is truly a large range for aliases and an alibi. There is somewhat of the grotesque in the aspect of a European intruder, of another stock, coming from across the sea, meeting the native red men, regarding them as an impertinence or an anomaly, and putting the question, “Who are you? Where did you come from?” The Indian rightly thought that it was for him to put and for the white man to answer the query. The Indian regards himself as a perfectly natural person where he is and as he is; a product and a possessor, not a waif nor a “come-by-chance.” Their own account of themselves was that they were indigenous, — true aborigines. With this now agree the conclusions of wise and judicious authorities. Dr. S. G. Morton, writing of the “Aboriginal Race of North America,” says: “Our conclusion, long ago adduced from a patient examination of facts, is, that the American race is essentially separate and peculiar, whether we regard it in its physical, its moral, or its intellectual relations. To us there are no direct or obvious links between the people of the Old World and the New.” It is generally admitted that there is more similarity between the Indians over all North America than there is among the inhabitants of Europe. Agassiz regarded it as proved that this is the oldest of the continents. If so, the burden is now shifted to Europeans, Asiatics, and Africans to account for themselves as offspring, wanderers, vagabonds, or exiles. The Mound Builders form the heroes of much ingenious speculation. So far, little has come of it but relics of crude pottery. Loskiel, the Moravian missionary, speaks very lightly of these puzzling relics. Referring to what the Indians told him, of traditions of former more frequent and ferocious wars — some hereditary — among them, he writes: —
“The ruins of former towns are still visible, and several mounds
of earth show evident proofs that they were raised by men. They
were hollow, having an opening at the top, by which the Indians
let down their women and children, whenever an enemy approached,
and, placing themselves around, defended them vigorously. For
this purpose they placed a number of stones and blocks on the top
of the mound, which they rolled down against the assailants. The
killed, in large numbers, were buried in a hole. The antiquity of
these graves is known by the large trees upon
them.”[2]
After the Indians are all gone, we may perhaps be able
to tell whence they came.
An equally perplexing and distracting inquiry with that of the origin of the Indians has now become another question, as to the number of them when the country was reached and occupied by Europeans. Of course, this question was not intelligently asked by the first whites who came here, though they ventured, all at random, upon guesses and estimates. Those who entered upon the continent at different points naturally drew widely contrasted inferences on the subject, according as they encountered what they call “swarms” of the natives, on island or mainland, or passed long reaches of territory wholly tenantless.
It is only within the last dozen years that rigid and rational tests have been applied to the statements and traditions which have found their admission into our histories, as to the probable numbers of the native race on this continent when it was opened to Europeans. Wholly conjectural as the estimates were, the measure of the extravagance or the fancy introduced into them depended upon the range or license indulged in by those who ventured to make them. The admission is now yielded, without exception or qualification, by all intelligent authorities, that the number of the natives in each of the best-known tribes, and their whole number on the continent at the time of its discovery have been vastly overestimated. All the Spanish chroniclers were mere romancers on this point. The soldier Baron La Hontan was a specimen of the same class among the French. John Smith, of Virginia, who tells us that that country produced pearl, coral, and metallic copper, and that the natives planted and harvested three crops of corn in five months, also multiplies the numbers of the Pamunkeys, to exalt the state of their “emperor” Powhatan. Our own artist, Catlin, allowed his imagination to create some sixteen millions of Indians as once roaming here, when it is more than doubtful if a single million were ever living at the same time on the soil.
Hispaniola, or Little Spain, the name given by Columbus to the present Hayti, or St. Domingo, has as before stated an area of about thirty thousand square miles, — or more than half the area of England and Wales. When first discovered, Las Casas says that it sustained three million Indians; he afterwards sets the number at 1,200,000. The Licentiate Zuazo, however, estimated them at 1,130,000. In 1508, when Passamonte came, he put them at seventy thousand. The Governor, Diego Columbus, estimated the number at forty thousand. Albuquerque, in 1514, counted them as between thirteen and fourteen thousand. This was a vast deduction from three millions in a score of years. We can give the Spaniards the benefit of our charity in denying their own statement, that in less than forty years they had destroyed fifteen millions of the natives, while we also distrust the story that Montezuma led three million warriors. We know the claim of the Jesuits to have converted nine millions of natives in Mexico, in a score of years, to be a pure fiction. Such random counts as these have no value, inasmuch as the evident exaggeration is characteristic of the extravagant spirit of all the Spanish expectations and accounts of their experience.
The practical matter of interest in the estimate of the probable number of Indians on this continent, on the arrival of the Europeans, concerns us as it bears on the current belief, universally held till within a few years, substantially covering these three assumptions: (1) That there was then a vast number of Indians here, to be counted in millions; (2) That this original population has been steadily and rapidly wasting away; and (3) That this decay is the result of the destroying influence coming from the whites, either in demoralization or by war. These three assumptions are now largely, if not universally, discredited. In direct denial of them, it is now affirmed, with evidence offered in proof, that the number of the Indians here was quite below the old estimates; that there are substantially as many on the continent now as there were on the arrival of the white men; and that their own habits of life, and internecine feuds, have been as destructive as the influence of the Europeans. In fact, the former overestimates of the numbers in some tribes, and of the aboriginal race, are now thought to have been as wild if not as poetical and visionary as the Indian traditions of their origin and mythical ancestry. In the lack of any accredited facts drawn from anything resembling a census, — and no attempt at such a process was made till after the middle of this century, — we have mainly to rely upon two helpful considerations for estimating the number of the aborigines at any given time on any particular locality. The first is, the effect of their constant warfare among themselves in reducing their number; and, second, the capacity of the soil, its woods and waters, for sustaining a more or less compact population by productive labor on tilled fields, or by the chase. Both these considerations would naturally lead us to infer that there was no such steady increase of population as commonly occurs in peaceful life in a civilized and industrious community. We are besides to take into view the fact, well authenticated, that plagues, contagious and epidemical diseases, were frequent and wide in their visitations, and occasionally effected a well-nigh complete extinction of one or more tribes devastated by them.
It is significant, that, in every case in which careful and patient research or inquiry have been brought into intelligent use in estimating the number of one or more Indian tribes, and of the whole Indian population, previous calculations, guessings, and inferences on the subject have been found to be exaggerations. The only associated groups of tribes with which our acquaintance and knowledge have been continuous from the beginning is the Iroquois, who have been in intimate intercourse with the Dutch, the French, and the English for more than two hundred and fifty years. Sir William Johnson, the best informed of all interested in their number, placed it in 1763 at 11,650. We have no certainty that at any previous time they really exceeded this count, though La Hontan and others multiplied it almost ten times. The old Iroquois were represented in 1876-77 by seven thousand in the United States, and the same number in Canada. The number is the same today. The so-called, civilized tribes in the Indian Territory, as counted in 1809, were 12,395. The Indian Bureau in 1876 numbered them at twenty-one thousand. They have doubled in forty years. The Indians who have fared the worst in decrease of numbers have been those of California and Oregon.
If we seek in a general view of the mode of life and resources of the red men, in some favored localities, to find any radical disadvantage or disablement which put them below all communities of the whites which we call civilized, we can readily convince ourselves of our error by comparing the state of our Indians at the time of the settlement of this continent with that of communities of whites in Europe at the same time. Mr. Lecky in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century” condenses from his authorities such a view of the condition of the common people in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland a century and a half ago, as puts them to a disadvantage, merely as to the means and resources of subsistence, in comparison with North American Indians. The people, wildly ruled in clans, were thieves and cattle-lifters, kidnappers of men and children to be sold as slaves; they were ferocious barbarians, besotted with the darkest ignorance and the grossest and gloomiest superstitions; they scratched the earth with a crooked piece of wood for a plough, and a bush attached to the tail of a horse for a harrow, wholly dispensing with a harness; their food was milk and oatmeal mixed with blood drawn from a living cow; their cookery, their cabins were revoltingly filthy, causing disgusting cutaneous diseases; they boiled their beef in the hide, roasted fowls in their feathers, and plucked the wool from the sheep instead of shearing it.
The relative position or grade, on the human scale, of any tribe or race of men — much like that of any one man among his fellows — is to be measured by the sum and range of their capacities, and the degree of their self-improvement by the use of means, resources, and appliances within their reach. And the capacities of men are also to be estimated by the extent to which they actually avail themselves of these means, appliances, and resources; finding in native impulse and energy, quickness of wit, restlessness of feeling, the spur of progress; casting about them for reliefs, helps, betterments of their condition. We classify nations by the direction in which they have trained and advanced one or another of the abilities and aptitudes of our manifold nature. In the Greeks, the direction of it was in artistic, poetic, and philosophic culture, the genius for which is expressed in their wonderful language; in the Romans, it was an organizing faculty, working in the range of law in all its departments; in Germany, research, scholarship, jurisprudence; in Italy, aesthetic, for poetry, painting, and music; in France, a mixture of use and ornament, — the packages in which certain cosmetics, etc., are done up being more ingenious than their contents; in the English, it is general utilitarianism, with strength, thoroughness, and skill; in the Irish, it is a cheerful willingness for hard, patient, laborious, disagreeable work, without mental restlessness. We know how we, especially, are indebted to the faithful toil of the Irish race; yet I cannot recall a single invention, or discovery in art or science, ever made by an Irishman. If one would have before him a full demonstration of the adroit and acute inventiveness and ingenuity of the Yankee race, let him spend a week or a month — there will be full employment for it — in the Patent Office at Washington, among reapers, thrashers, and winnowers, cotton mules, cooking stoves, apple parers and sausage machines, and needle threaders and sewing machines.
Now our aborigines present to us these singular conditions: having a fine physique, vigor of body, acuteness of senses, few demoralizing habits, good natural understandings, and living under a stimulating and healthful, not enervating climate, on good soil, they were nevertheless torpid, unaroused, unambitious, idle, listless, indifferent to everything but hunting and fighting. Of the metals, fibres, chemical activities all around them they made almost no use. No step of progress, no sign of betterment, showed itself among them. For all the evidence within our reach attests to us that there was among the savages no token of that discontent or yearning which is the incentive to change for the better.
In dealing with our whole subject under its successive themes, we shall have many occasions to present the Indian under a variety of characters and aspects. A few general notes of observation may come in here.
The fascinating description which Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella of the first savages that came within his view has already been repeated here. Coming to a later time and to a way of judging them which we can better appreciate, we take a sentence from Roger Williams, who had as long and close and curious an intercourse with the Indians as any white man, and who had an intelligent and discerning spirit. He wrote thus: “For the temper of the brain in quick apprehensions and discerning judgements (to say no more), the most High Sovereign God and Creator hath not made them inferior to Europeans.” This relates to the higher endowment of the Indian. For his form and grace, his bearing and demeanor, let us take a few sentences from the enthusiast George Catlin, who lived eight years (1832-1840) with such Indians as we have now, visited forty-eight of their tribes, and painted in oil five hundred canvases of portraits and scenes among them. He says: “The North American Indian in his native state is an hospitable, honest, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless, yet honorable, contemplative, and religious being.” While freely stating their defects and enormities, Catlin adds: “I have lived with thousands and ten thousands of these knights of the forest, whose whole lives are lives of chivalry, and whose daily feats with their naked limbs might vie with those of the Grecian youth in the beautiful rivalry of the Olympian games.” Their passion for stealing horses, Catlin ascribes to their having been trained to regard the act as a virtue. The artist says he has often seen six, eight, or ten hundred Indians engaged in their animating ball-playing, with five or six times the number of men, women, and children looking on. “And I pronounce such a scene — with its hundreds of Nature's most beautiful models, denuded, and painted of various colors, running and leaping into the air, in all the most extravagant and varied forms, in the desperate struggles for the ball — a school for the painter or sculptor equal to any of those which ever inspired the hand of the artist in the Olympian games or the Roman forum.” He adds, that they have learned their worst vices from the contamination of the whites, but that they find a full equivalent in nature and freedom for all the harassments of civilization, and make an intelligent estimate of the relative advantages of either state of man. “They are noble fellows, noblemen and gentlemen. . . . I have met with so many acts of kindness and hospitality at the hands of the poor Indian, that I feel bound, when I can do it, to render what excuse I can for a people who are dying with broken hearts, and never can speak in the civilized world in their own defence. . . . Nature has no nobler specimen of man or beast than the Indian and the buffalo.” Catlin pleads with equal earnestness for the man and the beast, and suggests for his own monument a grand national park to preserve both from extermination. There is a fine appreciation here of the intimate relation of dependence and a link in destiny, at least as concerns vast numbers of the old hunting tribes and the beast which furnished them pastime and subsistence.
I have quoted these evidently overdrawn pictures of Catlin while fully aware of his deficiencies as an observer, and of his unrestrained enthusiasm in description. His richness of fancy was offset by lack of judgment. He writes more like a child than a well-balanced man.
Major J. S. Campion, in his “Life on the Frontier,”[3] shows himself a most intelligent and discriminating observer of Indian life and character, of which he had large experience. He says: —
“That there is a radical mental difference between the races
is as certain as that there are physical ones. The dog and wolf —
as we are told mankind had — may have had one pair of ancestors;
but the dog is naturally a domestic animal: so is the white
man, and so are some of the American tribes. The wolf still is,
he always will be, a savage; so has been, so always will be, the
Apache. The philanthropist sees no apparent reason why, with
proper culture, the Apache should not become a useful member
of society. I see no apparent reason why the wolf should not
become as domestic as the dog; but he won't. The reason is a
mental difference. Therein is the root of endless misunderstandings,
of mutual injustice, between the races. But if the earth was
made for man to increase and multiply thereon, and have possession,
as it requires a greater number of square miles to support one
Apache than a square mile will support of civilized families, his
extinction is justified by the inevitable logic of the fitness of things.
He cannot be developed into a civilized man: he must give place
to him. Circumstances and early training will sometimes make a
white boy into a first-rate savage; but that is no argument to prove
the converse, — only a case of reversion. Our remote ancestors
were painted savages. The cleverest collie is a descendant of dogs
that lived like wolves and foxes. Every country has, perhaps, had
its true wild men, — tribes incapable of civilization: some countries have them yet. Every country, sooner or later, has its civilized races, — sometimes historically known to be immigrant ones, sometimes presumably of an equal antiquity of location to the wild ones near them. Mexico is a case in point. The conqistadóres found in that country an ancient, highly developed, apparentlyindigenous civilization, with a most complex system of government and taxation, an established state-religion, a thorough organization of classes, an elaborate school of manners and etiquette, — a civilization in some respects superior to their own; and in the same country wild, nearly naked savage tribes, equally indigenous, — the Apaches of then and to-day. Time, soil, climate, naturalresources, had been equal to them all, and behold the difference of result! It was a case of indigènes capable of self-development and not capable. . . . Savagery is civilization's childhood.”
These kindly and generous and paradoxical, if also
enthusiastic, estimates of the average North American savage
may fairly be quoted and emphasized, because they are so
rare in our voluminous Indian literature. Of quite
another tone and strain is the vast bulk of all that has been
written about the natives, — certainly by the pens of
Englishmen from their first contact here. With a vague intent
to regard the savages pitifully and to treat them kindly,
our ancestors here — very soon, and largely through their
own misdealing, and for the rest under the stress of
circumstances — came to hate and loathe the Indian, and to
view him and to speak of him as a most hideous and
degraded creature. The Indian was to them “the scum
of humanity,” “the offscouring of the earth.” When the
savage who bore the title of King Philip, and who planned
and led the most devastating — well-nigh exterminating —
war ever waged between the white and red men on our soil,
was drawn out of the miry swamp in which he had been
slain, Captain Church, his conqueror, said, “He was a doleful
great naked, dirty beast.” This, too, of an Indian
monarch! And yet it was of a neighbor chieftain, Iyanough, of
the same race, — from whom the town of Hyannis takes its
name, and whose bones are preserved in a cabinet in the Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth, — that the early chronicler
Mourt wrote, that he was “very personable, gentle, courteous,
and fair-conditioned; indeed, not like a savage, save for
his attire,” — probably the lack of it. Governor Winslow
wrote to a friend in England: “We have found the Indians
very faithful to their covenants of peace with us, very
loving and ready to pleasure us. We go with them in
some cases fifty miles into the country, and walk as safely
and peaceably in the woods as in the highways of England.
We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they are
friendly in bestowing their venison upon us. They are a
people without religion, yet very trusty, quick of
apprehension, humorous, and just.” And Winslow's friend,
Robert Cushman, wrote: “To us they have been like lambs,
— so kind, so trusty, and so submissive that many Christians
are not so kind and sincere.” When the Sachem
Chicatabot visited Boston in 1631, we read that, “being
in English clothes, the Governor (Winthrop) set him at
his own table, where he behaved himself as an English
gentleman.”
A few more estimates of Indian personality and character, as made in our own time, may serve to acquaint us with the wide diversity of judgment which has from the first found strong expression, and then we may attempt to account for this discordance of view. The chivalrous and heroic General Custer may be regarded as a typical authority among military men for his estimate of Indian character. He knew the Indian well in war and peace. He had made the savage the object of an intelligent and closely and keenly observant study. He was one of the most conspicuous victims of Indian warfare. Though the General is classed as among the most effective “Indian fighters,” and came to his early death at their hands in a fearful massacre, he was a man of a humane and kindly heart. In his “Life on the Plains,” referring to the romantic, gentle, and winning view which Cooper and other romancers have given of the Indian, as so misleading and wholly fanciful, he says: —
"Inseparable from the Indian character, wherever he is to be met with, is his remarkable taciturnity, his deep dissimulation, the perseverance with which he follows his plans of revenge or conquest, his concealment and apparent lack of curiosity, his stoical courage when in the power of his enemies, his cunning, his caution, and last, but not least, the wonderful power and subtlety of his senses. In studying the Indian character, while shocked and disgusted by many of his traits and customs, I find much to be admired, and still more of deep and unvarying interest. To me Indian life, with its attendant ceremonies, mysteries, and forms, is a book of unceasing interest. Grant that some of its pages are frightful, and if possible to be avoided; yet the attraction is none the weaker. Study him, fight him, civilize him if you can; he remains still the object of your curiosity, a type of man peculiar and undefined, subjecting himself to no known law of civilization, contending determinedly against all efforts to win him from his chosen mode of life. He stands in the group of nations solitary and reserved, seeking alliance with none, mistrusting and opposing the advances of all. Civilization may and should do much for him, but it can never civilize him. A few instances to the contrary may be quoted, but these are susceptible of explanation. No tribe enjoying its accustomed freedom has ever been induced to adopt a civilized mode of life,—or, as they express it, to follow the white man's road. At various times certain tribes have forsaken the pleasures of the chase and the excitement of the war-path for the more quiet life to be found on the 'reservation.' Was this course adopted voluntarily and from preference? Was it because the Indian chose the ways of his white brother, rather than those in which he had been born and bred? In no single instance has this been true."
Custer proceeds to argue that a few tribes, wasted and exhausted by wars with other tribes and the whites, and by contact with civilization and disease, and unable to cope with more powerful tribes which are always overbearing and domineering, must either become the vassals and tributaries of their enemies, or reluctantly accept the alternative of a sham conformity with the whites. He says: —
The tribe must "give up its accustomed haunts, its wild mode of life, and nestle down under the protecting arm of its former enemy, the white man, and try, however feebly, to adopt his manner of life. In making this change the Indian has to sacrifice all that is dear to his heart; he abandons the only mode of life in which he can be a warrior and win triumphs and honors worthy to be sought after; and in taking up the pursuits of the white man he does that which he has always been taught from his earliest infancy to regard as degrading to his manhood,—to labor, to work for his daily bread; an avocation suitable only for squaws. . . .
"To those who advocate the application of the laws of civilization to the Indian, it might be a profitable study to investigate the effect which such application produces upon the strength of the tribe as expressed in numbers. Looking at him as the fearless hunter, the matchless horseman and warrior of the Plains, where Nature placed him, and contrasting him with the reservation Indian, who is supposed to be revelling in the delightful comforts and luxuries of an enlightened condition, but who in reality is grovelling in beggary, bereft of many of the qualities which in his wild state tended to render him noble, and heir to a combination of vices partly his own, partly bequeathed to him from the pale face, — one is forced, even against desire, to conclude that there is an unending antagonism between the Indian nature and that with which his well-meaning white brother would endow him. Nature intended him for a savage state; every instinct, every impulse of his soul inclines him to it. The white race might fall into a barbarous state, and afterwards, subjected to the influence of civilization, be reclaimed and prosper. Not so the Indian. He cannot be himself and be civilized; he fades away and dies. Cultivation such as the white man would give him deprives him of his identity. Education, strange as it may appear, seems to weaken rather than strengthen his intellect."
In confirmation of this last statement, Custer affirms that the gift of forest eloquence is lost under civilization. He asks: —
"My firm conviction, based upon an intimate and thorough analysis of the habits, traits of character, and natural instinct of the Indian, and strengthened and supported by the almost unanimous opinion of all persons who have made the Indian problem a study, — and have studied it, not from a distance, but in immediate contact with all the facts bearing thereupon,—is that the Indian cannot be elevated to that great level where he can be induced to adopt any policy or mode of life varying from those to which he has ever been accustomed by any method of teaching, argument, reasoning, or coaxing which is not preceded and followed closely in reserve by a superior physical force. In other words, the Indian is capable of recognizing no controlling influence but that of stern arbitrary power. . . .
"And yet there are those who argue that the Indian with all his lack of moral privileges is so superior to the white race as to be capable of being controlled in his savage traits and customs, and induced to lead a proper life, simply by being politely requested to do so."[4]
Let us quote a passage from another intelligent observer of Indian life, also an accomplished officer of the army of the United States. The extract has a touch of romance about it, as it presents a child of Nature of the other sex: —
The military gentlemen, honored officers of our army, from whose works I have drawn these extracts, are well entitled to be regarded as representatives in good judgment, and as speaking from abundant knowledge and experience, of their own profession in that strong conflict of opinion which we must recognize in later pages between it and the advocates of an exclusive peace-policy with the Indians. General Custer and Colonel Dodge, humane and well-balanced men, present to us in harrowing descriptions and with all too vivid illustrations the atrocities of Indian warfare. The former tells the story of such tragedies as the "Philip Kearney Massacre" and the "Kidder Massacre." Remembering that he fell in the flower of his years, — after his patriotic career and eminent services to his country,—in a deadly and equally overwhelming disaster, we give just weight to his testimony. Clearly, and for reasons which he states with full force, he did not believe that the Indian could be lifted into the state of civilization, refinement, and full humanity. But we must not by anticipation prejudice this great issue.
In the abounding literature which we have gathered and are to leave to posterity, concerning the red man and his experiences with the white man, there is a large variety of stern and sober history, of poetry and romance, of engaging and instructive, of repulsive and revolting matter, fact and fiction, boasting and lament, stately volumes of legislative, cabinet, and war bureaus, and pages filled with contemplative and serious wisdom. In reading, for information or pleasure, a selection from this mass of books and documents, we have to remind ourselves that white men have dealt with, visited, and treated the Indians in very different ways and for very different ends and purposes, and so have formed very different opinions and made very different reports of them. Thus, besides the poets who give us their dreams and fancies of Indians and Indian life, our informants and authorities about them comprise this wide category, — travellers, tourists, and adventurous pleasure-seekers among the Indians, traders with them, missionaries to them, military officers watching or fighting with them, Government superintendents or agents for their help and protection, and settlers upon the successive frontier lines. We may well expect to find not only variety and variance, but discordance, and wholly incongruous and inconsistent representations of Indians and Indian life, coming from such miscellaneous authorities. One who proposes to make a thorough study of the Indian as known to the white man, will find it helpful to divide all the enormous mass of literature on the subject under six very distinct classes, — guided by this simple suggestion, that different persons coming into contact with the Indians, for very different purposes, on different errands, and under different relations, see them differently, use them differently, and so report them differently. First come the poems, — works of pure fiction and fancy, written in every case by those who never had any intercourse whatever with the wild men, and which always mislead, though the romance may please us. Second, those who have lived on the frontiers, amid Indian raids and captivities, massacres, butcheries, and tortures; who know the Indian yell, his hideous visage, and his tomahawk. Third, the missionary, who has his point of view, and makes his report. Fourth, the Indian or Government agent, who often, not always, — for there have been honorable and noble exceptions, — finds himself the only honest man among a crew of rascals and knaves, and who guards against their swindling him by swindling them. Fifth, the army officer, who has to follow the trail of the ambushed foe, and to do the fighting. And, lastly, there are annually numerous wild rovers, pleasure tourists, hunters, noblemen from abroad, who go to the Plains to chase the buffalo. These have a free and happy time with the Indians, being companionable and lavishly generous. When the Duke Alexis, by President Grant's order, was accompanied by General Custer in his rush over the wild plains, he of course had a good time, and thought the Indians noble fellows.
Of course the Indian, his life and surroundings, are favorite themes of romance. These have been already wrought into the fancies and charms of poetry. Such uses they will serve more richly in the future. The less we see and know of real Indians, the easier will it be to make and read poems about them. The themes of epics will yet be found in them, and distinctive American literature for time to come will draw inspiration, eloquence, and fascination from the heroes and the fortunes, it may be, of a vanished race, — vanished with the primeval forests and the wild game. And poetry and romance have their license. Stern history, however, has got the start of them, and will always be able to tell the true story in sober prose. Cooper's novels, the poems and ballads of Campbell, Longfellow, Whittier, and others will secure to romance the holding of its own with the traditions of truth. Whittier, in his preface to his “Mogg Megone,” naïvely says, that in portraying the Indian character he has followed, as closely as his story would admit, the rough but natural delineations of Church, Mayhew, Charlevoix, and Roger Williams (that is, of those who had actual knowledge and converse with the Indians); and, in so doing, he has “necessarily discarded much of the romance which poets and novelists have thrown around the ill-fated red man.”
Of course common-sense, after all, must be trusted on such themes to draw the line not only between opinions and theories, but even in the statement and interpretation of facts, as they come from romancers, sentimentalists, idealists, and philanthropists, or from literal, practical, matter-of-fact persons, speaking from experience. The familiar line, hackneyed by frequent quotation, —
“When wild in woods the noble savage ran,” —
would have a different meaning according to the
circumstances under which one happened to meet him, — whether
he was running to you or from you. “The stoic of the woods,
the man without a tear,” as a poet has drawn him, was
after all, like most of us, a many-sided being. Much wise
and well-balanced judgment, poised fairly, has been uttered
of the savage in this sentence: “His virtues do not reach
our standard, and his vices exceed our standard.” It seems
to have been with the Indians, as Tacitus says it was with
our German ancestors, that one half of their time was
spent in hunting and war, and the other half in sloth and
play. Two constraining reflections must always guide our
thoughts about them. However degraded, they had the
divine endowment from Him — as Southey says —
| “ | Who in the lowest depths of being framed |
| The imperishable mind.” |
Again, the Indians are a people with a history but
without a historian. The Jesuit Father Lafitau, a man of
great learning in classic lore, and a most intelligent, candid,
and discerning observer of savage life, published in
1724 the fruits of his patient investigations in two stately
quartos, abundantly illustrated with engravings. The title
of his work, — “Mœurs des Sauvages Américains,
Comparées aux Mœurs des Premiers Temps,” — expresses the method by which he has treated his theme. Believing the
savages to have shared in the disaster of the “fall” of our
first human parents, he finds among them the traces of an
original revelation, with its corruptions and steady deterioration;
and he illustrates all their customs by parallelisms
from classic history and the usages prevailing among other
barbarous peoples. He follows this illustrative method
through all the ideas, superstitions, observances, feasts,
sacrifices, and bacchanalian orgies of the savages, as having
an intimate affinity with those of other peoples of our
fallen race in all ancient times. Still, he is very indignant
with the romancing Baron La Hontan and others, who,
“seeing among the savages neither temple, altars, idols,
nor regular worship, very unadvisedly concluded that their
spirits did not go further than their senses; and too lightly
pronounced that, living as the beasts without knowledge of
another life, they paid no divine honor to anything visible
or invisible, made their God of their belly, and bounded all
their happiness within the present life.”
Doubtless one misleading element of our notions of the red men, as they first appear in our history, comes from the early use of the names, the titles, and the state of royalty as attached to forest chieftains, the formalities and etiquette to be observed with them. This is the more strange, as those who first used such high terms of language had known real potentates and real courts, and were well aware that such were characterized by personal cleanliness and by an excess of apparel and draperies rather than by an entire lack of them. Good Roger Williams frankly tells us about the filthy, smoky dens and the vermin-covered persons of the natives, and of their disgusting food and habits, wholly unconscious of common decency. Yet even he freely scatters about the titles of king, queen, and prince, of court and state, among them. The element of the incongruous and the ridiculous in this is well brought out when from worthy old John Smith in Virginia, downwards, we have the titles and the state offset by literal descriptions in plain English, and sometimes by “cuts and etchings” on his pages. Indian names with an English alias present this incongruousness, thus: “The chieftain Munashum, alias Nimrod.” The romantic story of Pocahontas, as it developed so luxuriously from its original germ in the successive narrations of the same incident by the “Admiral,” is sadly reduced by comparing the different editions of his narrative.
From this point of view it is interesting to compare some pages of two of our most able and faithful New England historians, writing at the same time and on the same themes, — Dr. Palfrey, in his “History of New England,” and Governor Arnold, in his “History of Rhode Island.” It is suggestive and really amusing to note what contrasted views, tones, and ways of speaking of and representing the aborigines of New England are characteristic of those writers. Dr. Palfrey regards them, their habits, and manners with absolute disgust. To him they were little above vermin, — abject, wretched, filthy, treacherous, perfidious, and fiendish. For them existence had but a questionable value. He scorned the attempt to invest them with romance, and ridiculed the attributing to them the qualities of barbaric forest state and royalty. Governor Arnold, however, fondly loved to retain the old romance of the noble and kingly savage, with his wild-wood court, his councillors and cabinet, his wilderness chivalry, with the free, pure air around him, and the abounding lakes and streams, suggesting at least their uses for frequent and effective ablutions. In keeping with these, — their divergent appreciation of the same phenomena, — Dr. Palfrey sets before us the squalor and wretchedness of the Indians, their shiftlessness and incapacity, their improvidence, beastliness, and forlorn debasement; while Governor Arnold dwells bewitchingly upon their grand manhood, their constancy, magnanimity, and dignity. When the friendly chief Massasoit was suffering with a fever and was under the hands of his powwows, Palfrey and Arnold both describe a visit made to him by Winslow and Hopkins, of Plymouth. Arnold says the monarch received his Puritan visitors at “his seat” at Mount Hope. Palfrey says that the “monarch,” with his vermin-covered bear-skin, had no food to offer the envoys, that their lodging in his “stye” was of the most comfortless description, and that they had a distressing experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality. More remarkable still is the contrast of estimate between the two historians of the religion of these same Indians. Arnold says: “Here we find the doctrine of the immortality of the soul entertained by a barbarous race, who affirmed that they received it from their ancestors. They were ignorant of revelation; yet here was Plato's great problem solved in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the West.”[6] But Dr. Palfrey writes: “The New England savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain.”[7] It is but proper to add, that these works being in press at the same time, the writers were not controverting each other.
Yet there was a touch of nobleness in the words of the royal chief Miantonomo, accepting the dignity which the English ascribed to him. When, in King Philip's war, Miantonomo and another sachem, with some chief councillors, had been taken prisoners at Potuxit, a squad of common Englishmen put him under question. The “Old Indian Chronicle”[8] tells us: “The said Miantonomo's carriage was strangely proud and lofty. Being examined why he did foment that war, he would make no other reply to any interrogatories but this: ‘That he was born a prince, and if princes came to speak with him he would answer; but none present being such, he thought himself obliged, in honor, to hold his tongue and not hold discourse with such persons below his birth and quality.’ ”
Practically, however, the truth must be told, that, in spite of all the epithets of royalty and state which our own Puritan ancestors connected with the Indians, as a matter of fact they very soon came to regard and treat the savages as a kind of vermin of the woods, combining all the offensive and hideous qualities and subtleties of snakes, wolves, bears, wild-cats, skunks, and panthers, with a bloodthirstiness and ferocity exceeding them all. This was the estimate of the noble Indian by those who had heard his yells and felt his tomahawk in actual conflict.
The subject of the languages spoken by our aborigines is too comprehensive and intricate a one for discussion here. Our authorities differ widely on this theme, as to the number of the vocabularies, which of them are languages, which are dialects, their constructions, root-terms, inflections, etc. They used very long words, with affixes and suffixes of many syllables, and of many letters, especially consonants, in each syllable. Cotton Mather said some of their words had been growing ever since the confusion of tongues at Babel. It must have required some intellectual vigor and a grasp of memory in Indian children to master their speech. It is doubtful if any affinity can be detected in their vocabularies or in the structure of their languages with those of any other continent of the globe. As might be expected, their languages are rich and copious as relating to common life and common things, objects, matters of sense, but very deficient and scant for the processes and expression of mental and spiritual activity, conceptions, and abstractions. For instance, the speech of the Delawares was found to have ten very different names for a bear, according to age, sex, etc. The limited resources of their speech explain to us the rhetorical and figurative character of Indian eloquence, so abounding in images, pictures, and symbols. It was this paucity of words and expressions suited to their use in moral and religious teachings that greatly impeded the work of missionaries among the savages. Doubtless, in many of the Treaty Councils with them speeches have been very erroneously conveyed, and covenants greatly mystified.
Of the power and graces of Indian oratory the evidences and the illustrations are abundant. The famous speech of Logan, even if apocryphal, is ranked among the gems of eloquence. When his fellow-chief Cornstock, in Cresap's war, 1774, held his interview with Lord Dunmore, Colonel Wilson, who was present, thus describes the scene: —
“When Cornstock arose, he was in nowise confused or daunted,
but spoke in a distinct and audible voice, without stammering or
repetition, and with peculiar emphasis. His looks while addressing
Governor Dunmore were truly grand and majestic, yet graceful and
attractive. I have heard the first orators in Virginia, — Patrick Henry
and Richard Lee; but never have I heard one whose powers of
delivery surpassed those of Cornstock.”
Among the efforts of labor and zeal which have been
spent by Europeans — generally, too, in unselfish and
self-sacrificing toils — for the benefit of the Indians, might well
be mentioned with special emphasis the task-work given to
the acquisition and comparison of Indian vocabularies, for
purposes of speech, instruction, and translation. It is one
thing to give oneself to the study of a difficult language for
the sake of being able to master the treasures of literature
which it may contain. It is quite another thing to catch
the words and modulations, the breathings and gruntings of
a spoken tongue without alphabet or symbol, to reduce it to
written forms, and to make it a vehicle for presenting the
literature of other languages. It is curious to note that the
earliest Europeans who undertook to put into writing the first
Indian words which they heard, seem to have aimed to crowd into them as many letters as possible. The first mention
of a word of the Dakota or Sioux language in a European
book is said to be one which Hennepin wrote in his Journal,
on his being taken by a war-party on the Upper
Mississippi. The savages were angry at seeing him read
his breviary, and fiercely spoke a word which Hennepin
writes Ouakanche! This word now appears in the
Dakota vocabulary as Wakan-de, meaning magical, or
supernatural.[9]
In the earliest intercourse between the Europeans and the Indians, a medium was established between them by meeting each other in speech and in sign-language, as we should say, half way. Father Lafitau has, with his usual intelligence, described the process as follows: —
“When two peoples who speak languages so widely unlike as
those of the Iroquois and the French come together for the ends of
traffic, or for mutual service in defence, they are compelled, equally
on either side, to approach each in the other's language, in order to
make themselves understood. This is difficult enough in the beginning;
but at last, with a little practice, they come to communicate
their thoughts, partly by gestures and partly by some corrupt words
which belong to neither language, because they are mere blunderings,
and compose a discourse without rhyme or reason. Still, by
practice, fixed significations are assigned to these terms, and they
serve the end proposed by them. Thus is formed a language or
jargon of scant authority in the dictionary and confined only to
intercourse. The Frenchman thinks he is using the language of
the savages, the savage that he is speaking that of the French, and
they understand enough to serve their needs. During the first
months of my stay at Sault-Saint-Loüis the savages used this jargon
to me, supposing that, being a Frenchman, I ought to understand it.
But I understood so little of it, that, when I began to apprehend a
little more clearly the principles of their natural speech, I was
obliged to ask them to speak as they do to each other, and I then
entered much better into their
thoughts.”[10]
The Father remarks, however, that though the savages had so many different languages, they had nearly the same range of mind and view, the same style of thought, and the same modes for expressing themselves. Their languages had a dearth of such terms as the missionaries needed to use in conveying to them religious lessons and abstract truths. This difficulty the Father says was not surmounted by missionaries who had lived among the savages for very many years, and who candidly confessed, that though their disciples perfectly understood them on other subjects, they could not satisfy themselves that their religious instruction was really apprehended.
Fettered and obstructed by such disabling conditions, we can perhaps appreciate the almost overwhelming difficulties of the task by which missionaries among the Indians have sought to construct vocabularies of the various native tongues for the purpose of mastering forms of speech, not merely for holding common intercourse with them, but for conveying to them the knowledge of the truths of revealed religion, instruction in spiritual things, in virtues, in transcendant verities, and in ecclesiastical obedience. References to further experiences of toil and ill success in this devoted work will engage our attention under another subject in this volume. Our imaginations hardly need any quickening or stimulating to bring before us the patient forms of the old missionaries, as in such hours as they could rescue from the tumults and annoyances of Indian village life, they crawled into their lonely lodges, and, when paper was too precious a luxury for such use, took their prepared sections of birch-bark, and, with ink extemporized from forest juice or moistened charcoals, essayed to construct a vocabulary of a savage dialect. Vast numbers of these tentative essays in a rude philology have perished. Primers, prayers, Church offices, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the Commandments have, after a fashion, been set forth in these vocabularies in sounds which have long since died on the air. Enough of them remain, in manuscript and print, to bear testimony to us of the zeal and love which were poured into them, and to make us grieve again over the penalty of the “Confusion of Tongues.”
In the light of our best means of knowledge of the past, with what we infer from fact, and our observations of the present, as regards the aborigines of our continent, probably we should not widely err in resting in this conclusion, — that the North American Indian, when first seen and known by Europeans, stood about midway upon the scale of humanity, as then divided and filled over our globe by gradations of beings belonging to our race. Perhaps we should place the Indian somewhat favorably this side of the middle of that scale. Certainly there were two hundred years ago, and probably there are to-day, as many representatives of our common humanity standing below him as above him. This statement is intended to cover general conditions, stage of development, possession and exercise of human faculties, resources of life, appliances, social relations, and the common experiences of existence.
We have not to go very far back in the centuries, to find for our own ancestors naked and painted men and women, burrowing in caves, without fields or flocks, and living by the chance growths of Nature. It has been pertly said that “the European is but a whitewashed savage;” and many among civilized scenes have lost both the external and the internal tokens of a release from barbarism.
There is one special and painful matter — most harrowing if it were pursued into details — to which we must give some place in forming our estimate of the nature and character of the Indian: it is the hideous and revolting cruelty manifested in his savagism. The scalping-knife is the symbol of the Indian warrior, as the sword and the rifle are of the rank and file of the civilized soldier. But there is something to us supremely hideous in the use of the scalping-knife and its companion weapon, the tomahawk. The practice of scalping a victim seems to have been universal among our aborigines. It has been a matter of question whether the practice was original with and peculiar to them. It has been affirmed that the wild hordes of Huns scalped their victims. Lafitau finds parallelisms of the practice among the pagans of the Old World. Niles, in his “History of French and Indian Wars,” makes, I think, the utterly unwarranted assertion that the French initiated the Indians into the habit. But they do not appear to have needed any teaching from civilized men in this or in any other shape or ingenuity of excessive and needless cruelty. They took to it and delighted in it as of the prompting of nature and instinct, and it became, if we may so use the word, a part of their religion.
Now what type of nature or character is indicated in this mastering and ferocious passion for inflicting mutilations and torture on helpless victims? The scalp was seized and preserved as a trophy. It was worn as a personal ornament. The number of scalps which a warrior could count as taken by his own hand marked as it were the degrees of honor and renown which he had reached and won, as degrees are graded in our lodges and commanderies of Masonic orders. Before they had edged tools of metal, the savage skill had sharpened stones or fish-bones so that they would sever the skin of the top-lock, whether of man, woman, or child. The dismal trophy would be stretched upon a wicker frame, tanned, and dried; and, after being a part of the ensigns displayed in his lodge, and worn as a trinket, it was buried with the warrior in his grave as a sort of Charon's penny for the fee on his voyage to the other shore. Several trustworthy persons, most familiar by long and intimate converse with the red men, have testified that the Indians have a very suggestive superstition on this subject, though there is no evidence that it is universal among them. They are said to believe that if a body — whether of white or red man, friend or foe — is deprived of the scalp-lock before burial, the soul that animated the body is forbidden all entrance upon the Happy Hunting Grounds, all share in the life hereafter. In confirmation of this, we are told of the eagerness shown by the Indian warrior to obtain the scalp of the slain, as if it insured for him the greater excommunication; and also of the risks which they will run to reclaim the bodies of their fallen friends on the battle-field, to save them from the fatal knife. But whether we regard the scalping-knife as the instrument of a wanton cruelty, or as darkly associated with a revengeful superstition, in either view of it, it is the symbol of the barbarity of savagism.
There are two passing hints to be dropped on this matter, if so be that any one may regard them as relieving its horror. First, the Indian warrior magnanimously dressed and elevated the crowning tuft of hair on his own head, so as to make it every way convenient to the clutch and knife of his enemy. Second, we must admit — shall we say, to our shame? — that the white man, after he had become skilled in the ways of Indian warfare, did not scruple to adopt the red man's practice of scalping the dead. There are official papers preserved on our State files, in which our magistrates offered bounties for Indian scalps to their own soldiers and to our red allies; and these papers show a tariff of prices for the tuft from the head of a man, a woman, or a child. The bounty for a scalp to a regular soldier was ten pounds; to a volunteer, twenty pounds; to patrol parties, fifty pounds. More than all, these bounties were claimed, paid, and receipted. An heroic woman of New Hampshire, Hannah Dustin, received payment for ten, which she had taken off with her own hand. More noteworthy still is the fact, that while the benevolent and pacific William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had declared the person of an Indian “sacred,” never to be harmed, his own grandson, when succeeding to the government, in the stress of Indian warfare, offered, in 1764, in a proclamation, this tariff of prices for Indian scalps: for a male scalp, $134; for that of a boy under ten, $130; for that of a female, $50. All that we can say of this self-degradation of the white man — civilized, Christian — to the barbarism of the red man is, that he was swift to learn and imitate all ill examples; and that he adopted scalping simply as one of the elements of wilderness warfare, like the lurking in ambushed thickets and ravines, and skulking behind a tree when firing his piece.
Again: shrinking from harrowing details, but for fidelity of view recognizing the truth, we must take note also of the hellish ingenuities practised by the savages in the mutilation and torture of the bodies of their victims and prisoners. All the taught skill which the anatomist can acquire with the scalpel, in dealing with the human body, could not have helped the Indian in his methods of drawing out, prolonging, and intensifying the pangs and agonies of his helpless foe. He seems to have known by instinct and by practice where were the quick points of keenest sensation, the order in which the nerves would quiver most torturingly, where fire would twinge the muscle, and how he might sap the life-currents so that they would most delay the blessing of unconsciousness. The preliminaries of the stake were found in the fun and revelry provided for the squaws and the pappooses, when the destined victim ran the gantlet, with its mocking jeers and its showering blows. We can well credit the repeated assertions of exposed frontier fighters and soldiers, that it is a habit among them to reserve the last charge of their rifles, or a secret pocket pistol, that they may terminate their own life when they know the game is over with them, to escape the dread fate.
If it will at all relieve the savage of the charge of utter inhumanity in this respect, it should be mentioned that it is a part of his education to prepare himself to endure as much of physical torture as he himself inflicts. Lafitau writes: —
“This heroism is real, and is born of a grand and noble courage.
That which we admire in the martyrs of the primitive
Church, and which in them was the work of grace and miracle,
is nature in the savages, and comes from the vigor of their
spirit. The Indians seem to prepare themselves for this from
the most tender age. Their children have been observed to press
their naked arms against each other, and put burning cinders
between them, defying each other's fortitude in bearing the pain.
I myself saw a child of five or six years old, who, having been
severely burnt by some boiling water accidentally thrown upon it,
sang its death-song with the most extraordinary constancy every
time they dressed the sores, although suffering the most severe
pain.”[11]
To this is to be added the profound admiration, as for
a consummate virtue, which they have for a tortured
warrior whose nerves do not flinch under his agonies,
and who raises cheerily the pæan of his scornful
triumph. It does not appear that any one of the Jesuit
Fathers who have admiringly related, in all their horrifying
details, this more than Spartan firmness and defiance
of the savages under protracted tortures, had
suggested to himself the thought that the terrors of hell,
which he regarded as the most potent agency in the work
of conversion, might have at least but a qualified dread
for those who could thus triumph over agonies inflicted
by their fellow-men. All unconscious as the savages were
that such a doom awaited them, or that they had done
anything to expose themselves to it, the most sceptical
and philosophic among them may have resolved to meet
it if they must, and to find their comfort as some Christian
people, unawed by the terrific threat, have avowed
that they should do, in a stout confidence that the doom
was unjust.
These barbarous ingenuities of torture by the savages, however relieved in endurance by the training which had fitted them to bear as well as to inflict them, were wrapped in intenser horror for all Christian eyes when the bodies of the sufferers, after life had been driven from its last refuge, were embowelled and severed by the tormentors, and then committed by the squaws to the caldrons for a fiendish banquet. We may leave untranslated the words of Lafitau concerning the savages and a victim: “Ne lui donnent point d'autre sepulture que leur ventre.”[12]
That such distressing scenes should have come under the eyes of Europeans calling themselves Christians, without engaging their sternest rebuke and prohibition, is to us hardly conceivable. But what shall we say about a trained connivance with them?
Baron La Hontan, often a dubious but sometimes a trustworthy authority, gives the following contemporary narrative of a scene at Quebec, of which it would appear that he was an eye-witness. It was an episode of that warfare, equally ferocious on both sides, waged between the French and the Iroquois. In the beginning of the year 1692, Frontenac had sent out one hundred and fifty men under Chevalier Beaucour, with fifty friendly savages, who in an encounter with a party of sixty Iroquois had killed all of them but twelve, who were brought as prisoners to Quebec: —
“After they arrived, M. Frontenac did very judiciously
condemn two of the wickedest of the company to be burnt alive with
a slow fire. This sentence extremely terrified the governor's lady
and the Jesuits. The lady used all manner of supplication to
procure a moderation of the terrible sentence; but the judge was
inexorable, and the Jesuits employed all their eloquence in vain
upon this occasion. The governor answered them, ‘That it was
absolutely necessary to make some terrible examples of severity to
frighten the Iroquois; that since these barbarians burnt almost all
the French who had the misfortune to fall into their hands, they must be treated after the same manner; because the indulgence which had hitherto been shown them seemed to authorize them to invade our plantations, and so much the rather to do it because they run no other hazard than that of being taken and well kept at their masters' houses: but, when they should understand that the French caused them to be burnt, they would have a care for the future how they advanced with so much boldness to the very gates of our cities: and, in fine, that the sentence of death being past, these two wretches must prepare to take a journey into the other world.’ This obstinacy appeared surprising in M. Frontenac, who but a little before had favored the escape of three or fourpersons liable to the sentence of death, upon the importunate prayer of madame the governess; but, though she redoubled her earnest supplications, she could not alter his firm resolution as to these two wretches. The Jesuits were thereupon sent to baptize them, and oblige them to acknowledge the Trinity and the Incarnation, and to represent to them the joys of paradise and the torments of hell, within the space of eight or ten hours. This was a very bold way of treating these great mysteries; and to endeavor to make the Iroquois understand them so quickly was to expose them to their laughter. Whether they took these truths for songs, I do not know; but from the minute they were acquainted with this fatal news they sent back these good fathers without ever hearing them; and then they began to sing the song of death, according to the custom of the savages. Some charitable person having thrown a knife to them in prison, he who had the least courage of the two thrust it into his breast, and died of the wound immediately. Some young Hurons of Lorette, between fourteen and fifteen years of age, came to seize the other and carry him away to CapeDiamond, where notice was given to prepare a great pile of wood. He ran to death with a greater unconcernedness than Socrates would have done. During the time of execution he sung continually, ‘That he was a warrior, brave and undaunted; that the most cruel kind of death could not shock his courage; that no torments could extort from him any cries; that his companion was a coward for having killed himself through the fear of torment; and, lastly, that if he was burnt he had this comfort, that he had treated many French and Hurons after the same manner.’ ”[13]
La Hontan proceeds to describe, in shocking details, the torments inflicted upon the victim, protracted through three hours, with all the ingenuities of fiendishness, through roasting and maiming, member by member, without drawing forth a tear or sigh or groan, or interrupting his strain of triumphant song. The Huron youth were the tormentors. By a hint or order from Madame Frontenac, a Huron gave the victim a finishing blow with a club, while La Hontan had already turned away from a spectacle which, he says, he had often to witness.
There is full truth in the words of Lafitau, that, “when the French and the English have been naturalized among the savages, they adopt readily all that is bad in their manners and customs without taking the good, so as to become viler than they. The savages know very well how to reproach us for this; and the charge is so true that we do not know how to answer them.”[14]
One may easily account for those barbarous traits in the man of the wilderness, which we are wont to refer to his deprivation of all civilizing influences, by tracing them to the savagism latent in humanity, and which is ever ready to assert itself when the restraints and helps of a surrounding and mastering social oversight are evaded or forgotten.
We are familiar with a form of quackery among us, as adopted by resident or travelling practitioners, who advertise themselves as Indian doctors or doctresses, and who profess to deal with the roots and herbs of the woods. That these simple natural products furnished to our use have their specific virtues, healthful and curative, common science and experience have fully proved. The essential part of the knowledge and use of these drugs of the field and of the forest very soon becomes the common folk-lore of simple people, as it did in the families of our first white colonists all over the country. And as there are progress and development in all such means and uses, and a finding of new virtues in everything, there may doubtless be revealed specifics, panaceas perhaps, in now neglected roots and herbs.
But the aim and lure of quacks — white persons or colored — who announce a practice after the manner and skill of the Indians, are to induce a belief in some occult knowledge or methods about the treatment of disease by simples acquired from the natives. Of course it is well understood that such pretensions are of the very essence of charlatanry, and are successful only with the ignorant and the credulous. But behind these pretences, and as furnishing whatever ground there may be for them, is a very interesting matter of inquiry; about which, however, it is not easy to reach a satisfactory conclusion, because our authorities are quite at variance in their statements and opinions. The Indian doctors, conjurers, or medicine-men were called by the French jongleurs, by the English powwows. Hakluyt describes them as “great majicians, great soothsayers, callers of divils, priests who serve instead of phisitions and chyrurgions.” These native practitioners appear through all our Indian history and in every tribe, including those with which we have most recently been brought into intercourse, under the twofold character of conjuring priests and dispensers of medical agencies. Under either aspect, if they did not assume, they had ascribed to them, the quality of a supernatural agency. More or less of trickery and of real sanitary skill may have manifested themselves in individuals according to the make-up of each one's own mental or moral composition, or the intelligence and shrewdness of his constituency of patients. Some of these patients in the hands of real conjurers passed through a herculean treatment worse than any known disease. In the mean time the jongleur himself had to submit to the severest drafts upon his own vitality, — his strength of nerve, his powers of self-contortion, his feats of skill, and the strain upon his vocal organs in hideous yellings. It must have often been a wonder that either the doctor or the patient survived.
There are those whose testimony has gone to favor the belief that the Indian doctors, as a class, had really a wonderful natural skill in the treatment of diseases, and especially in surgery; that they knew and made excellent use of the medicinal properties — emetic, drastic, and purgative, tonic and laxative, sudatory, emollient, antiseptic, anæsthetic, and antifebrile — of roots and herbs and barks, and that the course and results of their practice would compare favorably with those of our best scientific practitioners. Intelligent observers who have known the natives well, and have lived with them for years in their wild state, report to us most inconsistently and diversely on this subject. The weight of trustworthy testimony, however, reduces any claim in behalf of the natives for medical skill to a very slender substance, and the large majority of witnesses pronounce the claim absurd and wholly unfounded, while they describe the processes and material of Indian medical practice as monstrous, revolting, fraudulent, and utterly ineffectual, when not absolutely mischievous and fatal. In a volume published in 1823, under the title of “Manners and Customs of several Indian Tribes,” — purporting to be written by John D. Hunter, kidnapped from white parents when he was a child, and living among the Indians many years, till he was old enough to make his escape, — we have a most elaborate Materia Medica, giving us the common and the botanical names of a great variety of roots and herbs, as used by the Indians for specifics. The tribes to whom he ascribes a systematic practice of this sort, — which would do credit, in the main, to the profession among us, — were the Osages and the Kansas. He attributes to the Indian practitioners great skill, and to their simples much virtue. There were two marked peculiarities among them, which would be novelties to us: first, the practice was unpaid, wholly gratuitous; and, second, the doctors tried to effect some cures by taking the medicines themselves instead of giving them to their patients. Unfortunately, however, the good faith of Mr. Hunter, as an author, is in doubt and question. His personal history and credit are clouded, whatever be the value of his statements.
There are, however, authentic statements of real service derived from some simple medical appliances of the natives. When Cartier, in his second voyage up the St. Lawrence, in 1535, wintered on the St. Charles, near Quebec, his forlorn company, buried in ice and snow, was nearly reduced to extinction by the scurvy in its most malignant form. Twenty-five of the party perished, and not half-a-dozen were left in health. In his despair of all succor, even from the Virgin and the Saints, an Indian who had recovered from the disease directed his attention to an evergreen, probably the spruce, a strong decoction from which had wrought his cure, and the free use of which restored the health of the wretched sufferers. Many of the Jesuit Fathers, in their lonely residence with Indian tribes, were withheld by scruples from seeking acquaintance or familiarity with the Medicamenta of the Indians. They observed that the Indians were jealous of any such curiosity on their part, and, on the other hand, they were cautious about giving any countenance to Indian charms and superstitions.
Our authorities are equally discordant as to the physical robustness, the general healthfulness, and freedom from many diseases which characterized the aborigines. The Jesuit Fathers, however, — whose intercourse with the natives was earliest, most extended, most intimate and constant, and who are trustworthy in such statements, — repeatedly assert that the Indians were wholly free of many of the most annoying and painful and lingering maladies visited upon civilized men. As to the affirmation frequently made by them, that they never saw a dwarf, a hunchback, or otherwise deformed or native cripple among the savages, the statement might be parried by the supposition that infants born under such disadvantages might not be allowed to live. The intelligent and cautious Lafitau is a good authority within the wide range of his observation and inquiry. He tells us that the severe bodily exercises of the savages, their travels, and the simplicity of their food exempted them from many of the maladies which attend an easy, indolent, and luxurious life, with the use of salt and spices and ragouts, and all the refinements and delicacies that minister to gluttony, tickle the taste, impair the appetite, and undermine health. The savages, with light nourishment, hardened by their trampings, though taking little care against the rigorous extremes of heat and cold, are still strong and robust, with a soft skin and pure blood, “less salt and more balsamic than ours.” “One does not see among them the deformed from birth; they are not subject to gout or gravel, to apoplexy or sudden death; and perhaps they may not have knowledge of the small-pox, the scurvy, the measles, and most of the other epidemic diseases, except through intercourse with Europeans.” Still, Lafitau says that they are human in their subjection to diseases, and have some especial ones of their own, — such as scrofulous maladies, caused, he says, by the crudity of the waters, and by snow-water. The exposure of their chests makes them liable to phthisis, of which the most of them die. Many of them reach an extreme old age. “I have seen at my mission a squaw who had before her children of her children, down to the fifth generation.”[15]
There is abundant and according testimony that the natives had great success in the treatment of flesh wounds, and in some surgical operations. Indeed many competent witnesses assure us that their skill surpassed that of trained practitioners, and instances are given of their successful treatment of desperate cases among the whites, as well as among their own people where the European surgeon had been baffled. This native skill was of high service, as the Indians suffered, in their mode of life, more from wounds, bruises, and fractures than from internal maladies. The purity of their blood and the simplicity of their food favored an easy recuperation from injuries, and they took great pains to exclude the air from festering flesh.
The signal triumph of native medical skill was in their conceiving and availing themselves of that seemingly paradoxical method of alternation between the extremes of heat and cold in the treatment of a patient which has been adopted by civilized Europeans and Americans, and credited to the Turks.
The “suderie,” the “sweat-box,” or the “vapor bath” are the names attached to a method of treatment which, with trifling modifications and adaptations required by different circumstances, was the principal sanitary reliance of the natives over this whole continent, with the possible exception of the Esquimaux. In an emergency, an Indian who had recourse to this method when suffering a malady might serve himself alone. Many who were prostrated and enfeebled by fever or cramped by rheumatism have been known to do this, by drawing on their own energies. It was desirable, however, that a patient should have one or more assistants in the treatment. A low hut, lodge, or cabin of bark or skins was constructed near to the water of lake or river. It was made very tight, with no orifice or air-hole save that through which the patient wholly naked crept into it, and which was then closed. Upon heaps of coal and heated stones water was suddenly poured, rapidly generating steam, which penetrated into every pore of the patient, nearly exhausting him into liquidation. In this condition he would then rush out, or be carried, to plunge into an icy stream or lake, or to roll in the snow. The operation was repeated, if necessary, on one or more succeeding days. It must have been prevailingly successful, or the native philosophy would have discredited and abandoned it. It seems to have been eminently adapted to insure a decisive result, either in killing or curing. If true science can ratify its method, its success or immunity is accounted for. Otherwise we must learn from it another lesson as to the capacities of endurance in the human organism.
A revolting subject, often brought under discussion and led on to widely contrasted decisions by historians and inquirers, has kept under debate the question whether that foul scourge, the penalty of sensual vice, now so prevalent here among the aborigines, was indigenous or introduced by Europeans. It has borne the titles of the French disease, the Italian disease, and the Indian disease. It is understood that our most able archæological investigators have effectually settled the question that the disease had its victims — as is proved by the condition of human bones — on this continent previous to the voyages of Columbus. It is by no means of universal prevalence among the Indian tribes, for while some few have been reduced by it to a most distressing condition, others have had no blight from it, or but very limited inflictions from it.
The manner in which the natives disposed of their dead, with more or less of sensitiveness and mourning in observances, and of superstition in their beliefs, and a continued regard for the resting-places, would of itself furnish the subject of an extended essay. Among the various tribes, and in some tribes at different periods, there was much range of diversity in these matters; and as in these regards the ways and feelings, the methods and observances of uncivilized men are very like in their variety and associations to those of civilized men, the subject is not of a character for particular dealing with it. Our common sympathetic references to the natives of the vanished and the vanishing tribes, attribute to the aborigines a lingering and profound attachment to the burial-places of their ancestors. That this sentiment has been intensely strong in some of the tribes is proved by the fact, that, when either by voluntary or forced removals they leave their old homes for new ones, they have reverently gathered up the bones of their kindred to be taken with them. The commemorative rites and festivals of some of the tribes draw them to their burial-grounds for lament and song, and to rehearse the achievements of their departed braves. The most ancient of these burial-places afford inviting fields for the explorations of the archæologists, though little has been yielded up by them to increase or modify our knowledge or views about the Indian sepulchral rites as ever having been essentially different from what they have been in recent times. Burial in upright, or sitting, or recumbent postures in the ground, or a disposal with coverings of skins on trees, scaffolds, or platforms, or in an old canoe, indicating a purpose of removal of the bones; the placing of weapons, trophies, and articles of apparel or food near the defunct; the marking, protecting, and respecting the resting-place, — are perpetuated among the aborigines now from pre-historic times.
The first impression which Europeans received from contact and intercourse with the aborigines, and which they reported in their earliest narratives and descriptions, was that they had no religion whatever, — that their minds were a blank on all religious subjects. The French monarch came to the conclusion that they had no souls. The epithet “heathen,” applied by all Europeans to the Indians, was a term which covered alike the lack of any religion and the belief of any other than a true one. But extended and familiar intercourse soon proved to the Europeans that the natives were by no means without what served them for a religion, and what filled the place and exercised the profound and august power over them which the purest and loftiest form of religion has and effects for the most advanced human being. Whether the sort of religion which the red men were found to have and to recognize were in the white man's view better or worse than no religion, was a matter for difference of opinion. But the red man's heart and thought were by no means empty or unengaged on the spells and mysteries, the shadows and the revealings, associated with religion. He who humbly and devoutly holds what represents the very loftiest, purest, and most spiritual form of religion in its tenets, its conceptions, and believings may be grateful if he can intelligently assure himself that any considerable portion of his creed or hope is adequate to the subject of it, — is free from superstition, credulity, limitation of view, imperfection of thought. Of those component elements of religion which awe and enthrall thought, which exercise the imagination, which quicken hopes, which strike dread, and which compel offerings, exercises, and real sacrifices, the Indian unmistakably showed that he was the possessor and the subject. In Eastern realms the monarch or chief was the priest of his tribe or people. It was not so here. The office of priest — magician, sorcerer, as the Europeans regarded it — was here filled by the doctor, the physician for bodily ills. In the idea which underlies this combination of functions, we certainly can find something likely to win our approval. The physician of the body was the minister of sacred rites to the Indian, and the chief of the tribe was both his patient and disciple. Certainly Christians, remembering the touch of healing and the word of power combined in their Master, must favorably regard the custom among our Indians in uniting the functions of the “powwow,” or enchanter, with those of the medicine-man.
True, the incantations and the professional ministrations of the Indian functionary may have been barbarous and monstrous, — of the essence of quackery, without the conscious intent of it; they may even have been as our devout fathers viewed them, — really diabolical: but they were rudely earnest, intensely practical, and substantially sincere. “Indian ceremonies,” says Major Campion, an in- telligent observer of them, “are not funny, they are not ridiculous; they are wild, fierce, and earnest, ofttimes cruel and blood-thirsty. They are semi-religious rites, — not celebrated in a perfunctory way, by a salaried pagan priesthood; but are the solemn, earnest exercises of grim, determined savages.”
It is hardly probable that any one in converse with what is left of the Indian race and tribes would now say that they were without religion, or that such religion as they have was of harmful rather than of good influence over them. Their religion is the product of all the elements, conditions, and surroundings of their life. It has its fierce and hideous, and also its gentle and winning, influences over them. We are learning lessons from the contact and comparisons of various religions and of those who profess them, in the spirit of contention or harmony, in real or in sham discipleship; and, of these lessons recently learned by us, the Indian has the benefit in tolerance and in charity. In the closest friendships and intimacies of social and domestic life, under the highest civilization and refinement, we are made to realize that religion furnishes the material for division, alienation, and obstruction of sympathies; simply because not only its deepest processes, but also its infinite richness of materials for speculation, preference, and fond and clinging vision and trust, are strictly the secrets of each individual breast. The lonely Indian — roaming the woods, occupied with his dreams and fancies, wondering over the panorama of earth and heaven, and facing his lot in life and death — had his “spiritual exercises.” He could not impart them, neither could they lightly be trifled with. We have learned that the best and most effective part of religion is not that which is characteristic and peculiar to one, but that which is common to them all.
The severest trial to which a religion can be subjected is in the effort to displace by it and to substitute it for another. We shall have to recognize, further on, many interesting facts bearing upon this point. The excellent and accomplished Lafitau exercised a discernment and a candor in forming and expressing his views upon the religious range, character, intelligence, and susceptibility of the aborigines, in which he was not followed by all of his brethren. He recognized not only the exceeding difficulty found in the imperfect vehicle of language, but the more perplexing and embarrassing obstruction offered in the lack of mental furnishing for all the processes of reasoning and spiritual conception in the savage. It was almost provokingly characteristic of these really irresponsive pupils, that, though they would assent spontaneously and as if with full appreciation and approval to some lesson or assertion of their teacher, their minds were utterly destitute of any answering idea. They caught no more of meaning from it than they would have appropriated from a page of the most abstruse mathematical or algebraical formulas. When, in rare cases, they did apprehend a gleam of some doctrinal teaching or religious lesson from the missionary which was in direct antagonism with a belief or opinion of their own, they could stand on the defensive and decline what, though it might be very good for the white man's religion, was not suited for the Indian.
That was indeed an astounding and appalling announcement which the missionary made the starting-point of his instruction to them, — that in their natural state they were under the doom of an awful and unending subjection to unutterable woe after this life, and that the only relation which the Great Spirit then sustained to them was as waiting for their passing from this troubled existence that he might visit upon them his wrath forever. The doctrine, if apprehended at all, was dulled in its impression by the amazement which paralyzed their ability really to grasp it. It might have been grimly submitted to as relieved by the suggestion — giving the comfort of companionship to misery — that they would share the terrible doom in the fellowship of their own race. And there were many reasons and occasions which strongly disposed the red man to long for a wide distance and a complete severance of associations from the white man, as well for the unknown hereafter as here on earth. If in the vigorous intellectual stretch of the reasoning powers of some of the more gifted of the savages the hideous doctrine was really brought within the grasp of the understanding, the ability to ponder it would be likely to be accompanied by some keen speculation as to its reasonableness, truthfulness, and authority.
There were shrewd and ingenious individuals among those whom the missionaries sought to convert, as the latter have left on record, who very naïvely took refuge from this and from other unattractive or perplexing instructions by insisting that all these lessons and warnings might be very true and good as parts of the white men's religion, who, if they had not a God of their own, had some very peculiar means of knowing things kept secret from the Indian. This ingenious refuge in recognizing and arguing, — as among the many fundamental differences between the white men and the red men, in their knowledge, privileges, opportunities, and consequent duties, — that there might well be a very broad distinction between the religions suited to their respective conditions, very often presents itself in related conversations of some of the more acute savages with the missionaries. That the savages had a religion of their own — what we call the religion of Nature — would find assurance in the single fact of their irresponsiveness and indocility under any merely dogmatical or doctrinal teachings, apart from such simple ritual and formal observance as the Roman Catholic priests exacted of them. There were occasions on which gifted and earnest individuals among the natives poured out a strain of simple, kindling eloquence in expatiating upon the grand and exalted truths of their own religion, of its special adaptation to themselves and the conditions of their own lives, the aspects of earth and sky under which they met the experiences of existence, and the kindly care of Providence for them in supplying all their needs through natural products and the services of their humble kindred among the animals.
Probably the fact held good in its application in degrees to all the native tribes under the teaching of the missionaries, which is signally illustrated in the case of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico; namely, that while yielding a seemingly ready compliance with the observances required of them by their priestly teachers, they retained in deeper impressions and with undiminished attachment the tenets of their ancestral religion. They certainly do in privacy or fellowship cherish their old rites and festivals in connection with a reverence for fire, for the sun, for periodical recognitions of the seasons in their ancient calendar, and for commemorating the departed generations of their race. Here nature and training, so often in strong antagonism with each other, seem to be brought into harmonious working together. It is the utmost result which can be looked for from the most hopeful teaching of religion to adult savage people. Should not that result, or even approximations to it, be regarded as the reward of wise zeal and effort?
- ↑ Foster's Pre-Historic Races, p. 370.
- ↑ History of the Mission of the United Brethren to the Indians of North America, p. 141.
- ↑ London ed., 1878, p. 355 et seq.
- ↑ My Life on the Plains; or, Personal Experiences with Indians. By General G. A. Custer, U. S. A. 1876. Pages 11, 16, 102, et seq.
- ↑ The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabitants. By Richard Irving Dodge, Lieut.-Colonel U. S. A. New York. 1877. Pages 342-43.
- ↑ Arnold's History of Rhode Island, vol. i. p. 78.
- ↑ Palfrey's History of New England, vol. i. p. 49.
- ↑ Page 231.
- ↑ Collections of Minnesota Historical Society, 1. 308.
- ↑ Mœurs des Sauvages, vol. ii. p. 475-76.
- ↑ Mœurs des Sauvages, vol. ii. p. 280.
- ↑ Vol. ii. p. 279.
- ↑ Voyages de La Hontan, vol. i. p. 233 (ed. 1709).
- ↑ Mœurs, etc., vol. ii. p. 290.
- ↑ Mœurs des Sauvages, etc., vol. ii. p. 360.