A VANISHING RACE.
There was a white man once with an idea. So modest was this man that
he was unwilling that even his name and the idea should be linked
together. He wanted the Indians to become better known to the whites,
to themselves, to their children, and to the future generations of
children. So he passed from one tribe to another and made known his
plan to them. They were to write a book; a book that would contain a
record of their thoughts and ideals, their songs and unwritten music,
their folk-lore, their views of the past, and their beliefs in the
mysterious future. The idea pleased them, grew on them, and ended in
their becoming deeply interested. The book was prepared and printed
and it contains the following touching and stately introduction by the
High Chief of the Indian Tribes. It moves forward so like a majestic
anthem, so solemn in its unspoken sorrow, so full of gentle dignity
that it sweeps into our souls like the cadence of a great Amen:
"To the Great Chief at Washington, and the Chief of Peoples Across
the Waters:
"Long ago, the Great Mystery caused this land to be, and made the
Indians to live in this land. Well has the Indian fulfilled all
the intent of the Great Mystery for Him. Through this book may men
know that the Indian was made by the Great Mystery for a purpose.
"Once, only Indians lived in this land. Then came strangers from
across the Great Waters. No land had they; we gave them of our
land; no food had they; we gave them of our corn; the strangers
have become many and they fill all the country. They dig
gold--from my mountains; they build houses--of the trees of my
forests; they rear cities--of my stones and rocks; they make fine
garments--from the hides and wool of animals that eat my grass.
None of the things that make their riches did they bring with them
from across the Great Waters. All comes from my lands--the land
the Great Mystery gave unto this Indian.
"And when I think on this, I know that it is right, even thus. In
the heart of the Great Mystery, it was meant that the
stranger--visitors--my friends across the Great Waters should come
to my land; that I should bid them welcome; that all men should
sit down with me and eat together of my corn; it was meant by the
Great Mystery that the Indian should give to all peoples.
"But the white man never has known the Indian. It is thus: there
are two roads, the white man's road, and the Indian's road.
Neither traveler knows the road of the other. Thus ever has it
been, from the long ago, even unto to-day. May this book help to
make the Indian truly known in time to come.
"The Indian wise speakers in the book are the best men of their
tribe. Only what is true is within this book. I want all Indians
and white men to read and learn how the Indians lived and thought
in the olden time and may it bring holy--good upon the younger
Indian to know of their fathers. A little while and the old
Indians will no longer be and the young will be even as white men.
When I think, I know it is the mind of the Great Mystery that the
white man and the Indians who fought together should now be one
people.
"There are birds of many colors, red, blue, green, yellow--yet it
is all one bird. There are horses of many colors, brown, black,
yellow, white--yet it is all one horse. So cattle, so all living
things--animals, flowers, trees. So man; in this land where once
were only Indians and now men of every color--white, black,
yellow, red--yet all one people. That this was to come to pass was
in the heart of the Great Mystery. It is right thus, and
everywhere there shall be peace."
(Sgd.) By HIAMOVI (High Chief),
Chief among the Cheyennes and Dakotas.
Who is the Indian? This question has been asked for more than four
hundred years, and from out the buried silence of the past has come no
answering voice. Columbus asked it as approaching the border of a New
Hemisphere he gazed thoughtfully upon the features of another race of
beings. Ferdinand and Isabella asked it, as these strange men doomed
to vassalage stood proudly before them speaking in an unknown tongue.
Cortez asked it, as he riveted the chains of servitude upon two
million of them in the Conquest of Mexico. Coronado asked it, as his
army moved among the wandering tribes with their differing languages
and customs. The Pilgrim Fathers asked it with varying emotions, as
they viewed the curious natives waiting for them on the bleak New
England shores. France asked it, and trusted its most highly cultured
scientist to bring reply. "Nothing," he said as he returned,
"Nothing." He had visited many tribes, studied their languages,
customs and character, read everything ever written about them, and he
knew nothing and nothing ever will be known.
May not human life have had its very beginning on this hemisphere? May
there not in the remote past have been a Columbus who sailed East and
discovered the Continent of Europe making it the New World and leaving
this the Old? The pendulum of the clock swings in seconds. The
pendulum of the growth and decay of continents swings in centuries, in
eons. The meteor of Rome blazing through the heavens took one thousand
years to fall. Like the Ocean's tide is the ebb and flow of nations.
That there was a prehistoric race on this continent and an extinct
civilization, we know. We read it in the Valleys of the Ohio and the
Mississippi, in the copper beds by the side of Lake Superior, along
the shores of Ecuador, and in the country to the southward. From time
immemorial, from generation to generation, from father to son, has
been handed down a tradition among the once powerful tribe of the
Iroquois Indians, that their ancestors, overflowing their boundaries,
had moved down from the northwest to the Mississippi; that on the east
side of that river they had found a civilized nation with their towns,
their crops and their herds; that permission was obtained to pass by
on their way to the East; that as they were crossing the river, they
were treacherously assailed, a great battle ensued, followed by a
continuous warfare, until the enemy was totally destroyed and their
civilization blotted out.
[Illustration: An Indian Chief Addressing the Council.]
The bones of human beings are dust by the side of mammals estimated by
geologists to be fifty thousand years old. The allotted period of a
man's life is three score years and ten. He could be born seven
hundred times, live seven hundred lives, die seven hundred deaths in
those five hundred centuries. It is not within the compass of the
human mind to grasp the infinite detail in the rise and fall of
nations within such a period. Read the story of nine generations of
men, from Adam to Noah in the first five Chapters of Genesis, for the
multiplication of the human race from just two people, and the
destruction of a population so numerous that they were like the sands
of the ocean's beach. Following on but a few pages, we find that out
of the Ark had "grown many nations and many tongues," and they were so
crowded that the Lord said unto Abram, "Get thee out of thy country,
and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I
will show thee, and I will make of thee a great nation." Abram went,
and he took his nephew Lot along, and directly we read that "the land
was not able to bear them that they might dwell together," and they
separated, one going to the right hand and the other to the left hand.
With this historical data before us, do we ask whence came these
millions of Indians and their confusion of tongues? There is a touch
of similarity between the wandering tribes in early Bible history,
with their many languages, their patriarchs, their flocks and herds,
their peaceful lives and their dissensions and wars--and that of our
Indians, with the earth before them, with their tribal Chiefs, their
many dialects and their nomadic lives. If the North American Indians
had possessed a written language; if after their discovery, they had
been able to make recorded conveyances of vast tracts of lands to the
subjects of the different Powers of the Old World; if international
law could have been appealed to for the protection of these individual
rights, there might have been a world war on this continent that would
have made our rivers run red with blood.
When we close our minds to months and years and think in centuries, it
is easy to understand the diversity of languages. Tribes going off by
themselves, drop words from their vocabulary as time goes on, and use
other words that mean the same; after the passing of generations there
is an entirely new dialect. It is so in nearly all the countries of
the Old World; people living under the same government, neighbors,
cannot talk to each other. Climate too has something to do with
language. Russians and Eskimos use a speech that requires very little
lip movement, so as not to inhale the cold air of those cold regions.
In a mild climate there is the open language with many vowels.
When we discovered the Indian, we found a character the like of which
has no parallel in all history. It was the untutored mind of a child
in the body of an adult; there was respect for each other and
scrupulous honesty in their dealings among themselves; there was
government by a Chief and his council, comprising the oldest of the
tribe, to whom all questions of importance were submitted, the Chief
being such because of inheritance, or daring, or possessions; there
was the love of the parent for the child, and the teachings that
developed the highest efficiency in hearing, tasting, smelling, seeing
and touching, for upon these faculties thoroughly trained, depended
success in war, and sustenance in peace; there was pride of ancestry
and a reverence for the Great Spirit, the maker and ruler of the
universe. It seems almost a pity that this Arcadia could not have
remained untouched. We asked for a little land to pasture our cows and
to use for gardens. It was given by them grandly. We asked for more,
and it came cheerfully; we demanded still more, and it came
gracefully. Then we quit asking and took it; took it with shot and
shell, as we hungrily pressed on, doubling one tribe back upon
another; bayonets in front, bows and arrows in the rear, and they
fought each other, and they fought us. We called them savages; and
they were savage, and so would we all be under like treatment. Justice
and diplomacy would have saved thousands of lives and millions in
money. We made many treaties with the Indians which were broken by us
and this occasioned most of our Indian wars. Canada had the Indians
and no wars. Her dealings with them were on principle and along
steadfast and unchanging lines. Men grew old and died in the Indian
Service, and those next in line took their places. They understood the
Indian nature, and knew they possessed a high sense of honor and the
dealings were fair to each side. Our politics have been at the bottom
of nearly all our troubles. As parties have changed, men have changed.
A promise made one day has been broken by the men who came on the
morrow. The Interior Department failing to handle the perplexing
question, the Indians were turned over to the various church
organizations, who failed to get the right proportions in their
mixture of morals and business. Then the War Department tried it; and
all the time the lands of the red men diminished, and the land of the
white man increased. Up to the year of Colorado's admittance into the
Union as a Territory, 1861, there had been three hundred and
ninety-three treaties made with the one hundred and seventy-five
tribes of Indians embraced within the Territory of the United States,
by which 581,163,188 acres of land were acquired.
As tribes differed in their languages, so they differed in their
customs; and the following traits are applicable to some tribes and
not to others.
The stoicism of the Indian is well known; but that trait of his
character has its qualifications. He shows the taciturn side of his
nature to strangers, but the world is not so serious as his austere
countenance would indicate. Among his own people he is a fun-loving,
story-telling, game-indulging human being. There are degrees in their
social status measured by what they have done and the property they
have accumulated. They have their ideas of propriety, and are shocked
that a man and woman should dance together. The men dance in a ring by
themselves, and the women dance in an outer ring, while a drum gives
accents to their movements. Usually they sing something mournful, its
weird rhythm following one for days.
A child is usually named by its father, who walks abroad from the tent
for that purpose, selecting the name of what he sees first that
impresses him most. So they have such peculiar names as Rain in the
Face, Yellow Mag-pie, Sleeping Bear, Thunder-cloud, Spotted Horse and
White Buffalo. However, there are no white buffalo. They are black
until the hot sun of each season fades the black to brown, which later
sheds, to come out black again. When a buffalo hide is tanned on both
sides, it becomes white, which gives rise to the name White Buffalo.
They have but one name other than their tribal name. The name "squaw"
was first found in the language of the Naragansett tribe of Indians
and is doubtless an abbreviation of the word "Esquaw." Other tribes
have their own peculiar name for women. The name squaw came into
general use and spread all over the United States and Canada, was
carried to the western tribes of Indians by the whites, and was used
by all whites and all Indians. A squaw man is one who does a woman's
work, or a white man who marries an Indian woman.
A youth does not tell a maiden of his love for her. That is told and
answered by heart telepathy in the old, old way. He tells his father,
who calls his relatives to a council and a feast, to consider the
matter. Then the young man's mother carries the proposal to the mother
of the maid, who tells it to the girl's father, and a meeting is
called by him of his relatives and friends, where there is much
feasting and speaking. The two mothers then meet, and accept for their
children. The girl prepares a dish and carries it to the tent of the
young man daily as a token of her intention to serve him all her days.
When the tepee is ready, and the presents accumulated, and house
keeping begins, they are husband and wife, all the former
preliminaries having constituted the wedding ceremony.
An Indian never touches a razor to his face, for they are a beardless
race. The tribes who occupied the eastern part of the United States,
wore their hair clipped short like the Chinamen, excepting that
instead of a queue, there was a scalp lock which they adorned with
feathers. It was worn in defiance of the Indians of other tribes, who
were thus dared to come and take their scalp. The picturesque and
warlike appearance of the Indians that comes from painting their faces
with deep and varying hues, originated in the preservation of the skin
from burning and chapping in the sun and alkali dust. They used
compounds made from roots or earth which they ground or baked and
mixed with grease. There were many kinds of earth that had different
tints which they liked, so this became a permanent custom which made
their appearance seem fierce and warlike. They believe that the red
men are made of earth, and the white men are made of sea foam.
In surgery they had rude skill and in disease they had a limited
knowledge of the proper application of roots and herbs. But they knew
nothing of the science of medicine in its complicated form as
practiced by the learned of the profession at the present time, who so
thoroughly understand prophylaxis, serum therapy, and the role of
antibodies in passive immunization. Dentistry was unknown among them;
their simple food and outdoor lives kept them well, and the food they
ate was thoroughly ground between their well-preserved teeth. The game
that was formerly so abundant was their principal food, and its
destruction by the whites took from the Indian his chief mode of
existence, and occasioned his menacing attitude toward our people.
Other food consisted of wild berries, sweet potatoes, rice and nuts,
which they would gather and bury. As they had a practiced eye, they
found the buried food of the squirrel, the otter and the muskrat,
which they would dig up and appropriate to their own use.
[Illustration: "Behold, he winnoweth barley to-night in the threshing
floor." Ruth 3:2.
As they did in biblical times, so do some of the Indian tribes to this
day. They beat out the grain with a stick and then pour it out gently
for its cleansing by the wind.]
They mourn noisily with each other in case of death. Likewise did the
tribes of the patriarchs, who "mourned with great and very sore
lamentation." The Indians think that it takes four days for the soul
to reach the land of the dead. So a light burns on the grave nightly
for four nights, that the disembodied may not get lost. They believe
that there are two souls, one that soars away in dreams, while the
other remains in the body. In the absence of a clock in the wigwam and
a watch in the pocket, they measure time in their own way; a sun is a
day, a moon is a month, and a snow is a season.
It is said the "hand that rocks the cradle is the lever that moves the
world." If this be true, then the Indian mother takes no part in the
world's movement, for she never has rocked a cradle. The cradle of a
child is an oak board two and one-half feet long, and one and one-half
feet wide, to which the babe is strapped in a way that the arms and
legs are free for exercise and growth. This board lies on the ground,
leans against the wigwam or a tree, is carried on the mother's back,
or placed between tent poles like the shafts of a vehicle, to which a
pony or dog is attached, leaving two of the ends dragging on the
ground. The child is sometimes rocked by the wind when fastened high
up among the branches of the trees; and that is where the little song
comes from that the mother sings to her child to this day; "Rock-a-bye
baby in the tree-top; when the wind blows the cradle will rock."
The speeches of the Indians are always impressive. Their words are
simple and direct, and there were developed great orators among them
in the days when war between the tribes, and against the United States
prevailed. Some of the simple pleas which they made for the land of
their fathers, were as fine as could be produced by a higher education
and a finer civilization. When the French demanded of the tribe of the
Iroquois that they move farther back into the wilderness, the eloquent
reply of their Chief has been pronounced by Voltaire to be superior to
any sayings of the great men commemorated by Plutarch: "We were born
on this spot; our fathers were buried here. Shall we say to the bones
of our fathers, arise, and go with us into a strange land?"
The same cannot be said of the Indian literature. Here is one of their
classics: "Nike adiksk hwii draxzoq. Geipdet txanetkl wunax. Nike ia
leskl txaxkdstge. Nike lemixdet. La Leskl lemixdet, nike haeidetge."
Interpreted this means: "Then came the tribes. They ate it all the
food. Then they finished eating. Then they sang. When they finished
singing then they stopped." It is characteristic of the Indians for
their feasting to end when their food is all gone, and for their
singing to cease when it stops.
A century ago Malthus, in his great work on the "Principle of
Population," prophesied the extinction of the North American Indians.
His theory was, that subsistence is the sole governing cause in the
ebb and flow of the population of the world. That given pure morals,
simple living, and food to support the increase, the inhabitants of
any country would double every twenty-five years. He therefore
predicted that it was an inevitable law of nature that the Indians,
failing to take advantage of the bounties of nature, must of necessity
give way before the needs of an ever increasing population.
The Indian had the misfortune to have been improperly named. Columbus
had sailed over the trackless ocean for many days; water in front of
him, water behind him, to the right and to the left. He had gone so
far that finally when he anchored, he thought he had sailed entirely
around the world, and had come upon the eastern coast of the very
country he had left behind when he sailed west out of Spain. Believing
that he had reached the eastern coast of India, he called the Islands
where he landed the "West Indies," and the inhabitants thereof
"Indians."