THE INDIAN AND OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE
The Indian is an absolute believer in the virtue of the outdoor life,
not as an occasional thing, but as his regular, set, uniform habit.
He _lives_ out of doors; not only does his body remain in the open,
but his mind, his soul, are ever also there. Except in the very cold
weather his house is free to every breeze that blows. He laughs at
“drafts.” “Catching cold” is a something of which he knows absolutely
nothing. When he learns of white people shutting themselves up in
houses into which the fresh, pure, free air of the plains and deserts,
often laden with the healthful odors of the pines, firs, balsams of the
forest, cannot come, he shakes his head at the folly, and feels as one
would if he saw a man slamming his door in the face of his best friend.
Virtually he sleeps out of doors, eats out of doors, works out of
doors. When the women make their baskets and pottery, it is always out
of doors, and their best beadwork is always done in the open. The men
make their bows and arrows, dress their buckskin, make their moccasins
and buckskin clothes, and perform nearly all their ceremonials out of
doors.
Our greatest scientific fighters against tuberculosis are emulating the
Indian in the fact that even in the winter of the East they advocate
that their patients sleep out of doors. Pure air, and abundance of it,
is their cry.
“Taking cold” comes, not from breathing “night air,” but generally from
inflammation of the mucous membranes caused by impure air,--the air of
a heated room from which all the pure air has been exhausted by being
breathed again and again into the lungs of its deluded occupants, each
exhalation sending with it a fresh amount of poison to vitiate the
little good that remains.
Men often go to gymnasiums in the city to get exercise. The air is
vitiated by the presence of others, and as respiration is increased
by the exercise, impure air is taken into the lungs, and the prime
object of the exercise is defeated. For it is not so much to develop
muscles as it is to stimulate the general action of the whole body
that gymnastics should be indulged in. Vigorous exercise demands deep
breathing; if the air breathed is pure, the blood thereby becomes
more oxygenated or vivified. As this vitalized blood circulates, it
carries its life-giving new strength and energy to every part of the
body, so that the whole man feels the increased vigor. But let the air
be impure, death instead of life is given to the blood. Hence, where
possible, all vigorous exercise should be taken out of doors in the
pure air and sunlight, and if this is not possible, every door, window,
and avenue through which outside air can be brought inside should
be placed wide open, and _kept open_ during the whole time of the
exercises. If spectators come, and on their account windows and doors
are closed, a positive injury is being done to the exercisers. Far
better turn out the spectators than shut out God’s pure air.
What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better
for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go
and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health. Think
of the vigor and strength, the robustness and power, the joy and the
health, that are the possession of men and women of outdoor life. Let
any one who wishes to know what this means read John Muir’s _Mountains
of California_. In it he tells of his years of experiences climbing the
terribly difficult peaks of the Sierras, the exploring of glaciers, the
sleeping out at night during snow-storms in the depth of winter without
either an overcoat or a single blanket. One of the most thrilling of
experiences is told as simply as the narrative of a child. He was out
during a terrific wind-storm. Says he: “When the storm began to sound
I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such
occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger
to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching
deprecatingly beneath a roof.”
Think of a city-bred man, a society man, deliberately walking out into
a storm to _enjoy_ it.
“It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift.
Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills.... I heard trees
falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some
uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of
the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused
by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees
made a delightful study. Young sugar-pines, light and feathery as
squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old
patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms,
waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming
fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and singing and
shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond.
“I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion,
across many a glen from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a
rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had
swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones
of individual trees,--spruce and fir and pine and leafless oak,--and
even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet.
Each was expressing itself in its own way,--singing its own song and
making its own peculiar gestures,--manifesting a richness of variety to
be found in no other forest I have yet seen.
“Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of
hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the
neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine
thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my
ear close to the Æolian music of the topmost needles. But under the
circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose
instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of
being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless
to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too
large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were
not favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about,
I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas spruces that were
growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed
likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively
young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops
were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb
trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in
reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an
exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished
in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward,
round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and
horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a
bobolink on a reed.
[Illustration: HAVASUPAI DRESSING BUCKSKIN.]
“In its wildest sweeps my treetop described an arc of from twenty to
thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen
others of the same species still more severely tried--bent almost to
the ground, indeed, in heavy snows--without breaking a fiber. I was
therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the
excited forest from my superb outlook....
“I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy
the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance
that was streaming past.”
What an experience, and what a joy to feel one’s self able to enjoy it!
I know what it is. Years before I had read this, I had had a similar
experience when driving over the high Sierras from the borders of
Oregon, Nevada, and California down into southern California. Imagine
the ordinary business man, or clerk, or banker, or preacher, or lawyer,
or doctor, daring to climb so high a tree, and especially during such
a storm. Yet such a day so spent is worth more than a year of any
ordinary man’s life.
Edward Robeson Taylor, the poet-mayor of San Francisco, once expressed
his keen appreciation of what Nature gives to the man who loves her
enough to test her. And he has made the test many a time, in the
Sierras, in the forests, in the deserts, in the Grand Canyon, as well
as on the Bay of San Francisco. He wrote:
“In him that on the rugged breast of mountain
Finds his joy and his repose,
Who makes the pine his fellow, and with zest
Treads the great glaciers and their kindred snows,
A strength is planted that in direst test
Dares all the devils of Danger to oppose.”
Then, too, there are marvelous healing powers in God’s great
out-of-doors. The _vis medicatrix Naturæ_ is no fiction of the
imagination. If sick people knew enough, were wise enough, to go
out into the open and discard all civilized modes of life, climbing
mountains, sleeping on pine boughs, swimming in the streams, working in
the soil, dabbling in the hot or cold springs, eating the ripe fruits
and nuts, and bathing the whole body daily in bright sunshine, they
would be brought to a health and vigor they had never before known.
I have often wondered why thoughtful white people have not observed
that insanity is practically unknown amongst the Indians. Why? Our own
great Emerson once wrote a clear answer.
“It was,” said he, “the practice of the Orientals, especially of the
Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the
towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild
animals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect
around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The
patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was
quieted and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than
are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the
cities, at the hotels, theaters, card-tables, the speculators who rush
for investment at ten per cent, twenty per cent, cent per cent, are all
more or less mad--these point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the
fields the health of the mind.”
But not only does healing come to the _mind_ in Nature: the diseased
_soul_ there finds medicine and health.
The well-beloved Robert Louis Stevenson was well aware of this
out-of-door joy. Among many other fine things on the subject he once
wrote the following which fully expresses my idea:
“To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort
of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble
among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.”
[Illustration: AN APACHE GRANDMOTHER AND SOME BASKETS OF HER OWN DESIGN
AND WEAVE. ALL MADE IN THE OPEN AIR.]
One of our great artists and writers, whose life went out a few years
ago in sad eclipse, wrote with a clarity of vision that his awful
experiences had taught him: “I have a strange longing for the great
simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than
the earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and
live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude.
They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on
the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for
the swimmer, and the land for the feet of the runner. They loved the
trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at
noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy, that he might
keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots; and
for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they
plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild
parsley, which else had been of no service to men. ... I feel sure
that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back
to them and live in their presence.”
How literally true to fact is this assurance of purification out in
the great elemental forces and places of Nature, and how the Indian
daily demonstrates it. Thousands can testify to it. Here one becomes
soothed. The grinning faces of hate do not pursue him here. Nature is
passionless to the hunted man. She is willing to be wooed and won,
and then opens up her rich treasures to the guiltiest and vilest of
men, until they regain the right angle of vision, then the desire for
purification, then repentance, then assurance of forgiveness, and
finally their self-respect. Then they are able to return (if necessity
compels) to civilization and bear any punishment that may be awarded,
for in the rugged arms of Nature they have absorbed strength and
power,--strength of will and power of soul to dare and do that which
the highest within them compels.
Who that has read the _De Profundis_ of that erratic and brilliant
genius, Oscar Wilde, has not felt the sad pathos and yet intense truth
of his concluding words? They are Indian-like in their direct truth and
native strength.
“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are
sentences of death; and three times I have been tried. The first time
I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the
house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years.
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none
to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike,
will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in
whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with
stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and
send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt.
She will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me
whole.”
This is one of the great wonders of the out-of-door life that the weary
and sinful of the white race would do well to learn.
But not only does health of mind and soul return to the sinful in God’s
great out-of-doors: the most vigorous and pure, healthy and perfect,
minds and souls are expanded and strengthened with such contact.
Buddha, Mahomet, Moses, David, Elijah, Christ, were all lovers of
out-of-doors. Washington, Lincoln, and Garfield were all out-of-door
men. One learns in the solitude and primitive frankness of the free
life of the out doors to do his own thinking, untrammeled by convention
or prejudice. He sees things as they are. His soul is unclothed, and
there can no longer be any deception or pretense. So he becomes an
individual; not a mere rote thinker of other’s thoughts, and not a mere
parrot of other men’s ideas. Edwin Markham could never have written
_The Man with the Hoe_ had he lived only in the city. He would never
have seen deeply enough, and he would never have dared brave the
conventional prejudices of the civilized (?) world as he did in his
poem, had he been city-bred. But because he thought nakedly before God
and his own soul he was compelled to see the monstrousness of making
a man--a son of God, created in His image--a mere clod of clay. The
idea that this poem is a reflection upon labor is utter nonsense. It
is merely a protest, strong, vigorous, forceful as a thunder-storm,
against compelling some men to labor so hard that they have neither
time nor opportunity for mental and spiritual occupation, and have thus
even lost the desire for or hope of gaining it. Labor is ennobling, but
man is made for more than mere physical labor. The unequal distribution
of affairs in this life causes some men to have no physical labor,
to their vast disadvantage, while others have nothing but physical
labor, equally to their disadvantage. The finding of a just equilibrium
between these two extremes, and then aiding the men of both extremes to
see the need of each helping the other, or of taking some of the burden
of the other, would result in the immediate benefiting of the race to
an incalculable extent, both in body, mind, and soul. And it is this
for which I plead, earnestly calling upon my fellows to so adjust their
own lives that they will strike the happy mean, thus _living_ (not
merely talking about) the dignity of labor as well as the joy of mental
and spiritual occupation.
Another important thing must not be overlooked. As a result of this
out-of-door life the Indian is an early riser and an early retirer
to bed. The civilized habit of turning night into day, living in the
glare of gas and electric light, is, on the face of it, artificial,
unnatural, and unhealthful. It is indefensible from every standpoint.
There is not one word of good can be said of it. The day is made
for work, the night for rest and sleep. The use of artificial light
to the extent we indulge it in civilization is gradually rendering
normal eyesight a rarity. Children are born with myoptic and other
eye-diseased tendencies. Sometimes it seems as if more people, of all
ages, wear glasses than use their natural eyesight, and this is but one
of many sad consequences accruing in part from our reversal of the
natural use of the day and night times.
[Illustration: HAPPY AND HEALTHY HOPI CHILDREN, ASKING THE AUTHOR FOR
CANDY.]
Many men, literary and others, wait until the quiet of evening to do
their work. They often stimulate themselves with coffee, and even
stronger beverages, and then work until the “wee sma’ hours,” by
artificial light, _after they have already done a fair day’s work_. We
used to hear a great many words of commendation of the youths in school
and college who “burned the midnight oil.” If I had my way I would
“use the leather strap” upon all these burners-up of their physical
and mental forces at the time God intended they should be abed and
asleep. The time for mental work is in the early morning after a
hearty, healthy, good night’s sleep. The body is strengthened, the mind
refreshed, and thought flows easily and readily, because all weariness
has disappeared under the influence of “tired nature’s sweet restorer.”
Mental work done at such time is not only a pleasure, but is well done,
properly done, because the conditions are right for its doing.
Nor is this all. There is a mental and spiritual pleasure given to the
early riser that the late sleeper knows nothing of. One of the most
beautiful baskets in my historic collection of Indian baskets is one
made by a Coahuila woman who depicted thereon the white light of the
morning shining through the dark silhouettes of the sharp points of the
giant cactus. Her æsthetic enjoyment was thus made the inspiration of a
real work of art.
How much white people lose by not seeing and knowing the beauty of the
early morning hours,--the hours just preceding dawn, and during the
first outburst of the sun! A friend and I stood out the other morning
before sunrise, looking at the exquisite delicate lights over the
mountain peaks, and she gave expression to the above thought, and only
a few days before I had said it to a friend as we had wended our way
from _El Tovar_ Hotel at the Grand Canyon out to O’Neill Point to see
the sunrise. Elisha Safford eloquently speaks as follows of this:
BEAUTY OF THE MORNING
Oh, the beauty of the morning! It showers its splendors down
From the crimson robes of sunrise, the azure mountain’s crown;
It smiles amid the waving fields, it dapples in the streams,
It breathes its sparkling music through the rapture of our dreams.
It floats upon the limpid air in rainbow clouds of mist,
It ripples through the glowing skies in pearl and amethyst,
It gleams in every burnished pool, it riots through the grass,
It splashes waves of glory on the shadows as they pass.
It steals among the nodding trees and to the forest croons,
In airy note and gentle voice, ’neath waning plenilunes;
It calls, and lo! the wooded brakes, the hills and tangled fens--
A world of life and mystery--swarm with its denizens.
It trembles in the perfumed breeze, and where its ardor runs,
A thousand light-winged choristers pant forth their orisons;
A thousand echoes clap their hands, and from their dewy beds,
A million scarlet-throated flowers peer forth with startled heads.
Oh, the beauty of the morning! It rains upon our ears:
The music of the universe, the chiming of the spheres;
From cloistered wood and leafy vale, its tuneful medleys throng,
Till all the earth is drenched in light and all the world in song!
[Illustration: INDIAN BASKET, SHOWING INFLUENCE OF NATURE IN THE
DESIGN.]
All children, and especially city children, need out-of-door life.
Men and women need it too, sadly, but if the elders cannot have it,
owing to our perverted social conditions, our law-givers should see to
it that the children do better. It is a well-known fact that cities
would soon die out if their vast populations were not constantly being
replenished by the sons and daughters of the country. So instead of
letting our city children grow up to imperfect manhood, let us find
some way to get them out of doors and out into the country more and
more. Exercise in the open, where pure air penetrates to the full
depths of the lungs, personal contact with the soil, and physical
work upon it, as well as personal contact with the trees and flowers
and all growing things, the animals of the farm and field, the rocks
and mountains, the hills and valleys, the waterfalls and streams, the
deserts and canyons; all these are to be desired. Who does not wish to
sing with Edwin Markham:
“I ride on the mountain tops, I ride,
I have found my life and am satisfied!”
Of course this out-in-the-country life for city children can only be
gained if their parents and our educators and politicians combine to
provide it. And in some way it ought to be done. What a joy it would be
to many a city boy to be allowed to go and do some work in the country
during certain times in the year! Those who have seen the city children
who are taken yearly into the country by Fresh Air Funds, or out by
vessel into the Bay of New York or Boston Harbor, by philanthropic
people, know what delight, joy, and health they receive from the
outing. These things all point to the great, the dire, the awful need
there is for some way of giving to our city children and men and women
more out-door life.
Just after the San Francisco earthquake, Dr. J. H. Kellogg, editor of
_Good Health_, wrote in his forceful way of some lessons the people
might learn from that disaster. Here is one of them bearing upon this
very question:
[Illustration: MONO INDIAN COOKING CORN MUSH IN A BASKET BY A CAMP
FIRE.]
“Three hundred thousand people have found out that they can live out of
doors, and that out of doors is a safer place than indoors.
“People who have all their lives slept on beds of down, protected by
thick walls of brick or stone, barricaded against the dangerous (?)
air of night, have found that it is possible to spend a night upon an
unsheltered hillside without risk to life, and it is more than likely
that, as in the case of the Charleston earthquake, not a few modern
troglodytes, who scarcely ever saw the light of day before, have been
actually benefited by being forced out into the fresh air and the
sunshine.
“The great tent colonies, improvised by the military authorities with
such promptness under the efficient management of the able General
Funston, may become the permanent homes for some of the thousands
who are now for the first time in their lives tasting the sweets of
an out-of-door life. Man is an out-of-door creature, meant to live
amid umbrageous freshness, his skin bathed clean by morning dews or
evening showers, browned and disinfected by the sun, fed by tropic
fruits, and cheered by tropic birds and flowers. It is only through
long generations of living under artificial conditions that civilized
man has become accustomed to the unhealthful and disease-producing
influences of the modern house to such a degree that they can be even
in a small measure tolerated. But this immunity is only apparent. An
atmosphere that will kill a Hottentot or a baboon in six months will
also kill a bank president or a trust magnate--_sometime_. And if these
tent-dwellers get such a taste of the substantial advantages of the
out-of-door life that they refuse to return to the old unwholesome
conditions of anti-earthquake days, they will profit substantially by
their experience, terrible though it has been. It takes earthquakes
and cyclones and tidal waves to jostle us out of the unnatural and
degenerative ruts into which conventionality is always driving us.
“What advantages has the man in the brown-stone front over the man in
the tent? Only these: A pale face instead of the brown skin which is
natural to his species; a coated tongue, no appetite, and no digestion,
instead of the keen zest for food and splendid digestive vigor of
the tent-dweller; an aching head and confused mind and depressed
spirits, instead of the vim and snap and energy, mental and physical,
and the freedom from pain and pessimism of out-of-door dwellers;
early consumption or apoplexy or paresis or cancer of the stomach or
arteriosclerosis,--the dry rot of the body which stealthily weakens the
props and crumbles the foundations of the citadel of life.”
Why is it that in our cities in summer, and in Florida and the South
generally, and in the West, we do not follow the French custom of
eating out of doors?
American visitors to Paris in the summer time have always been
impressed by the prevalent custom there of dining out of doors. The
sidewalks in front of cafés and restaurants are always so occupied with
chairs and tables that pedestrians often have to step into the street
to get by. This has long been the summer custom in Paris, but with
the arrival of cold weather tables and chairs disappeared every year,
and the diners returned to the close nicotine-laden air of the stuffy
little dining-rooms inside. But last year, according to the London
correspondent of the _Outlook_, an enterprising Frenchman, finding his
patrons much attached to his open-air dining-room, and being short of
room inside, undertook to make his guests comfortable out of doors by
means of a large brazier placed upon the sidewalk. Others followed
his example, and in a short time the streets were lined with braziers
from the Madeline to the Bastile, much to the satisfaction of the
cab-drivers and newsboys. One ingenious proprietor made his table-legs
hollow, filled with hot water, and thus utilized them as foot-warmers.
And so one may now enjoy a fashionable Parisian café _au plein air_ any
day in the year.
Everybody is always hungry at a picnic, not simply because of the
unusual exercise, but as the result of the tonic appetite-stimulating
influence of the out-of-doors. The same plan may be introduced into
any private home by utilizing a back porch, or, when this is lacking, a
tent-cloth awning may be provided at the expense of a few dollars.
The old Spanish _patio_, or inner court, provided the seclusion that
many desire, with the possibility of a larger out-of-door life. Mr.
Gustav Stickley, the far-seeing editor of _The Craftsman_, which so
effectually pleads for a simpler and more democratic life for the
people, has planned a number of _Craftsman_ houses in which these open
porches for eating, and sleeping as well, are introduced. This is a
great step in the right direction, and is strongly to be commended.
But the outdoor life is larger than houses and porches. One must get
away from all houses to really feel and know the joy of the great
out-of-doors. Every teacher and orator should know the birds and trees,
the flowers and grasses, the rocks and stars, the clouds and odors,
_at first hand_. He should not depend upon books at all for any of
this knowledge, save as guides to obtain it. Instead of reading books
he should read Nature. See how powerful is the simple oratory of the
Indian, whose figures and similes and illustrations and metaphors are
of those things in Nature with which he is perfectly familiar.
Another effect upon the mind and soul as the result of this outdoor
life is remarkable to those who have never given it a thought. One
of our poets once said, “The undevout astronomer is mad.” And every
Indian will tell you that the undevout Indian is either mad or “getting
civilized.” One of our California historians once wrote something to
the effect that the California Indian had no religion, no mythology,
no reverence, no belief in anything outside of and beyond himself.
Jeremiah Curtin, a careful and close student of the California Indian
for many years, in his wonderfully interesting book, “Creation Myths
of Primitive America,” shows the utter fallacy of this idea. He says:
“Primitive man in America stood at every step face to face with
divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape from
the presence of those powers which had constituted the first world,
and which composed all that there was in the present one. ... The
most important question of all in Indian life was communication with
divinity, intercourse with the spirits of divine personages.” Indeed,
the Indian sees the divine power in everything. His God speaks in the
storm, the howling wind, the tornado, the hurricane, the roaring rapids
and dashing cataracts of the rivers, the never-ending rise and fall of
the ocean, the towering mountains and the tiny hills, the trees, the
bees, the buds and blossoms. It is God in the flower that makes it grow
and gives it its odor; that makes the tree from the acorn; that makes
the sun to shine; that sends the rain and dew and the gentle zephyrs.
The thunder is His voice, and everything in Nature is an expression of
His thought.
This belief compels the Indian to a close study of Nature. Hence the
keenness of his powers of observation. He knows every plant, and when
and where it best grows. He knows the track of every bird, insect,
reptile, and animal. He knows all the signs of the weather. He is a
past-master in woodcraft, and knows more of the habits of plants and
animal life than all of our trained naturalists put together. He is a
poet, too, withal, and an orator, using the knowledge he has of nature
in his thought and speech. No writer that ever lived knew the real
Indian so well as Fenimore Cooper, and we all know the dignified and
poetical speech of his Indian characters. I know scores and hundreds of
dusky-skinned Henry D. Thoreaus and John Burroughses, John Muirs and
Elizabeth Grinnells and Olive Thorne Millers. Indeed, to get an Indian
once started upon his lore of plant, tree, insect, bird, or animal, is
to open up a flood-gate which will deluge any but the one who knows
what to expect.