process of adjustment with the various tribes of natives reluctantly
yielding to the new condition of things. Returns made to an address of
the House of Commons at Ottawa, dated March 1873, disclose the
jealousies and suspicions of the native tribes, and the anxiety evinced
by the Government officials to remove all just grounds of complaint. Mr.
Beatty, a contractor for certain surveys on the Upper Assiniboine,
reports that the Portage Indians, under their chief, Yellow Quill, had
absolutely forbidden any survey of their lands, and driven him and his
party off the field. The Lieutenant-Governor thereafter held an
interview with Yellow Quill and a party of his braves, and after a long
_pow-wow_ succeeded in pacifying him. Again, a party of about two
thousand Sioux are reported to have left in high dudgeon, with a threat
to return in force next spring; and the Hon. Alexander Morris—now
Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba—writes to the Provincial Secretary at
Ottawa, that “The Red Lake Indians on the American side have been
sending tobacco to the Sioux in our territory, as it is believed, with
the view of common action with regard to the Boundary Survey.” For the
settlement of provinces, and the surveying of the prairie for disposal
to its new occupants, had necessitated the determination of a
well-defined boundary between the Canadian territories and those of the
United States. Only a few years had elapsed since the State of Minnesota
was desolated by a cruel war, carried on by the Sioux at the
instigation, as was then affirmed, of Southern agents, with a view to a
diversion in favour of the South during the great Civil War. A large
number of the Sioux have since crossed the boundary, and settled within
the British lines; and the Hon. Mr. Morris writes from Fort Garry in
December last: “Some of the Sioux assist the white settlers as labourers
in the summer. They have asked for land, and were led to believe that
they would be assigned a reserve, and, if so, they would plant crops,
and could then be removed from the settlement.” But Mr. Morris specially
draws the attention of the provincial authorities to the excited state
apparent among all the Western tribes, and adds: “I believe it to be in
part created by the Boundary Commission. They do not understand it, and
think the two nations are uniting against them.” The difficulties,
however, were overcome; and the reports of the Indian agents contain
some curious illustrations of the difficulties inevitable in the first
attempt at transforming wild Indian tribes into prairie farmers. One of
them thus writes: “The full demands of the Indians cannot be complied
with; but there is, nevertheless, a certain paradox in asking a wild
Indian, who has hitherto gained his livelihood by hunting and trapping,
to settle down on a reservation and cultivate the land, without at the
same time offering him some means of making his living. As they say
themselves: ‘We cannot tear down the trees and build huts with our
teeth, we cannot break the prairie with our hands, nor reap the harvest,
if we had grown it, with our knives.’” But even among the wild tribes of
the prairies a great diversity in habits, and in aptitude for the new
life now forced upon them as their only chance of survival, is apparent.
The Portage Indians clung to their old status as hunters living in their
buffalo-skin lodges on the prairies; the St. Peter Indians form
permanent settlements, not only of birch-bark wigwams, but many of them
have built log-houses for themselves. Even among the tribes already
settling down to steady agricultural labour, such as the Saulteux and
the Swampies of Manitoba, a very great difference both in sentiments and
customs prevail. Thirty-four Indian families from one tribe in Pembina
are reported by the agent as demanding their allocation of farms; the
chiefs and headmen of other tribes are in negotiation for farming
implements, stock, etc., and some of their demands curiously illustrate
the form in which the new life thus opening up to them presents its most
tempting aspects. Hoes, axes, and other indispensable implements have
been readily granted to them. Ploughs, harrows, and oxen are in request,
and have been conceded or promised where the Government agent is
satisfied that they will be turned to good account. But in special
demand is “a bull and cow for each chief, and a boar for each reserve.”
The incipient idea of the stock farm is indeed apparent in the universal
demand of all: “A promise,” says one of the agents, “which the Indians
never omit to mention, that they shall be supplied with a male and
female of each animal used by a farmer.” But the transformation of the
wild hunter into an industrious agriculturist is a difficult process;
and even in the new generation, born under such changed conditions, the
Indian boy shows much greater aptitude for mechanical employments; and
takes more readily to the work of the carpenter than to that of tilling
the soil, which, so long as the Indian was its lord, was practised
exclusively by the women of the tribe.
Could the older condition of interblended prairie life have been
sufficiently long perpetuated, the results would far more fully have
presented results in close analogy to the intermingling of Europe’s
aboriginal and Aryan races in prehistoric times. A settlement begun by
Lord Selkirk in 1811, was formed on the Red River within the area now
embraced in the Province of Manitoba. It consisted of hardy Orkney men
and Sutherlandshire Highlanders; and on the amalgamation of the
North-West and the Hudson Bay Companies, the settlement received
considerable additions to its numbers. When at length the great fur
Companies’ supremacy came to an end, the community numbered upwards of
two thousand whites, chiefly occupied in farming, or in the service of
the Company. At a later date, another settlement was formed on the
Assiniboine river, chiefly by French Canadians. In those, as at the
forts and trading-posts of the Hudson Bay Company, the settlers
consisted chiefly of young men. They had no choice but to wed or cohabit
with the Indian women; and the result has been, not only the growth of a
half-breed population greatly out-numbering the Whites, but the
formation of a tribe of half-breeds, divided into two distinct bands,
according to their Scottish or French paternity, who kept themselves
distinct in manners, habits, and allegiance, alike from the Whites and
the Indians.
This rise of an independent half-breed tribe is one of the most
remarkable results of the great, though undesigned, ethnological
experiment which has been in progress ever since the meeting of the
diverse races of the Old and New World on the continent of America; and
when the peculiar circumstances which favoured this result came to an
end, it became a matter of great interest to note the most striking
phases presented by it, before they are effaced by the influx of
European emigration. I accordingly printed and circulated as widely as
possible a set of queries relative to the Indian and half-breed
population both of Canada and the Hudson Bay territory; and from the
returns made to me by Hudson Bay factors, missionaries, and others, most
of the following results are derived. The number of the settled
population, either half-breed or more or less of Indian blood, in Red
River and the surrounding settlements was about 7200. The intermarriage
there has been chiefly with Indian women of the plain Crees, though
alliances also occur with the Swampies (another branch of the Crees),
and with Sioux, Chippeway, and Blackfeet women. But the most noticeable
differences are traceable to the white paternity. The French half-breeds
have more demonstrativeness and vivacity, but they are reported to take
less readily to the steady drudgery of the farm than those of Scotch
descent. But, at best, the temptations of a border settlement, with its
buffalo hunts and its chief market for peltries, were little calculated
to develop the industrious habits of a settled community; and the
intrusion of farmers from the old provinces, and immigrants from Europe,
ignorant of their habits and wholly indifferent to their interests,
necessarily interfered with the healthful process of transformation into
a settled industrious community of civilised half-breeds.
Some of the results elicited by the inquiries are of value in their
bearing on the question of mixed races, and the apparent tendency to
develop permanent varieties; and all the more so as the data thus
obtained show the condition of the North-West community immediately
prior to the formation of the Province of Manitoba, and the inauguration
of the revolution which inevitably followed in its train. The
half-breeds are a large and robust race, with greater powers of
endurance than the native Indian. Mr. S. J. Dawson, of the Red River
Exploring Expedition, speaks of the French half-breeds as a gigantic
race as compared with the French Canadians of Lower Canada. Professor
Hind refers in equally strong language to their great physical powers
and vigorous muscular developments; and the venerable Archdeacon Hunter,
of Red River, replied in answer to my inquiry: “In what respects do the
half-breed Indians differ from the pure Indians as to habits of life,
courage, strength, increase of numbers, etc.?” “They are superior in
every respect, both mentally and physically.” Much concurrent evidence
points to the fact that the families descended from mixed parentage are
larger than those of the whites; and though the results are in some
degree counteracted by a tendency to consumption, yet it does not amount
to such a source of diminution on the whole as to interfere with their
steady numerical increase. One of the questions circulated by me was in
this form: “State any facts tending to prove or disprove that the
offspring descended from mixed White and Indian blood fails in a few
generations.” To this the Rev. J. Gilmour answered: “I know many large
and healthy families of partial Indian blood, and have formed the
opinion that they are likely to perpetuate a hardy race.” The venerable
Archdeacon Hunter, familiar with the facts by long residence as a
clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church among the mixed population of the
Red River Settlement, answered still more decidedly: “The offspring
descended from mixed White and Indian blood does not fail, but,
generally speaking, by intermarriages it becomes very difficult to
determine whether they are pure Whites or half-breeds.” Living, however,
for many years among a people in whom the Indian traits are more or less
traceable, it is probable that Archdeacon Hunter is less attracted by
the modified, ample black hair, the large full mouth, and the dark,
though gentle and softly expressive eye, which strikes a stranger on
first coming among any frontier population of mixed blood. The
half-breeds also retain much of the reserved and unimpressible manner of
the Indian; though a good deal of intercourse with the native race has
led me to the conclusion that this is more of an acquired habit than a
strictly hereditary trait: a piece of Indian education akin to certain
habits of social life universally inculcated among ourselves. When off
his guard, the wild Indian betrays great inquisitiveness, and when
relaxing over the camp-fire after a laborious day gives free play to
mirth and loquacity.
So far, however, much that has been said applies to the mixed population
of the Red River Settlement, living on a perfect equality with the white
settlers, and constituting an integral part of the colony. They are
neither to be confounded with the remarkable tribe of half-breed
hunters, nor with the Indians of mixed blood already described, on older
Canadian reserves. Remote as this settlement has hitherto been from
ordinary centres of colonisation, and inaccessible except through the
agency of the Hudson Bay Company, every tendency has been to encourage
the introduction of the young adventurer, trapper, or _voyageur_, rather
than the married settler. The habits of life incident to the fur trade
made the distinction less marked between the Indian and the white man;
and thus a people of peculiar type grew up there as intermediate in
habits and mode of life as in blood from those of the old settled
provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Much property is now possessed by
men of mixed blood. Their young men have in some cases been sent to the
colleges of Canada, and, after creditably distinguishing themselves,
have returned to lend their aid in the progress of the settlement. Thus
a favourable concurrence of circumstances in all respects tended to give
ample opportunity for testing the experiment of intermingling the blood
of Europe and America, and raising up a civilised race peculiar to its
soil. With the rapid influx of emigrants; the settling of the prairie
lands with a population of yeomen farmers; and the rise of villages and
towns along the railways and river highways; the ultimate absorption of
this half-breed population, and its merging into the homogeneous
community that will ultimately be fashioned out of a meeting of very
diverse settlers, is inevitable. Icelanders and Danes, Germans,
Russians, Italians, French, Highland crofters, and Irish Celts, are all
being interfused into the new community of which the half-breed element
will form no unimportant factor.
But a greater interest attaches to that other class of half-breeds
already alluded to, which the new order of things has inevitably tended
to efface, though not necessarily to eradicate, as an element in the
population of the future province. Besides the civilised race of
half-breeds, mingling on a perfect equality with the Whites; brought up
in many cases in full enjoyment of such domestic training as the Hudson
Bay factor and hunter could furnish in the wilderness; there remained
apart from them a half-breed race, the offspring born to native women as
the inevitable results of such a social condition as pertains to the
occupants of the forts and trading-posts of that remote region. These
half-breed buffalo hunters were wholly distinct from the civilised
settlers, and yet more nearly related to them than to the wild Indian
tribes. They belonged to the settlement, possessed land, and cultivated
farms, though their agricultural labours were very much subordinated to
the claims of the chase, and they scarcely aimed at more than supplying
their own wants. The two bands numbered in all between 6000 and 7000.
Each division had its separate tribal organisation and distinct
hunting-grounds, extending beyond the British American frontier. In 1849
the White Horse plain half-breeds on the Strayenne river, Dakota
territory, rendered the following returns to an officer appointed to
take the census: “700 half-breeds, 200 Indians, 603 carts, 600 horses,
200 oxen, 400 dogs, and 1 cat.” This may illustrate the general
character of a people partaking of the nomad habits of the Indian, and
yet possessed of a considerable amount of movable property and real
estate. They are a hardy race, fearless horsemen, and capable of
enduring the greatest privations. They have adopted the Roman Catholic
faith, and specially coveted the presence of a priest with them when on
their hunting expeditions. The mass was celebrated on the open prairie,
and was prized as a guarantee of success in the hunting-field. On such
expeditions, it has to be borne in view, they were not tempted by mere
love of the chase or by the prospect of a supply of game. Winter-hunting
supplies to the trapper the valued peltries of the fur-bearing animals;
but they depended on the summer and autumn buffalo hunts for the supply
of pemmican, which furnished one of the main resources of the whole
Hudson Bay population. The summer hunt kept them abroad on the prairie
from about the 15th of June to the end of August, and smaller bands
resumed the hunt in the autumn. With this as the favourite and
engrossing work of the tribe, it is inevitable that farming could be
carried on only in the most desultory fashion. Nevertheless, the
severity of the winter compelled them to make provision for the numerous
horses and oxen on which the summer hunt depended; and thus habits of
industry and forethought were engendered.
The half-breed hunters regarded the Sioux and Blackfeet as their natural
enemies, and carried on warfare with them much after the fashion of the
Indian tribes that have acquired fire-arms and horses; but they gave
proof of their “Christian” civilisation by taking no scalps. In the
field, whether preparing for hunting or war, the superiority of the
half-breeds was strikingly apparent. They then evinced a discipline,
courage, and self-control, of which the wild Sioux, Crees, or Blackfeet
are wholly incapable; and they accordingly looked with undisguised
contempt on their Indian foes.
Such are some of the most noticeable characteristics of this interesting
race, called into being by the contact of the European with the native
tribes of the forest and prairie. With so many of the elements of
civilisation which it is found so hard to introduce among the most
intelligent native tribes, an aptitude for social organisation, and a
thorough independence of all external superintendence or control, there
seems no reason to doubt that here is an example of an intermediate
race, combining characteristics derived from two extremely diverse types
of man, with all apparent promise of perpetuity and increase, if they
could have been secured in the exclusive occupation of the region in
which they have originated. But the railway has traversed the trail of
the buffalo; and they have been compelled to make their choice between
conformity to the industrial habits of agricultural settlers, or follow
the herds of the buffalo in search of some remote wilderness beyond the
shriek of the locomotive and the hail of the pioneer immigrant.
The inevitable revolution was not permitted to be inaugurated without
very practical protest. The Red River Expedition of Sir Garnet Wolseley
in 1870 was directed to put down a revolt of the half-breeds, under
their leader, Louis Riel, resolute to oppose the intrusion of immigrant
settlers. The struggle was renewed in 1885 under the same leader, but
with the more legitimate grievance of neglected land claims, and the
assertion of their rights to property in the prairie lands and on the
river fronts. They were encountered by a Canadian volunteer force;
Batoche, their little urban stronghold, was captured; and the North-West
rebellion was brought to an end. But it was freely acknowledged that,
poorly armed and ill-provided with the indispensable requisites for
meeting a well-organised force of militia, under an experienced British
soldier, General Middleton, they displayed unflinching courage, and held
out bravely against overwhelming numbers furnished with the deadly
appliances of modern warfare.
It could not be supposed that the invasion of the western hemisphere by
the wanderers from the later homes of the Aryans beyond the Atlantic
could reproduce in all respects the old phenomena that marked the
displacement of Europe’s prehistoric races. But making due allowance for
the changes wrought on the Aryan stock by the civilising influences of
twenty centuries or more; and the consequent disparity between them and
the rude hunter tribes of the American forests and prairies; much
remains to aid us in the interpretation of the past. Ethnological
investigation and induction enable us to realise the condition of Europe
when its thinly-dispersed population consisted of a dark-skinned race,
small in stature, and, as we may conceive, with hair and eyes of
corresponding hue. Sepulchral deposits and the chance disclosures in
their old cave-shelters have made us familiar with their physical form.
Their modern representatives survive on the outskirts of Europe’s
civilised centres. Still more, their ethnical characteristics have been
perpetuated by the very same process as may now be seen in progress in
the frontier states of America and the newest provinces of the Canadian
Dominion. Not only are the modern representatives of Europe’s Allophyliæ
to be found among the Lapps, Finns, and the Iberians of Northern and
Western Europe; but everywhere in the British Isles, and throughout
Western Europe, the Melanochroic elements stand out distinctly from the
predominant Xanthocroic stock, among a people unconscious of any
diversity of race. Here then we see evidences of the intermingling and
the partial absorption of the Australioid savage of prehistoric Europe
by the later Xanthocroi, the product of which survives in the brunette
of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. In Britain the
contrasting characteristics of the diverse ethnical elements attracted
the attention of Tacitus in the first century of our era. In Spain the
Iberian still preserves the evidence of an individuality apart from the
Indo-European races in the vernacular Euskara, while a large Moorish
element in the southern portion of the peninsula perpetuates the results
of another foreign intrusion and interblending of races within historic
times.
The diversity apparent in some of the results of the meeting of
dissimilar races in the Old World and the New, is due to the
geographical characteristics of the two hemispheres. Alike by sea and
land, Europe could be entered by invading colonists, gradually, and at
many diverse points. Hence, the aggression of the higher races may be
assumed to have begun while the difference between them and the
aborigines of Europe was much less than that which distinguishes the
European from the Bed Indian savage. The conquest would thus be
protracted over a period probably of many generations, and so would
involve no such collisions as inevitably result in the destruction of
savage races when brought into abrupt contact with those far advanced in
civilisation.
But the peculiar relations of the frontier populations of the New World,
and especially of the factors, trappers, and _voyageurs_ of the Hudson
Bay Company, with the native tribes, helped to create a partial equality
between the civilised European and the savage, and so to beget results
akin to those which have left such enduring evidences of the mingling of
diverse races in the population of Europe.
This accordingly suggests a question affecting the whole relations of
British and European colonists generally to the native population of new
lands settled and colonised by them. Not only English, Scotch, and
Irish, but German, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Polish, Russian, and
Italian emigrants flock in thousands to the New World, merge in the
common stock, and in the third generation learn to speak of themselves
as “Anglo-Saxon!” The investigations of ethnologists have well-nigh put
an end to the supposed purity of an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian
population in all but the assumed purely Celtic areas of the British
Islands; and the latest system of ethnical classification is based on
the recognition of the survival in the mixed population of modern
Britain of a race-element which still perpetuates an enduring influence
derived from aborigines of Europe anterior to the advent of Celt or
Teuton. The power of absorption and assimilation of a predominant race
is great; and ethnological displacement is no more necessarily a process
of extinction now than in primitive times; though intermixture must ever
be most easily effected where the ethnical distinctions are least
strongly marked, and the conditions of civilisation are nearly akin.
The permanent survival of a disparate type in America perpetuating the
evidences of the interblending of the Red and White races may be
doubted. That some ineffaceable results will remain I cannot doubt; but
the enormous disparity in numbers between the millions of European
nationalities, and the little remnant of the native race brought in
contact with them, precludes the possibility of results such as have
perpetuated in the modern races of Europe elements derived from some of
its earliest savage tribes.
It has indeed been such a favourite idea with some physiologists that in
the undoubted developments of something like a distinct Anglo-American
type, there is a certain approximation to the Indian, that Dr.
Carpenter, in his _Essay on the Varieties of Mankind_, lays claim to
originality in the idea “that the conformation of the cranium seems to
have undergone a certain amount of alteration, even in the Anglo-Saxon
race of the United States, which assimilates it in some degree to that
of the aboriginal inhabitants.” This he dwells on in some detail, and
arrives at what he seems to regard as an indisputable conclusion, that
the peculiar American physiognomy to which he adverts presents a
transition, however slight, toward that of the North American Indian.
But the long-cherished opinion, to which Dr. Morton gave currency, of
the existence of one special type of skull-form common to the whole
aborigines of America, has been abandoned by all who have given any
attention to the evidence which Dr. Morton’s own _Crania Americana_
supplies. I doubt if the idea of such an approximation of the
Anglo-American to the Red Indian type would ever have occurred to a
physiologist of Canada or of New England, to whom abundant opportunities
for comparing the Indian and Anglo-American features, and of noting the
actual transitional forms between the two, are accessible. But if such
examples can be clearly recognised, they may be assigned with
probability to a reverting to the type of some Bed ancestress whose
blood is transmitted to a late descendant.
But it is otherwise with the millions of the Coloured race who now
constitute the indigenous population of the Southern States. They are at
home there in a climate to which the White race adapts itself with very
partial success. The offspring of white fathers and of mothers of the
African races, they have multiplied to millions; and now with the
recently acquired rights of citizenship, and with the advantages of
education within their reach, the country is their own. The very social
prejudices against miscegenation protect them from the effacing
influences to which the Indian half-breed is exposed by ever recurrent
intermarriage with the dominant race. As yet, there are discernible the
various degrees of heredity from the Mulatto to the Quinteron. But the
abolishing of slavery has placed the Coloured race on an entirely new
footing; and left as it now is, free to enjoy the healthful social
relations of a civilised community, and protected by the very prejudices
of race and caste from any large intermixture with the White race, it
can scarcely admit of doubt that there will survive on the American
continent a Melanocroi of its own, more distinctly separated from the
White race, not only by heredity, but also by climatic influences, than
the “dark Whites” of Europe are from the blonde types of Hellenic,
Slavic, Teutonic, or Scandinavian stocks.
-----
[148] _Reisen in Lykien_, etc., Vienna, 1889.
[149] Vide _History of the Negro Race in America_. G. W. Williams.
[150] _Science_, Feb. 13, 1891. A. F. Chamberlain.
[151] See p. 290.
VIII
RELATIVE RACIAL BRAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE