Naturally most of the Indians did not care to buy Bibles at first. They
were furnished free to the school-children, and, like many other things
that cost nothing, were not very highly prized, nor taken care of half
as well as they ought to have been. Still they learned that it was the
sacred Book and when one after another left school most of them
possessed a Bible. I had not been here long when an Indian bought one,
and, having had the family record of a white friend of his written in
it, he presented it to the man, who had none. It caused some comment
that an Indian should be giving a Bible to a white man. When the first
apprentices received their first pay, a good share of their earnings
were invested in much better Bibles than they had previously been able
to buy.
The following item appeared in _The San Francisco Pacific_ in March,
1880:--
“LO, THE POOR INDIAN!
“The following facts speak volumes. Let all read them.--[Chaplain
Stubbs, Oregon Editor.]
“During 1879 I acted as agent of the Bible Society for this region. The
sales amounted to over twenty-two dollars to the Indians, out of a total
of thirty-two dollars. Of the seventy-five Bibles and Testaments sold,
thirty-nine were bought by them, varying in price from five cents to
three dollars and thirty cents. These facts, with other things, show
that there is some literary taste among them. Not many of the older ones
can read, hence do not wish for books; but many have adorned their
houses with Bible and other pictures, twenty of them having been counted
in one house, nearly all of which were bought with their money. In the
house of a newly married couple, both of whom have been in school, are
twenty-seven books, the largest being a royal octavo Bible, reference,
gilt. _The Council Fire_ is taken here. In a room where four boys stay,
part of whom are in school, and the rest of whom are apprentices,--none
of them being over seventeen years old,--will be found _The Port
Townsend Argus_ and _The Seattle Intelligencer_. On the table is an
octavo Bible, for the boys have prayers every evening by themselves,
and two of them have spent about five dollars each for other books,
“Christ in Literature” being among them. At another house are three
young men who have twenty volumes. One of them has paid twenty dollars
for what he has bought; Youmans’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants,
Webster’s Unabridged, Moody’s and Punshon’s Sermons being among them. He
was never in school until he was about twenty-two years old and nine
months will probably cover all the schooling he ever had. Here will be
found _The Pacific_. In another house the occupant has spent about fifty
dollars for books, and his library numbers thirty volumes. Among them
will be found an eighteen-dollar family Bible, Chambers’s Information
for the People, “Africa” by Stanley, Life of Lincoln, and Meacham’s
Wigwam and Warpath. Here also, is _The Pacific_, _The West Shore Olympia
Courier_, _The Council Fire_, and _The American Missionary_. This man
never went to school but two or three weeks, having picked up the rest
of his knowledge. When Indians spend their money thus, it shows that
there is an intellectual capacity in them that can be developed.”
It has been, however, and still is, somewhat difficult to cultivate in
many of them a taste for reading, so as to continue to use it when
older. This is not because of a want of intellectual capacity, but for
three other reasons. First, as soon as they leave school and go back
among the uneducated Indians, there is no stimulus to induce them to
read. The natural influence is the other way, to cause them to drop
their books. Second, like white people who remain in one place
continually, they are but little interested in what is going on in the
outside world. Third, in most books and papers there are just enough
large difficult words which they do not understand to spoil the sense,
and thus the interest in the story is destroyed. Yet notwithstanding
these discouragements, the present success together with the prospect
that it will be much greater in the future, as more of them become
educated, is such as to make us feel that it pays.