FIRE.
THE FIRE-USING ANIMAL—ESQUIMAUX USE OF FIRE—FUEGIAN FIRE-MAKING
—MODES OF PRODUCING FIRE—AUSTRALIAN FIRE-MYTH—MEN OF THE
MAMMOTH AGE—HEARTHS OF THE CAVE-MEN—PACIFIC ROOT-WORD FOR FIRE
—GREAT CYCLE OF THE AZTECS—REKINDLING THE SACRED FIRE—
PERUVIAN SUN-WORSHIPPERS—SACRIFICE OF THE WHITE DOG—SACRED
FIRES OF THE MOUND-BUILDERS—INDIAN FIRE-MAKING—SANCTITY OF
FIRE—TIERRA DEL FUEGO.
No incident attending the discovery of America is more suggestive than
the evidence which first satisfied Columbus that his exploration of the
mysterious western ocean had not been in vain. The sun had descended
beneath the waves as his eye ranged along the horizon in search of the
long expected land, when suddenly a light glimmered in the distance,
once and again reappeared to the eyes of Pedro Gutierrez and others whom
he summoned to confirm his vision, and then darkness and doubt resumed
their reign. But to Columbus all was clear. Not only did those flitting
gleams reveal to him certain signs of the long-wished-for land; they
told him no less clearly that the land was inhabited by man.
There is something singularly significant in the old Greek myth which
represents the Titanic son of Iapetus stealing the fire of Zeus that he
might confer on the human race a power over the crude elements of
nature. Man is peculiarly fire-using. The element which becomes in his
hands a power that controls all the others, and subjects them to his
use, is an object of dread to the lower animals, alike amid arctic snows
and the shadows of a night-camp in the tropics. Its use, moreover, is so
universal as to admit of its being regarded as one of the primitive
instincts of man, and so peculiarly his own that he may be appropriately
designated the _fire-using animal_. Nevertheless, his supposed ignorance
of fire during primitive ages has been employed as an argument in
confirmation of the idea that the first habitat of man must have been a
climate where his unclothed body experienced no discomfort from the
changing seasons, and where fruit was found in sufficient abundance to
supply his wants without need of artificial preparation.[57]
Yet it is in climates where the torrid sun presents itself as the
life-giving force that, alike in the old and the new world, the worship
of fire, and the rites associated with its use, have been found most
fully developed. It is noticeable, moreover, that fire is less used in
the frigid than in the temperate zones as the direct source of heat. The
Esquimaux in his snow-hut would find a fire productive only of
discomfort. Even in the adaptation of animal food to his use cookery is
less indispensable than in other latitudes; and fire is more prized by
him in his brief summer as a protection against the myriads of noxious
insects then warmed into life, than as a means of counteracting the
rigour of a polar winter. He depends for warmth on his fur clothing, and
still more on the heat-producing blubber and fat which constitute so
large a portion of his food. Yet the lamp, generally made of stone, with
its moss wick, and the stone kettle, play an important part among the
implements and culinary apparatus of an Esquimaux’s hut. On those he
depends for his supply of water from melted snow, for thawing and drying
his clothes, and for cooking; and without the light of the lamp the
indoor life of the long unbroken arctic night would be spent as in a
living tomb. The Esquimaux generally possess a piece of iron pyrites and
of quartz. These serve them for flint and steel, with which they ignite
a tuft of dried moss frayed in the hand. But they are also familiar with
the more laborious fire-making process by means of friction, which is in
general use throughout America.
At the opposite extremity of the Continent lies Tierra del Fuego, the
natives of which are exposed to still greater privations, and have been
pronounced by observant voyagers as among the most degraded of savage
races. Yet the Fuegians exhibit considerable ingenuity in constructing
their fishing tackle, slings, bows and stone-tipped arrows, stone
knives, and javelins pointed with bone. A bone harpoon in use by them,
barbed only on one side (Fig. 33), resembles examples already referred
to found in the Dordogne and other caves of the era when the mammoth and
its hunters existed together in Southern France. M. Lecoq de
Boisbeaudrau suggests that the deflection of the harpoon so formed
serves as an equivalent for the refraction of the fish in the water, and
thus the fisherman secures an unerring aim. If so, it furnishes an
ingenious application of the fruits of experience directed to rectify a
difficulty common to the modern Fuegian and to the Troglodyte of
post-glacial times.
The canoes of the Fuegians are rudely constructed of bark sewed together
with prepared sinews. In the bottom a hearth of clay is made, on which
they habitually keep a fire alight. They too have learned the value of
iron pyrites, and with its help readily obtain the spark required for
igniting their prepared tinder of dried moss or fungus. Captain Weddell
states that he produced the tinder-box in presence of a party of
Fuegians, in order to ascertain how fire is obtained by them, and
presently he discovered that his steel had been purloined. This,
however, he recovered, and after sending the culprit to his canoe with
threats of punishment, he learned that they procure fire by rubbing iron
pyrites and a flinty stone together, catching the sparks in a dry
substance resembling moss.[58]
The ancient use of pyrites for fire-making is supposed to be embodied in
its etymology (πῦρ). Mr. John Evans has pointed out that the lower beds
of the same English chalk in which the flint abounds are prolific of
pyrites; and he makes the suggestion that the use of a nodule of pyrites
for a hammer-stone in the process of manufacturing flint implements, may
have led to the discovery of this method of producing fire. But if so,
it is a discovery of remote antiquity, for such nodules have been found
both in French and Belgian caves, associated with the bones of fossil
mammals and worked flints of the palæolithic era. They also occur in the
Swiss lake-dwellings, as at Robenhausen, along with neolithic
implements.
But pyrites is not always available; and Esquimaux, Fuegians, and
Australians practise also the more usual, and probably the more ancient,
method of producing fire by friction. The process among the Tahitians
and South Sea islanders is pursued in the laboriously artless fashion of
rubbing one piece of wood against another; though it is said that, with
perfectly dry wood, they obtain fire in this way in two or three
minutes. Australian fire-making is effected in nearly the same way; but
the American Indians have improved on the process by the use of the bow
and drill. Among the Iroquois and other tribes, the drill was provided
with a stone whorl, or fly-wheel, to give it momentum; and when rapidly
revolved by means of a bow and string, with the point resting on a piece
of dry wood, surrounded with moss or punk, sparks are produced in a few
seconds, and the tinder is ignited.
The art of fire-making is thus found in use among savage nations, even
in the most degraded state: as among the Fuegians, whose wretched
condition and repulsive appearance and habits have led travellers to
describe them as scarcely human. They are indeed in every way inferior
to the Esquimaux. Yet their implements and weapons display remarkable
ingenuity and skill; and the origin of the name of their desolate region
is traced to the numerous fires seen by the first Spanish discoverers
who navigated its coasts.
The aborigines of Australia rival the Fuegians alike in physical and
intellectual degradation; but, like them also, have achieved or
perpetuated the discovery which lies at the very foundation of all
possible civilisation. According to the inconsequential account
furnished by a native Australian of their first acquisition of fire:—“A
long, long time ago a little bandicoot[59] was the sole owner of a
fire-brand, which he cherished with the greatest jealousy. So selfish
was he in the use of his prize, that he obstinately refused to share it
with the other animals. So they held a general council, where it was
decided that the fire must be obtained from the bandicoot either by
force or strategy. The hawk and pigeon were deputed to carry out this
resolution; and after vainly trying to induce the fire-owner to share
its blessings with his neighbours, the pigeon, seizing, as he thought,
an unguarded moment, made a dash to obtain the prize. The bandicoot saw
that affairs had come to a crisis, and, in desperation, threw the fire
towards the river, there to quench it for ever. But, fortunately for the
black man, the sharp-eyed hawk was hovering near, and seeing the fire
falling into the water, with a stroke of his wing he knocked the brand
far over the stream into the long dry grass of the opposite bank, which
immediately ignited, and the flames spread over the face of the country.
The black man then felt the fire, and said it was good.”[60]
The discovery of the art of fire-making, prefigured in this rude myth,
is intimately associated in the minds of the Australian aborigines with
their distinctive ideas of man. According to the mythology of the
Booroung tribe, inhabiting the Mallee country, on Lake Tyrill, they were
preceded on the earth by a race of Nurrumbunguttias, or old spirits, who
had the knowledge of fire; but these were translated to heaven before
the black man came into existence. One of them, named _War_, or the
Crow,—the Australian Prometheus,—is now the star Canopus; and he it
was who first brought fire back to earth, and gave it to the black
men.[61]
It is a noticeable fact that, while the Maoris of New Zealand use the
same word, _ahi_, for fire, which under slight modifications is employed
through widely severed island groups of the Pacific: different
Australian tribes use distinct names for it, as _darloo_ at Moreton Bay,
_koyung_ at Lake Macquarrie, and _kaubi_ at Bathurst. In the Kamilarai
of Wellington Valley it is called _koyan_; while in the Wiradurei,
spoken about 200 miles inland from Lake Macquarrie, it is _win_. Such
diversity of names for the common acquisition proves that fire is no
recent novelty derived from a single source by the savage tribes of that
strange southern continent.
Amid all the remarkable evidence recently disclosed relative to the
antiquity and the rude arts of primitive man, nothing has yet appeared
suggestive of a condition inferior to the savages of Tierra del Fuego or
Australia; while much tends to an opposite conclusion. Alike in physical
development and in arts, the Troglodytes of the Dordogne caves were
undoubtedly far in advance of either; and yet they were the
contemporaries of the mammoth, the Siberian rhinoceros, the cave- lion
and bear, the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, and the fossil horse of
Central Europe,—the men of a period separated from our own by epochs
the duration of which can be gauged by no standards of historical
chronology. It could scarcely admit of doubt that such men were capable
of achieving the art of fire-making. It might even be questioned if they
could have subsisted under the conditions of life marking that
post-glacial epoch without the use of fire. But on this subject we are
not left to conjecture.
The contents of the Aurignac cavern, in the department of the
Haute-Garonne, at the foot of the Pyrenees, were at first supposed to
disclose a singularly interesting example of sepulture contemporaneous
with the fossil mammals of the drift; and accompanied not only with
implements and personal ornaments fashioned from their bones and tusks,
as well as others of flint; but with the ashes of the funeral fires and
the débris of the funeral feast which formed a part of the last rites to
the dead. Unfortunately some discredit has been cast on the evidence
which seemed to indicate that the remains of extinct mammalia, and those
of the entombed dead, were contemporaneous; and the importance of the
deductions which this discovery seemed to justify render it all the more
needful that the proof should be indisputable. But the practice of
regular interment of the dead, accompanied with some funeral rites, by
the men of the post-glacial age, is suggested by the contents of the
sepulchral recess of Cro-Magnon, in the valley of the Vézère. No ashes
of funeral fires can be pointed to, but the traces of the use of fire
are abundant.
Throughout the floors of various caves in this district which have been
rich in disclosures of primitive art, particles of charcoal abound at
every level where broken bones occur, suggesting that fires were in
daily use, and were employed for cooking much more than for warmth.
Possibly, indeed, those caverns were only the summer dwellings of the
Drift-Folk of post-glacial times; and with them, as with the Esquimaux,
and the Indians of North America generally, fire may have been valued as
a protection against the noxious insects which, especially in the brief
summer of a rigorous climate, render life intolerable. Fire is the
universal servant of man. The Esquimaux and the Red Indian ward off the
mosquito, the black-fly, and the sand-fly by means of a “smudge” made
with the smoke of grass and green-wood; while the Hottentot or Bushman
kindles his night-fire in the tropics as the most effectual guardian
against beasts of prey. Everywhere, and at all epochs, fire appears as
one of the most characteristic indices of rational man; and as we study
such traces of him as reappear for us in the works of art and the
extinguished fires of the Moustier and Madelaine cave-dwellings, or
those of the neolithic, if not an earlier period of the Aurignac
catacomb, we see the unmistakable evidences of human intelligence; and
anew concur in the decision of Columbus, that the night-torch of the
Guanahanè savage was indisputable proof that the unknown world which lay
before him was the habitation of man.
It may be doubted if man has anywhere existed without the knowledge of
fire. By means of it some of his earliest triumphs over nature have been
achieved. With its aid his range is no longer limited to latitudes where
the spontaneous fruits of the earth abound at every season. The use of
fire lies at the root of all the industrial arts. The friendly savages
found by Columbus on the first-discovered island of the New World were
armed with wooden lances, hardened at the end by its means. The most
civilised among the nations conquered by Cortes and Pizarro, had learned
by the same means to smelt the ores of the Andes, and make of their
metallic alloys the tools with which to quarry and hew the rocks, to
sculpture the statues of the gods of Anahuac, and the palaces and
temples of the Peruvian children of the sun. Without fire the imperfect
implements of the stone period would be altogether inadequate to man’s
necessities. By its help he fells the lofty trees, against which his
unaided stone hatchet would be powerless. It plays a no less important
part in preparing the log-canoe of the savage, than in propelling the
wonderful steamship, by means of which the great lakes and rivers of the
New World have become the highways of migrating nations.
A common root-word for fire serves to connect numerous scattered insular
races of the great Pacific archipelagos, through their intercourse with
the Malay voyagers. Yet while the Malay word _ápi_ may be taken as the
source of many diversified forms of the insular term for fire, the
Papuans, rather than the Malays, present the ethnical peculiarities
predominant throughout Polynesia, and characteristic of the Maoris of
New Zealand; and distinct roots in many intermediate island vocabularies
prove the independent knowledge of fire. The Vitian is rich in terms for
light, warmth, shining, kindling, burning, boiling, etc. _Aundre_, to
shine or flame, becomes _oundreva_, to kindle, and _vakaundre_, to cause
to burn. From _yame_, the tongue, is made, by a familiar analogy,
_yame-ni-mbuka_, a flame of fire. _Ilgatu_, fire, begets a group of
words, including _ilgilaiso_, charcoal, and _ilgilaisongawa_, hot
cinders. _Liva_, a flash of lightning, gives _lavi_, to bring fire,
_lovo_, a furnace, a native oven; and recalls one familiar source of the
knowledge of fire: as the _asa_, the sun; _atua_, a deity, probably the
sun-god; _asu_, smoke, etc., of the Rotuma dialect suggest another
association of ideas common to the Old and New World.
The fire-worship of the Ghebirs is but a degraded form of that homage to
visible divinity with which man worships the god of day, and bows down
before the heavenly host. Among the civilised nations of the New World,
accordingly, a peculiar sanctity was associated with the familiar
service of fire. At the close of the great cycle of the Aztecs, when the
calendar was corrected to true solar time at the end of the fifty-second
year, a high religious festival was held, on the eve of which they broke
in pieces their household gods, destroyed their furniture, and
extinguished every fire. In the reconstruction of the ritual calendar,
the intercalated days were held as though non-existent, and dedicated to
no gods: on which account they were reputed unfortunate. At the end of
that dreary interval of fasting and penitence, during which no hearth
smoked, and no warm food could be eaten throughout the land, the
ceremony of the new fire was celebrated. After sunset the priests of the
great temple went forth to a neighbouring mountain, and there, at
midnight, the sacred flame was rekindled, which was to light up the
national fires for another cycle. The process by which it was procured,
by revolving one piece of dry wood in the hollow of another, is
repeatedly illustrated in the Mexican paintings of Lord Kingsborough’s
work. But, true to the bloody rites of the national faith, at this
sacred festival the fire was kindled on the breast of a human victim,
from whence the reeking heart was immediately afterwards torn out, and
cast as a bloody offering to the gods. The period from the extinction to
the rekindling of the sacred flame was one of great suspense. With a
superstitious feeling, in striking accordance with the customs and ideas
of the northern Indians, the women remained confined to their houses,
with their faces covered, under the belief that if they witnessed the
ceremony they would be forthwith transformed into beasts. Meanwhile, the
men gathered on the terraced roofs, and looked forth in dread suspense
into the darkness. The flames on the summits of the great teocallis,
which lighted up the city at all other seasons, had been extinguished;
and if the priests failed to rekindle them, it was believed that the
night must be eternal, and the world would come to an end. But dimly,
through the darkness, a spark was seen to glimmer on the distant summit
of the mountain, and from thence it was swiftly borne to the temple,
towards which the worshippers turned with renewed hope. As the sacred
flame again blazed on the high altar, and was distributed to the other
teocallis, shouts of triumph ascended with it to the sky. Feasts, joyous
processions, and oblations at the temples followed, and were prolonged
through a festival of thirteen days, devoted to a national jubilee for
the recovered flame, the type of a regenerated world.[62] The long
interval which transpired between this closing rite of the great cycle
was of itself sufficient to give it an impressive sanctity in the eyes
of the Aztec worshipper. He who witnessed it in youth saw it only once
again as life drew towards a close; whilst few indeed of all who
rejoiced at the renewed gift of fire could expect to look again on the
strangely significant rite. Compared with the annual miracle of the
Greek Church in the crypt of the Holy Sepulchre, to which it bears some
resemblance, the great festival of the Aztecs was replete with
significance and solemn grandeur, though stained with the blood of their
hideous sacrifices.
The Peruvian sun-worshippers preserved the harmony between their
recurrent festivals and the true solar time, by a ruder process of
adjustment than that which was devised by the remarkable proficiency of
the Aztec priests in astronomical science. Nevertheless, they too had
their secular festival of Raymi, held annually at the period of the
summer solstice. For three days previous a general fast prevailed, the
fire on the great altar of the sun went out, and in all the dwellings of
the land no hearth was kindled. As the dawn of the fourth day
approached, the Inca, surrounded by his nobles, who came from all parts
of the country to join in the solemn celebration, assembled in the great
square of the capital to greet the rising sun. The temple of the
national deity presented its eastern portal to the earliest rays,
emblazoned with his golden image, thickly set with precious stones; and
as the first beams of the morning were reflected back from this emblem
of the sun-god, songs of triumph mingled with the jubilant shout of his
worshippers. Then after various rites of adoration, preparations were
made for rekindling the sacred fire. But this, with the Peruvians, was
done by a process far in advance of that retained by the Aztec priests.
The rays of the sun, collected into a focus by a concave mirror of
polished metal, were made to inflame a heap of dried cotton; and a llama
was sacrificed as a burnt-offering to the sun. Only in the case of the
sky being overcast did the priests resort to friction for rekindling the
altar; but the hiding of his countenance by the god of day was regarded
as little less ominous than the extinction of the sacred fire, which it
became the duty of the virgins of the sun to guard throughout the year.
A slaughter of the llama flocks of the sun furnished a universal
banquet; and, while the god was propitiated by offerings of fruit and
flowers, there appear to have been some rare occasions on which the
sacrifice of a human victim—a beautiful maiden or a child,—gave to
this graceful anniversary a nearer resemblance to the appalling rites of
Aztec worship.
Among the northern Indian tribes some faint traces of the annual
festival of fire are discernible. At the sacrifice of the white dog, the
New Year’s festival of the Iroquois, the proceedings extended over six
days; and such were the obligations which its rites imposed on all, that
if any member of a family died during the period, the body was laid
aside, and the relatives participated in the games as well as the
religious ceremonies. The strangling of the white dog destined for
sacrifice was the chief feature of the first day’s proceedings. On the
second day the two keepers of the faith visited each house, and
performed the significant ceremony of stirring the ashes on the hearth,
accompanied with a thanksgiving to the Great Spirit. On the morning of
the fifth day the fire was solemnly kindled by friction; and the white
dog was borne in procession on a bark litter, until the officiating
leaders halted, facing the rising sun, when it was laid on the flaming
wood and consumed, during an address, which included a special
thanksgiving to the sun, for having looked on the earth with a
beneficent eye.[63]
There is, perhaps, no connection traceable between the various rites
thus described; for it would be easy to find their parallels among
ancient and modern nations. They pertained to the religious practices of
the Chaldeans, to the rites of Baal, and to other early forms of
idolatry. Sabaism is indeed the most natural form of false worship,
commending itself by many visible tokens, as of a divine influence and
power, to uninstructed man; and readily suggests the association of fire
with the sun as its source. “Take ye good heed unto yourselves,” says
the lawgiver of Israel to the tribes in the wilderness, “for ye saw no
manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb
out of the midst of the fire; lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven,
and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the
host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them.” This worship of the
sun, though associated with ancient rites of Asiatic nations, is not
therefore necessarily an evidence of the eastern origin either of the
faith or of the nations of the New World. But, in the services to which
it gave rise there, we have, at least, suggestive hints of the links
that bind together its own ancient and modern tribes. Perhaps also they
may supply a clew to the interpretation of some of the obscure
sculptures still remaining on sites of the extinct native civilisation
of America, and of rites once practised amid the sacred enclosures, and
on the altar-mounds which give such peculiar interest to the
river-terraces of the Mississippi valley.
Among the remarkable structures of the Mound-Builders, reviewed in a
subsequent chapter, their explorers have been struck by the
peculiarities of a certain class of mounds, erected on the most elevated
summits of outlying hills. Concerning these “there can be no doubt that
the ancient people selected prominent and elevated positions upon which
to build large fires, which were kept burning for long periods, or
renewed at frequent intervals. They appear to have been built generally
upon heaps of stones, which are broken up and sometimes partially
vitrified. In all cases they exhibit marks of intense and protracted
heat.”[64] Such indications have been supposed to mark ancient
signal-stations adapted to the telegraphic system still in use among
native tribes, of sending up columns of smoke as a warning that enemies
are at hand. But this “putting out fire,” as it is called among the
Indians of the north-west, for the purposes of signal, is now
accomplished by the simple process of setting the short-tufted buffalo
grass in flame, and presents slight analogy to the traces of intense
fires on the ancient hill-mounds, where the amount of scoriaceous
material often covers a large space several feet deep.
Perhaps greater importance is due to the employment of the same method
of fire-making at the present day among the Indians of the north-west,
as we see illustrated in ancient Aztec paintings; while the
sun-worshippers of the southern continent had devised a totally distinct
method, corresponding to that by which the Romans kindled the sacred
fire. Mr. Paul Kane thus describes the process employed by the Chinooks
on the Columbia River:—“The fire is obtained by means of a flat piece
of dry cedar, in which a small hollow is cut, with a channel for the
ignited charcoal to run over; on this the Indian sits to hold it steady,
while he rapidly twirls a round stick of the same wood between the palms
of his hands, with the point pressed into the hollow. In a very short
time sparks begin to fall through the channel upon finely frayed
cedar-bark placed underneath, which they soon ignite. There is a great
deal of knack in doing this, but those who are used to it will light a
fire in a very short time. The men usually carry these sticks about with
them, as after they have been once used they produce the fire more
quickly.”[65] I witnessed the process successfully employed under the
most unfavourable circumstances, on one occasion when camping out with
Chippewa guides on the Lake of Bays, in Western Canada. We had struck
our tents, and were making our way down the river, when a steady rain
set in, which continued throughout the day. We had to pass several long
portages, involving in each case the unloading, and carrying over them,
our canoes and baggage; and on one of these occasions, finding myself
alone with my Indian guide at the foot of a portage where we must
necessarily be detained a considerable time, I suggested to him by words
and signs, whether it were possible to kindle a fire. Rain was falling
in torrents, the trees were dripping, and the grass and fallen leaves
resembled a soaked sponge. But Kineesè set to work in Indian fashion,
hunted out a pine-knot, such as are of common occurrence in the Canadian
forest, where the tree itself has rotted away and left the cores of its
oldest branches like pins of iron. Having secured this, and a piece of
half-burned wood from under the remains of an old camp-fire, he next
stripped off the bark from the lee-side of a birch tree, and collecting
a heap of the dry inner bark, thin as paper, he carefully disposed it
under a cover of pine-bark, and placed over all a pile of chips cut with
his axe from the centre of a pine log. All being now ready, he frayed a
handful of the birch-bark into the consistency of tow, and placing this
on the charred wood, he made the hard point of the pine-knot revolve in
the wood by means of a cord, while his bent position, pressing the other
end to his breast, protected it from the rain. In a surprisingly short
time he blew the tinder into a flame, applied it to the pile he had
prepared, and nursing this with chips and dry twigs, we were able to
welcome our companions to a blazing log fire, kindled under
circumstances which, even with the aid of flint and steel, would have
seemed impossible to the European woodsman.
The knowledge of this simple process, however acquired, constitutes
perhaps the oldest of all human traditions relating to the arts of life.
A mode of obtaining fire nearly equivalent to that of flint and steel
has already been referred to as in use both among the Fuegians and
Esquimaux; but the process of friction is also resorted to by the
latter, and with slight variations in the application of the principle,
it appears to be the recognised Indian mode of procuring fire. Among all
the Indian tribes not only was a certain superstitious sanctity attached
to fire, but they looked with distrust on the novel methods employed by
Europeans for its production. When, in 1811, Elksatowa, the prophet of
the Wabash,—a brother of Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior,—was exhorting
his tribe to resist the deadly encroachments of the white man, he
concluded one of his eloquent warnings by exclaiming: “Throw away your
fire-steels, and awaken the sleeping flame as your fathers did before
you; fling away your wrought coverings, and put on skins won for
yourselves as was their wont, if you would escape the anger of the Great
Spirit.” Nor is there wanting among many Indians a conviction that the
Ishkodaiwaubo, or fire-liquid, is a malignant form of the same
mysterious element; an evil medicine wrought for their destruction by
the white Manitou.
Various methods are thus traceable throughout the western hemisphere for
calling into existence the wondrous element, so peculiarly distinctive
of man. Yet even in these, common relations of a very comprehensive
character are apparent; while the Peruvian, with the solar mirror,
stands apart alike from the rude Indian and the cultivated native of the
Mexican plateau; and far to the south of both, the Fuegian finds in the
natural products of his inhospitable clime a means of fire-making
analogous to that which the Shawnee prophet taught his people to regard
as one of the unhallowed practices of the Whites. All alike exhibit man,
even in the rudest stage, master of the same secret; and turning to many
useful, and even indispensable purposes, that which no other animal can
be taught to use, or scarcely even to look upon without dread.
-----
[57] Floureus, _De la Longévité Humaine_, p. 127.
[58] Weddell’s _Voyage towards the South Pole in 1822-24_, p. 167.
[59] A small sharp-nosed animal, not unlike the Guinea-pig.
[60] _Canadian Journal, N.S._, vol. i. p. 509.
[61] _Trans. Philosoph. Institute, Victoria_, vol. i.
[62] _Clavigero_, vol. ii. p. 84.
[63] _League of the Iroquois_, pp. 207-221.
[64] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, p. 183.
[65] _Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America_, p.
188.