To return to the Indians. After telling me some other particulars, which
gave me a clearer view of their notions and feelings on these points
than I ever had before, my informant mildly added,--"It is a constant
and favourite subject of reproach against the Indians--this barbarism of
their desultory warfare; but I should think more women and children have
perished in _one_ of your civilised sieges, and that in late times, than
during the whole war between the Chippewas and Sioux, and _that_ has
lasted a century."
I was silent, for there is a sensible proverb about taking care of our
own glass windows: and I wonder if any of the recorded atrocities of
Indian warfare or Indian vengeance, or all of them together, ever
exceeded Massena's retreat from Portugal,--and the French call
themselves civilised. A war party of Indians, perhaps two or three
hundred (and that is a very large number), dance their war dance, go out
and burn a village, and bring back twenty or thirty scalps. _They_ are
savages and heathens. We Europeans fight a battle, leave fifty thousand
dead or dying by inches on the field, and a hundred thousand to mourn
them, desolate; but _we_ are civilised and Christians. Then only look
into the motives and causes of our bloodiest European wars as revealed
in the private history of courts:--the miserable, puerile, degrading
intrigues which set man against man--so horridly disproportioned to the
horrid result! and then see the Indian take up his war-hatchet in
vengeance for some personal injury, or from motives that rouse all the
natural feelings of the natural man within him! Really I do not see that
an Indian warrior, flourishing his tomahawk, and smeared with his
enemy's blood, is so very much a greater savage than the pipe-clayed,
padded, embroidered personage, who, without cause or motive, has sold
himself to slay or be slain: one scalps his enemy, the other rips him
open with a sabre; one smashes his brains with a tomahawk, and the other
blows him to atoms with a cannon-ball: and to me, femininely speaking,
there is not a needle's point difference between the one and the other.
If war be unchristian and barbarous, then war as a _science_ is more
absurd, unnatural, unchristian than war as a _passion_.
This, perhaps, is putting it all too strongly, and a little
exaggerated--
God forbid that I should think to disparage the blessings of
civilisation! I am a woman, and to the progress of civilisation alone
can we women look for release from many pains and penalties and
liabilities, which now lie heavily upon us. Neither am I greatly in love
with savage life, with all its picturesque accompaniments and lofty
virtues. I see no reason why these virtues should be necessarily
connected with dirt, ignorance, and barbarism. I am thankful to live in
a land of literature and steam-engines. Chatsworth is better than a
wigwam, and a seventy-four is a finer thing than a bark canoe. I do not
_positively_ assert that Taglioni dances more gracefully than the
Little-Pure tobacco-smoker, nor that soap and water are preferable as
cosmetics to tallow and charcoal; for these are matters of taste, and
mine may be disputed. But I do say, that if our advantages of intellect
and refinement are not to lead on to farther moral superiority, I prefer
the Indians on the score of consistency; they are what they profess to
be, and we are _not_ what we profess to be. They profess to be warriors
and hunters, and are so; we profess to be Christians and civilised--are
we so?
Then as to the mere point of cruelty;--there is something to be said on
this point too. Ferocity, when the hot blood is up, and all the demon in
man is roused by every conceivable excitement, I can understand better
than the Indian can comprehend the tender mercies of our law. Owyawatta,
better known by his English name, Red-Jacket, was once seen hurrying
from the town of Buffalo, with rapid strides, and every mark of disgust
and consternation in his face. Three malefactors were to be hung that
morning, and the Indian warrior had not nerve to face the horrid
spectacle, although--
"In sober truth the veriest devil
That ere clenched fingers in a captive's hair."
* * * * *