|THERE can be nothing more pathetic than to watch the decay of a race,
even though it be a scrub race. To watch the decay of the Indian race,
has been with me, for many years a passion, and the more the Indian has
decayed the more reckless I have been in studying his ways.
The Indian race for over two hundred years has been a race against Time,
and I need hardly add that Time is away ahead as I pen these lines.
I dislike to speak of myself so much, but I have been identified with
the Indians more or less for fifteen years. In 1876 I was detailed by a
San Francisco paper to attend the Custer massacre and write it up,
but not knowing where the massacre was to be held I missed my way and
wandered for days in an opposite direction. When I afterwards heard how
successful the massacre was, and fully realized what I had missed, my
mortification knew no bounds, but I might have been even more so if I
had been successful. We never know what is best for us.
But the Indian is on the wane, whatever that is. He is disappearing from
the face of the earth, and we find no better illustration of this sad
fact than the gradual fading away of the Shinnecock Indians near the
extremity of Long Island.
In company with _The World_ artist, who is paid a large salary to
hold me up to ridicule in these columns, I went out the other day to
Southampton and visited the surviving members of this great tribe.
Neither of us knows the meaning of fear. If we had been ordered by the
United States Government to wipe out the whole Shinnecock tribe we would
have taken a damp towel and done it.
The Shinnecock tribe now consists of James Bunn and another man. But
they are neither of them pure-blooded Shinnecock Indians. One-Legged
Dave, an old whaler, who, as the gifted reader has no doubt already
guessed, has but one leg, having lost the other in going over a reef
many years ago, is a pure-blooded Indian, but not a pure-blooded
Shinnecock. Most of these Indians are now mixed up with the negro race
by marriage and are not considered warlike.
The Shinnecocks have not been rash enough to break out since they had
the measles some years ago, but we will let that pass.
There are now about 150 Shinnecocks on the reservation, the most of whom
are negroes. They live together in peace and hominy, trying most of the
time to ascertain what the wild waves are saying in regard to fish.
There is an air of gentle, all-pervading peace which hangs over the
Shinnecock hills and that had its effect even upon my tumultuous and
aggressive nature, wooing me to repose. I could rest there all this
summer and then, after a good night's sleep, I could go right at it
again in the morning. Rest at Southampton does not seem to fatigue one
as it does elsewhere.
The Shinnecock Indian has united his own repose of manner with the calm
and haughty distrust of industry peculiar to the negro, and the result
is something that approaches nearer to the idea of eternal rest than
anything I have ever seen. The air seems to be saturated with it and the
moonlight is soaked full of calm. It would be a good place in which to
wander through the gloaming and pour a gallon or so of low, passionate
yearning into the ear of a loved one.
As a friend of mine, who is the teacher of modern languages and
calisthenics in an educational institution, once said, "the air seems
filled with that delicious dolce farina for which those regions is noted
for." I use his language because I do not know now how I could add to it
in any way.
We visited Mr. James Bunn at his home on Huckleberry avenue, saw the
City Hall and Custom House and obtained a front view of it, secured a
picture of the residence of the Street Commissioner and then I talked
with Mr. Bunn while the artist got a marine view of his face.
Mr. Bunn was for forty years a whaler, but had abandoned the habit now,
as there is so little demand among the restaurants for whales, and also
because there are fewer whales. I ascertained from him that the whale at
this season of the year does not readily rise to the fly, but bites the
harpoon greedily during the middle of the day.
Mr. Bunn also gave us a great deal of other Information, among other
things informing us of the fact that the white men had been up to their
old tricks and were trying to steal portions of the reservation that had
not been nailed down. He did not say whether it was the same man who is
trying to steal the old Southampton graveyard or not.
James is about seventy-five years old and his father once lived in a
wigwam on the Shinnecock Hills. Mr. Bunn says that the country has
changed very much in the past 250 years and that I would hardly know the
place if I could have seen it at first. During that time he says two
other houses have been built and he has reshingled the L of his barn
with hay.
He told us the thrilling story of the Spanish Sylph and how she was
wrecked many years ago on the coast near his house, and how the Spanish
dollars burst out of her gaping side and fell with a low, mellow plunk
into the raging main.
How and then the sea has given up one of these "sand-dollars" as the
years went by, and not over two years ago one was found along the shore
near by. What I blame the Shinnecock Indians for is their fatal yearning
to subsist solely on this precarious income.
But with the decline of the whaling industry, due somewhat to the great
popularity of natural and acquired gas as a lubricant, together with
the cheap methods of picking up electricity and preserving it for
illuminating purposes, and also to the fact that whales are more
skittish than they used to be, the Shinnecock whaler is left high and
dry.
It is, indeed, a pathetic picture. Here on the stern and rock-bound
coast, where their ancestors greeted Columbus and other excursionists
as they landed on the new dock and at once had their pictures taken in a
group for the illustration on the greenbacks, now the surviving relic of
a brave people, with bowed heads and frosting locks, are waiting a few
days only for the long, dark night of merciful oblivion.
So he walks in the night-time, all through the long fly time, he walks
by the sorrowful sea, and he yearns to wake never, but lie there forever
in the arms of the sheltering sea, to lie in the lap of the sea.
At least that is my idea of the way the Shinnecock feels about it.
The Indian race, wherever we find it, gives us a wonderful illustration
of the great, inherent power of rum as a human leveler. The Indian has,
perhaps, greater powers of endurance than the white man, and enters into
the great unequal fight with rum almost hilariously, but he loses his
presence of mind and forgets to call a cab at the proper moment. This is
a matter that has never been fully understood even by the pale face, and
of course the Indian is a perfect child in the great conflict with rum.
The result is that the Indian is passing away under our very eyes, and
the time will soon come when the Indian agent will have to seek some
other healthful, outdoor exercise.
So the consumptive Shinnecock, the author of "Shinny on Your Own Ground
and Other Games," is soon to live only in the flea-bitten records of a
great nation. Once he wrote pieces for the boys to speak in school, and
contributed largely to McGuffy's and Sander's periodicals, but now you
never hear of an Indian who is a good extemporaneous public speaker, or
who can write for sour apples.
He no longer makes the statement that he is an aged hemlock, that his
limbs are withered and his trunk attached by the constable. He has
ceased to tell through the columns of the Fifth Reader how swift he used
to be as a warrior and that the war-path is now overgrown with grass. He
very seldom writes anything for the papers except over the signature of
Veritas, and the able young stenographer who used to report his speeches
at the council fire seems to have moved away.
Two hundred and fifty years ago the Shinnecock Hills were covered by a
dense forest, but in that brief period, as if by magic, two and one-half
acres of that ground have been cleared, which is an average of an entire
acre for every hundred years. When we stop to consider that very little
of this work was done by the women and that the men have to attend to
the cleaning of the whales in order to prepare them for the table, and
also write their contributions for the school-books and sign treaties
with the White Father at Washington, we are forced to admit that had the
Indian's life been spared for a few thousand years more he would have
been alive at the end of that time.
So they wander on together, waiting for the final summons. Waiting for
the pip or measles, and their cough is dry aud hacking as they cough
along together towards the large and wide hereafter.
They have lived so near Manhattan, where refinement is so plenty, where
the joy they jerk from barley--every other day but Sunday--gives the
town a reddish color, that the Shinnecock is dying, dying with his
cowhide boots on, dying with his hectic flush on, while the church
bells chime in Brooklyn and New Yorkers go to Jersey, go to get their
fire-water, go to get their red-eyed bug-juice, go to get their cooking
whiskey.
Far away at Minnehaha, in the land of the Dakota, where the cyclone
feels so kinky, rising on its active hind-feet, with its tail up o'er
the dash-board, blowing babies through the grindstone without injuring
the babies, where the cyclone and the whopper journey on in joy
together--there refinement and frumenti, with the new and automatic
maladies and choice diseases that belong to the Caucasian, gather in the
festive red man, take him to the reservation, rob him while his little
life lasts, rob him till he turns his toes up, rob him till he kicks the
bucket.
And the Shinnecock is fading, he who greeted Chris. Columbus when he
landed, tired and seasick, with a breath of peace and onions; he who
welcomed other strangers, with their notions of refinement and their
knowledge of the Scriptures and their fondness for Gambrinus--they have
compassed his damnation and the Shinnecock is busted.