World has been taking place, alike by voluntary and enforced migration;
with results involving a series of undesigned yet exhaustive
ethnological experiments carried out on the grandest scale. There alike
has been tested to what extent the European and the African are affected
by migration to new regions, and by admixture with diverse races. There
can now be witnessed the results of a transference, for upwards of three
centuries, of indigenous populations of the Old World to a continent
where they have been subjected to many novel geographical, climatic, and
social influences. There, too, has taken place, on a scale without any
parallel elsewhere, an intimate and prolonged intermixture of some of
the most highly cultured races of Europe with purely savage tribes,
under circumstances which have tended to place them, for the time being,
on an equality as hunters, trappers, or explorers of their vast forest
and prairie wilds.
The whole question of heredity, its phenomena and results, is now in
process of review under the novel phases that affect anthropology; and
in this view the illustrations which the New World supplies in reference
to hybridity and absorption have a distinctive value. The anthropologist
recognises various elements marking diversity of race in stature,
colour, proportion of limbs, conformation of skull, colour and other
characteristics of eye and hair. He also notes no less distinctively the
diverse intellectual and moral aptitudes. Noticeable as are the
diversities of national type in Europe, the range of variation is
trifling when compared with the conditions under which the White, Red,
and Black races have met and intermingled in the West Indies and in
North and South America. The cultured and civilised races of Europe have
there united their blood with the African negro and the native Indian
savage; and both admixtures have been carried out on so great a scale as
to furnish indisputable data for determining the question how far the
half-breed is a mean between the two parents; or if there is any
inevitable preponderance of one of them, with a tendency to revert to
one or the other type. The intermarriage of fair and dark races of the
Old World has gone on throughout the whole historic period, with
apparently resultant intermediate types. The Iberians and “black Celts”
of Western Europe, and the dark brunettes of the Mediterranean shores,
stand out in marked contrast to the blondes of the Baltic shores.
Whatever may be said of other diversities of race, Professor Huxley is
led to the opinion that the Melanochroi, or dark whites, are not a
distinct group, but the metis resultant from just such a mixture of his
“Australioids” and his “Xanthocroi,” as has been going on for centuries
on the American continent between the blondes of Europe and the native
olive-skinned American, and between both of them and the dark African
race.
Yet, on the other hand, many anthropologists insist on the survival of
distinct types, even among approximate races, as shown in the remarkable
persistency of the Jewish type, notwithstanding the modifications that
have resulted from intermarriage with fair and dark races of many lands.
Dr. F. von Luschan, in describing the Tachtadschy,[148] calls attention
to the fact that the Greeks of Lycia represent a mixture of two distinct
types. From this he draws the following inference: “At first glance it
appears remarkable and hardly probable that two disparate types should
remain distinct, although intermarriage has continued without
interruption through thousands of years. But we must acknowledge that it
would be just as remarkable if continued intercrossing should result in
the production of a middle type (_Mischform_). It is true that at the
present time the greater number of anthropologists appear to be of the
opinion that middle forms originate wherever two distinct types live in
close contact for a long time. If this is true at all, it is true only
in a very limited sense, and still needs to be proven. _A priori_, we
rather ought to expect that one or the other of these types would soon
succumb in the struggle for existence. It would become extinct, and give
way to the other type; or both types might continue to co-exist,
although intercrossing might go on for centuries. They would undergo no
other changes than those which each singly, uninfluenced by the other,
would have undergone by the agency of physical causes.”
The evidence we possess of the physical characteristics of the
succession of races in Europe from palæolithic times is already
considerable; and in reference to neolithic and later periods is ample.
Within the recent historic period of the decline and fall of Rome, and
the influx of Northern and Asiatic barbarians, the evidence of admixture
of race is abundant; and the physical, intellectual, and moral changes
resulting therefrom have stamped their ineffaceable impress on history.
But the conditions under which the meeting of the Aryans with
Allophylians, Neolithians, or other prehistoric races took place in
older centuries, can only be surmised; and the many analogies resulting
from the intrusion of the European races on the aborigines of the
western hemisphere are calculated to render useful aid in determining
some definite results.
History has familiarised us with the idea of sovereign and subject
races. The monuments of Egypt perpetuate the fact from its remote dawn,
Punic, Roman, Gothic, Frank, Saracenic, and Scandinavian races, have in
turn subdued others, and made them subservient to their will. Evidence
of a different kind, but little less definite, points to the intrusion
into Europe in prehistoric times of races superior alike in physical
type, and in the arts upon which progress depends, to the Autochthones,
or primitive occupants of the soil. Further indications have been
assumed to point to the contemporaneous presence, in primeval Britain,
as elsewhere, of races of diverse type, and apparently in the relation
of lord and serf: a natural if not indeed inevitable consequence of the
intrusion of a superior race of conquerors.
But in the New World the inaptitude of the native race for useful
serfdom largely contributed to the introduction there of other and very
diverse races from Africa and Asia; so that now within a well-defined
North American area, indigenous populations of the three continents of
the Old World are displacing its native races. Still more, all three
meet there under circumstances which inevitably lead to their
intermixture with one another, and with the native races.
Various terms, such as Iberian, Silurian, Canstadt, Cimbric, Finnish,
and Turanian, have been applied to primitive types as expressive of the
hypothesis of their origin. But on turning to the American continent we
see vast regions occupied exclusively until a comparatively recent
period by tribes of savage hunters, upon whom some of the most civilised
races of Europe have intruded, with results in many respects so
strikingly accordant with the supposed evolution of the Melanochroi of
the Old World, that we seem to look upon a series of ethnological
experiments prolonged through centuries, with synthetic results to a
large extent confirmatory of previous inductions.
The intermingling of very diverse races at present taking place on the
American continent includes some of widely diverse types. There is seen
the Portuguese in Brazil; the Spaniard in Peru, Mexico, Central America,
and in Cuba; the African in the West Indies and the Southern States; the
Chinese on the Pacific; the Frenchman on the St. Lawrence; the German,
the Italian, the Norwegian, the Icelander, the Celt, and the
Anglo-Saxon: all subjected to novel influences, necessarily testing the
results of a change of climate, of diet, and of social habits, on the
ethnical character of each. There too, alike in the Red and the Black
races, we can study the results of hybridity carried out on a scale
adequate to determine many important points calculated to throw light on
the origin and perpetuation of diverse races of mankind.
The growth of a race of hybrid African blood has been one of the results
of the substitution at an early date of imported negro slaves to supply
the place of the rapidly disappearing Indians who perished under the
exactions of their taskmasters. According to careful data set forth in
the United States census for 1850, the whole number of native Africans
imported cannot have exceeded 400,000. At present the coloured
race—hybrids chiefly—of African blood numbers nearly 7,000,000. In
1715 there were 58,000 negroes in British America; in 1775, when the
revolution broke out, there were 501,102. After the epoch of
independence the increase became more rapid. In 1790 the numbers were
757,208; in 1800, 893,041; in 1810, 1,191,364. At the date of
emancipation in 1865 there were, in round numbers, in slavery,
4,000,000; and at the census in 1880 the negro population in the United
States had risen to 6,580,793;[149] and in the returns thus far
published relative to the later census of 1890, in the Southern States
alone they are reported to number 6,996,116; so that with the added
numbers of the Northern States and Canada they can fall little short of
8,000,000. Of this numerous intrusive race, the larger number are
hybrids; and, as was inevitable, they include some small proportion of
mixed negro and Indian blood.[150] But it is the Metis, or White and Red
half-breed, that constitutes the subject of special interest here.
Various causes have tended to beget more friendly relations between the
older colonists of New France, and at a later date between those of
British America and the native Indian race, than have existed either in
Spanish America or the United States.
The great North-West, with its warlike Chippeways, Crees, Sioux, and
Blackfeet; and beyond the Rocky Mountains its Tinné, Babeens, Clalams,
Newatees, Chinooks, Cowlitz, and numerous other native tribes; had till
recently been under the control of the all-powerful fur-trading company
of Hudson Bay. The interests of the fur-traders stimulated them to fair
and honourable dealing with the native tribes; and while they had no
motive to encourage the Indians to abandon their nomadic life for the
civilised habits of a settled people, or even to interpose in the wars
which varied the monotony of the Indians’ wild hunter-life, they had so
thoroughly won the confidence of the natives, that tribes at open enmity
with each other were ready to repose equal confidence in the Hudson Bay
factors.
The late Paul Kane, author of _Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians
of North America_, informed me that when travelling beyond the Rocky
Mountains he found no difficulty in transmitting his correspondence
home, even when among the rudest Flathead savages. His packet, entrusted
to one of the tribe, was accompanied with a small gift of tobacco, and
the request to have it forwarded to Fort Garry, or other Hudson Bay
fort. The messenger—Cowlitz, Chinook, Nasquallie, or other
Indian,—carried it to the frontier of his own hunting-grounds, and then
sold it for so much tobacco to some Indian of another tribe; by him it
was passed on, by like process of barter, till it crossed the Rocky
Mountains into the territory of the Blackfeet, the Crees, and so onward
to its destination, in full confidence that the officers of the Hudson
Bay Fort would sustain the credit of the White Medicine-man (for so the
painter was regarded), and redeem the packet at its full value in
tobacco or other equivalent.
The personal interests of the little bands of European fur-traders thus
settled in the heart of a wilderness, and surrounded by savage hunters,
no less strongly prompted them to exclude the maddening fire-water from
the vast regions under their control. Guns and ammunition, kettles,
axes, knives, beads, and other trinkets, with the no less prized
tobacco, were abundantly provided for barter. Even nails and the iron
hoops of their barrels were traded with the Indians, and displaced the
primitive tomahawk and arrow head of flint or stone. Thus, curiously,
the Stone period of a people still in the most primitive stage of
barbarism has been superseded by the use of metals obtained solely by
barter, and without any advance either in the knowledge of metallurgy,
or in the mastery of the arts which lie at the foundation of all
civilisation. Long before the advent of Europeans, the Chippeways along
the shores of Lake Superior had been familiar with the native copper
which abounds there in the condition of pure metal. But they knew it
only as a kind of malleable stone; nor have they even now learned the
application of fire in their simple metallurgic processes. The root of
their names for iron and copper is the same abstract term, _wahbik_,
used only in compound words, and apparently in the sense of rock or
stone. _Pewahbik_ is iron; _ozahwahbik_, copper, literally the yellow
stone. It formed no part of the Hudson Bay traders’ aim to advance him
beyond the stage of a savage hunter. It was incompatible with the
interests of the fur-trader to teach him any higher use of the rich
prairie land than that of a wilderness inhabited by fur-bearing animals,
or a grazing ground for the herds of buffalo which furnished their
annual supply of pemmican; or to familiarise him with more of the
borrowed arts of civilisation than helped to facilitate the accumulation
of peltries in the factory stores. Hence the intrusive Europeans and the
native tribes met on common ground, engaged in the same pursuits, all
tending to foster the habits of hunter-life; and so presenting a close
analogy to the condition of Europe when, in its Neolithic age, its rude
hunter tribes were invaded by the Aryans. Thus engaged to a large extent
in the same pursuits, the Whites and Indians of the Canadian North-West
have dwelt together for successive generations on terms of comparative
equality, and with results of curious interest, hereafter referred to,
in relation to the intermingling of the races.
In the long-settled provinces of Canada it has been otherwise. There the
aborigines had to be gathered together on suitable reserves, and induced
to accommodate themselves in some degree to the habits of an industrious
agricultural population; or to be driven out, to wander off into the
great hunting-grounds of the uncleared West. The exterminating native
wars, which preceded the settlement of Upper Canada, greatly facilitated
this; and the tribes with which the English colonists of Ontario have
had to deal have been for the most part immigrants, not greatly less
recent than themselves. As to the Six Nation Indians settled on the
Grand River and at the Bay of Quinté (the most numerous and the farthest
advanced in civilisation of all the Indians in the British provinces),
they are a body of loyalist refugees who followed the fortunes of their
English allies on the declaration of independence by the revolted
Colonies; and there is now in use, at the little Indian Church at
Tuscarora, the silver Communion Plate presented to their ancestors while
still in the valley of the Mohawk, in the State of New York, the gift of
Her Majesty Queen Anne, “to her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks.”[151]
But the civilisation which has thus resulted from prolonged and intimate
relations with the Whites, has been accompanied by an inevitable
admixture of blood, of which the results are abundantly manifest in the
physical characteristics of the Indian settlers, both on the Grand river
and at the Bay of Quinté. The system of adopting members of other
tribes, including even those of their vanquished foes, to recruit their
own numbers, was practised by many of the North American tribes, and was
familiar to the Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, as they were
styled before the admission of the Tuscaroras to their confederacy. In
1649, for example, the survivors of two of the Huron towns which they
had ravaged, besought the favour of the victors, and were adopted into
the Seneca nation. Nor did extreme differences of race interfere with
affiliation, as in the case of children kidnapped from the White
colonists in their vicinity. One interesting example of the latter
suffices to illustrate the extent to which such a process tended to
affect the ethnical purity of the race.
In the year 1779, while the Mohawks still dwelt in their native valley
in the State of New York, Ste-nah, a white girl, then about twelve years
of age, was captured in one of their marauding expeditions, and adopted
into the tribe. In 1868, while still living, she was described to me by
an educated Mohawk India, as a full-blood _Sko-ha-ra_, or Dutchwoman.
She grew up among her captors, accompanied the tribe on their removal
from the Mohawk valley to the shores of the Bay of Quinté, and married
one of the Mohawk braves. She had reached mature years, and was the
mother of Indian children, when an aged stranger visited the reserve in
search of his long-lost daughter. He had heard of a captive white woman
who survived among the emigrant Mohawks there, and was able, by certain
marks, and the scar of a wound received in childhood, to identify his
long-lost daughter. But the discovery came too late. As my Mohawk
informant told me, she had got an Indian heart. She had, indeed, lost
her native tongue; had acquired the habits and sympathies of her adopted
people; and coldly repelled the advances of her aged father, who in vain
recalled his long-lost daughter Christina in the Mohawk white-blood,
_Ste-nah_. If the date of her capture and her estimated age can be
relied on, she must have been in her hundred and fifth year at the time
of her death, in December 1871. I have received through one of her
grandsons—himself a Mohawk chief,—a genealogical table of her
descendants, from which it appears that there are at the present time
fifty-seven of them living and twenty-three dead. It is thus apparent,
that by the adoption of a single White captive into the tribe, there
are, in the fourth generation, fifty-seven survivors out of eighty
members of the tribe, all of them of hybrid character.
The influence of a single case of admixture of White blood, thus
followed out to its results in the fourth generation, suffices to show
how largely those tribes must be affected who dwell for any length of
time in close vicinity to White settlers, and in intimate friendly
relations with them. The earlier French and English colonists, like the
Hudson Bay traders of later times, were mostly young adventurers,
without wives, and readily entering into alliance with the native women.
The children of such unions were admitted to a perfect equality with the
Whites, when trained up in their settlements; and in the older period of
French and English rivalry the Indians were dealt with on very different
terms from those with which they are now regarded, though even yet some
memory of older relations survives.
During the wars between the French and English colonists to the north
and south of the St. Lawrence, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the alliance of neighbouring Indian tribes was courted; and
the traditions of the fidelity of the Hurons to the French, and the
loyalty of the Iroquois to the English, are cherished as incentives to
the fulfilment of obligations entered into on behalf of the little
remnant of the Huron nation remaining on the river St. Charles, below
Quebec; and to a liberal and generous policy towards the Six Nation
Indians settled on the Grand river and elsewhere in Western Canada.
But also in the primitive simplicity of border life, the half-civilised
Indian and the rude settler meet on common ground; and in some cases the
friendly relations established between them have survived the more
settled condition of agricultural progress in the clearings. In this
respect the older colonists of Quebec fraternised far more readily with
the native population than has been the case with English settlers. The
relations in which the early French colonists stood to the Indians of
Lower Canada bore more resemblance to those of the fur-traders of the
North-West in later times, and were of a kindlier nature than those of
the intrusive European emigrants of the present century. Prior to the
accession of Louis XIV. to the throne, the French possessions in the New
World had been regarded as little more than a hunting-ground to be
turned to the same account as the Hudson Bay Company’s territory; and
the peopling of Canada had given little promise of permanent
colonisation. Priests and nuns alone varied the usual class of trading
adventurers who resort to a young colony. But soon after the King
reached his majority, a systematic shipment of emigrants to Canada was
organised under the direction of Colbert; sundry companies of soldiers
were disbanded in the colony; and then, at last, the necessity of
finding wives for the settlers was recognised. Thereupon a system of
female emigration, with bounties on marriage, was established. Colbert,
writing to the Canadian Intendant, tells him that the prosperity of the
people, and all that is most dear to them as colonists, depend upon
their securing the marriage of youths not later than their eighteenth or
nineteenth year to girls at fourteen or fifteen; and the next step was
to impose a fine on the father of a family who neglected to marry his
children when they reached the respective ages of twenty and sixteen.
Up to this period the native women had chiefly supplied wives for the
colonists; nor was this element now ignored or slighted. In the _Mémoire
sur l’Etat Présent du Canada_, 1667, it is stated: “At this time it was
believed that the Indians, mingled with the French, might become a
valuable part of the population. The reproductive qualities of Indian
women therefore became an object of attention to Talon, the Royal
Intendant; and he reports that they impair their fertility by nursing
their children longer than is needful; but, he adds, ‘this obstacle to
the speedy building up of the colony can be overcome by regulations of
police.’” Thus it is apparent that the strongest encouragement was given
to such alliances.
The religious element, moreover, among a purely Roman Catholic
population, helped to foster a sense of equality in the case of the
Christianised Indian; while the gentler and less progressive habits of
the French habitants have tended to prevent direct collision with the
Indians settled in their midst. Hence in the province of Quebec,
half-breeds, and men and women of partial Indian blood, are frequently
to be met with in all ranks of life; and slighter traces, discernible in
the hair, the eye, the cheek-bone, and peculiar mouth, as well as
certain traits of Indian character, suggest to the close observer remote
indications of the same admixture of blood.
But while favouring influences in national character, political
institutions, and religion, all united to encourage a more friendly
intercourse between the native and European population of Lower Canada,
the circumstances attendant on the settlement of new clearings have
everywhere led in some degree to similar results; and experience
abundantly proves the impossibility of preserving distinct two races
living in close proximity to each other.
Throughout the old provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and the Maritime
Provinces, where the aborigines are mostly congregated on reserves,
under the charge of Government officers of the Indian Department, they
appear, with few exceptions, to have passed the critical stage of
transition from a nomadic state to that of assimilation to the habits of
settled industry of the Whites.