"Brother," said he, "take thy wife and my sister."
Turning towards the elders, the chief extended his right arm so as to
invite general attention.
"I have called you," said he, "that an act of justice may be performed;
hear my words:--
"A young antelope loved a lily, standing under the shade of a sycamore,
by the side of a cool stream. Daily he came to watch it as it grew
whiter and more beautiful; he loved it very much, till one day a large
bull came and picked up the lily. Was it good? No! The poor antelope
fled towards the mountains, never wishing to return any more under the
cool shade of the sycamore. One day he met the bull down, and about to
be killed by a big bear. He saved him; he heard only the whisper of his
heart; he saved the bull, although the bull had taken away the pretty
lily from where it: stood, by the cool stream. It was good, it was
well! The bull said to the antelope, `We shall be brothers, in joy and
in sorrow!' and the antelope said, there could be no joy for him since
the lily was gone. The bull considered; he thought that a brother ought
to make great sacrifices for a brother, and he said to the antelope:
`Behold, there is the lily, take it before it droops away, wear it in
thy bosom and be happy.' Chiefs, sages, and warriors! I am the bull;
behold! my brother the antelope. I have given unto him the flower of
the magnolia; she is the lily, that grew by the side of the stream, and
under the sycamore. I have done well, I have done much, yet not enough
for a great chief, not enough for a brother, not enough for justice!
Sages, warriors, hear me all; the flower of the magnolia can lie but
upon the bosom of a chief. My brother must become a chief, he is a
chief, for I divide with him the power I possess: my wealth, my lodge,
are his own; my horses, my mules, my furs, and all! A chief has but one
life, and it is a great gift than cannot be paid too highly. You have
heard my words: I have said!"
This sounds very much like a romance, but it is an Apache story, related
of one of their great chiefs, during one of their evening encampments.
An Apache having, in a moment of passion accidentally killed one of the
tribe, hastened to the chiefs to deliver himself up to justice. On his
way he was met by the brother of his victim, upon whom, according to
Indian laws, fell the duty of revenge and retaliation; they were friends
and shook hands together.
"Yet I must kill thee, friend," said the brother.
"Thou wilt!" answered the murderer; "it is thy duty, but wilt thou not
remember the dangers we have passed together, and provide and console
those I leave behind in my lodge?"
"I will," answered the brother; "thy wife shall be my sister during her
widowhood, thy children will never want game, until they can themselves
strike the bounding deer."
The two Indians continued their way in silence, till at once the brother
of the murdered one stopped.
"We shall soon reach the chiefs," said he, "I to revenge a brother's
death, thou to quit for ever thy tribe and thy children. Hast thou a
wish? think, whisper!"
The murderer stood irresolute, his glance furtively took the direction
of his lodge. The brother continued:--
"Go to thy lodge. I shall wait for thee till the setting of the sun,
before the council door. Go! thy tongue is silent; but I know the wish
of thy heart. Go!"
Such traits are common in Indian life. Distrust exists not among the
children of the wilderness, until generated by the conduct of white men.
These stories and thousand others, all exemplifying the triumph of
virtue and honour over baseness and vice, are every day narrated by the
elders, in presence of the young men and children. The evening
encampment is a great school of morals, where the Red-skin philosopher
embodies in his tales the sacred precepts of virtue. A traveller, could
he understand what was said, as he viewed the scene, might fancy some of
the sages of ancient Greece inculcating to their disciples those
precepts of wisdom which have transmitted their name down to us bright
and glorious, through more than twenty centuries.
I have stated that the holy men among the Indians, that is to say, the
keepers of the sacred lodges, keep the records of the great deeds
performed in the tribe; but a tribe will generally boast more of the
great virtues of one of its men than of the daring of its bravest
warriors. "A virtuous man," they say, "has the ear of the Manitou, he
can tell him the sufferings of Indian nature, and ask him to soothe
them."
Even the Mexicans, who, of all men, have had most to suffer and suffer
daily from the Apaches, [What I here say of the Apaches applies to the
whole Shoshone race.] cannot but do them the justice they so well
deserve. The road betwixt Chihuahua and Santa Fe is almost entirely
deserted, so much are the Apaches dreaded; yet they are not hated by the
Mexicans half as much as the Texians or the Americans. The Apaches are
constantly at war with the Mexicans, it is true, but never have they
committed any of those cowardly atrocities which have disgraced every
page of Texian history. With the Apaches there are no murders in cold
blood, no abuse of the prisoners; a captive knows that he will either
suffer death or be adopted in the tribe; but he has never to fear the
slow fire and the excruciating torture so generally employed by the
Indians in the United States' territories.
Their generosity is unbounded, and by the treatment I received at their
hands the reader may form an idea of that brave people. They will never
hurt a stranger coming to them: a green bough in his hand is a token of
peace; for him they will spread the best blankets the wigwam can afford,
they will studiously attend to his wants, smoke with him the calumet of
peace, and when he goes away, whatever he may desire from among the
disposable wealth of the tribe, if he asks for it, it is given.
Gabriel was once attacked near Santa Fe, and robbed of his baggage by
some honest Yankee traders. He fell in with a party of Apaches, to whom
he related the circumstance. They gave him some blankets and left him
with their young men at the hunting-lodges they had erected. The next
day they returned with several Yankee captives, all well tied, to
prevent any possibility of escape. These were the thieves, and what
they had taken of Gabriel was of course restored to him. One of the
Indians saying, that the Yankees, having blackened and soiled the
country by theft, should receive the punishment of dogs, and as it was
beneath an Apache to strike them, cords were given to them, with orders
that they should chastise each other for their rascality. The
blackguards were obliged to submit, and the dread of being scalped was
too strong upon them to allow them to refuse. At first, they did not
seem to hurt each other much; but one or two of them, smarting under the
lash, returned the blows in good earnest, and then they all got angry
and beat each other so unmercifully that, in a few minutes, they were
scarcely able to move. Nothing could exceed the ludicrous picture which
Gabriel would draw out of this little event.
There is one circumstance which will form a particular datum in the
history of the western wild tribes: I mean the terrible visitation of
the small-pox. The Apaches, Comanches, the Shoshones, and Arrapahoes
are so clean and so very nice in the arrangement of their domestic
comforts, that they suffered very little, or not at all; at least, I do
not remember a single case which brought death in these tribes; indeed,
as I have before mentioned, the Shoshones vaccinate.
But such was not the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the
West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet.
These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever
suffered from any plague or pestilence. To be sure, the Mandans had
been entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few,
while the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful
tribe in the neighbourhood of the mountains. Their war-parties ranged
the country from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south
to the very borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken
scalps of the Osages, near the Mississippi, and even of the great
Pawnees. Between the Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred
villages, thousands and thousands of horses. They numbered more than
six thousand warriors. Their name had become a by-word of terror on the
northern continent, from shore to shore, and little children in the
eastern states, who knew not the name of the tribes two miles from their
dwellings, had learned to dread even the name a Black-foot. Now the
tribe has been reduced to comparative insignificancy by this dreadful
scourge. They died by thousands; whole towns and villages were
destroyed; and even now the trapper, coming from the mountains, will
often come across numberless lodges in ruins, and the blanched skeletons
of uncounted and unburied Indians. They lost ten thousand individuals
in less than three weeks.
Many tribes but little known suffered pretty much in the same ratio.
The Club Indians, I have mentioned, numbering four thousand before the
pestilence, are now reduced to thirty or forty individuals; and some
Apaches related to me that, happening at that time to travel along the
shores of the Colorado, they met the poor fellows dying by hundreds on
the very edge of the water, where they had dragged themselves to quench
their burning thirst, there not being among them one healthy or strong
enough to help and succour the others. The Navahoes, living in the
neighbourhood of the Club Indians, have entirely disappeared; and,
though late travellers have mentioned them in their works, there is not
one of them living now.
Mr Farnham mentions them in his "Tour on the Mountains;" but he must
have been mistaken, confounding one tribe with another, or perhaps
deceived by the ignorance of the trappers; for that tribe occupied a
range of country entirely out of his track, and never travelled by
American traders or trappers. Mr Farnham could not have been in their
neighbourhood by at least six hundred miles.
The villages formerly occupied by the Navahoes are deserted, though many
of their lodges still stand; but they serve only to shelter numerous
tribes of dogs, which, having increased wonderfully since there has been
no one to kill and eat them, have become the lords of vast districts,
where they hunt in packs. So numerous and so fierce have they grown;
that the neighbouring tribes feel great unwillingness to extend their
range to where they may fall in with these canine hunters.
This disease, which has spread north as far as the Ohakallagans, on the
borders of the Pacific Ocean, north of Fort Vancouver, has also extended
its ravages to the western declivity of the Arrahuac, down to 30 degrees
north latitude, where fifty nations that had a name are now forgotten,
the traveller, perchance, only reminded that they existed when he falls
in with heaps of unburied bones.
How the Black-feet caught the infection it is difficult to say as their
immediate neighbours in the east escaped; but the sites of their
villages were well calculated to render the disease more general and
terrible: their settlements being generally built in some recess, deep
in the heart of the mountains, or in valleys surrounded by lofty hills,
which prevent all circulation of the air; and it is easy to understand
that the atmosphere, once becoming impregnated with the effluvia, and
having, no issue, must have been deadly.
On the contrary, the Shoshones, the Apaches, and the Arrapahoes, have
the generality of their villages built along the shores of deep and
broad rivers. Inhabiting a warm clime, cleanness, first a necessity,
has become a second nature. The hides and skins are never dried in the
immediate vicinity of their lodges, but at a great distance where the
effluvia can hurt no one. The interior of their lodges is dry, and
always covered with a coat of hard white clay, a good precaution against
insects and reptiles, the contrast of colour immediately betraying their
presence. Besides which, having always a plentiful supply of food, they
are temperate in their habits, and are never guilty of excess; while the
Crows, Black-feet, and Clubs, having often to suffer hunger for days,
nay, weeks together, will, when they have an opportunity, eat to
repletion, and their stomachs being always in a disordered state (the
principal and physical cause of their fierceness and ferocity), it is no
wonder that they fell victims, with such predispositions to disease.
It will require many generations to recover the number of Indians which
perished in that year; and, as I have said, as long as they live, it
will form an epoch or era to which they will for centuries refer.
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Note 1. There is every prospect of these north-western tribes remaining
in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement,
for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the
eastern Indians had been debased and conquered by the use of them, and
consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect
attempt upon their life and honour.