No rules are ever formulated as to fresh air or exercise, for the
sufficient reason that the door of the Cherokee log cabin is always
open, excepting at night and on the coldest days in winter, while
the Indian is seldom in the house during his waking hours unless when
necessity compels him. As most of their cabins are still built in the
old Indian style, without windows, the open door furnishes the only
means by which light is admitted to the interior, although when closed
the fire on the hearth helps to make amends for the deficiency. On the
other hand, no precautions are taken to guard against cold, dampness,
or sudden drafts. During the greater part of the year whole families
sleep outside upon the ground, rolled up in an old blanket. The
Cherokee is careless of exposure and utterly indifferent to the
simplest rules of hygiene. He will walk all day in a pouring rain
clad only in a thin shirt and a pair of pants. He goes barefoot and
frequently bareheaded nearly the entire year, and even on a frosty
morning in late November, when the streams are of almost icy coldness,
men and women will deliberately ford the river where the water is
waist deep in preference to going a few hundred yards to a foot-log.
At their dances in the open air men, women, and children, with bare
feet and thinly clad, dance upon the damp ground from darkness until
daylight, sometimes enveloped in a thick mountain fog which makes
even the neighboring treetops invisible, while the mothers have their
infants laid away under the bushes with only a shawl between them and
the cold ground. In their ball plays also each young man, before going
into the game, is subjected to an ordeal of dancing, bleeding, and
cold plunge baths, without food or sleep, which must unquestionably
waste his physical energy.
In the old days when the Cherokee was the lord of the whole country
from the Savannah to the Ohio, well fed and warmly clad and leading
an active life in the open air, he was able to maintain a condition of
robust health notwithstanding the incorrectness of his medical ideas
and his general disregard of sanitary regulations. But with the advent
of the white man and the destruction of the game all this was changed.
The East Cherokee of to-day is a dejected being; poorly fed, and worse
clothed, rarely tasting meat, cut off from the old free life, and
with no incentive to a better, and constantly bowed down by a sense of
helpless degradation in the presence of his conqueror. Considering all
the circumstances, it may seem a matter of surprise that any of them
are still in existence. As a matter of fact, the best information that
could be obtained in the absence of any official statistics indicated
a slow but steady decrease during the last five years. Only the
constitutional vigor, inherited from their warrior ancestors, has
enabled them to sustain the shock of the changed conditions of the
last half century. The uniform good health of the children in the
training school shows that the case is not hopeless, however, and that
under favorable conditions, with a proper food supply and a regular
mode of living, the Cherokee can hold his own with the white man.