# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI.
THE INDIANS UNDER CIVILIZATION.
“Extinction or civilization is the alternative for those of the Indian race living in the near future on our national domain.” It would be well-nigh as difficult to assign this oft-repeated sentence, as it would be one of our familiar proverbs, to an individual authority. All past experience, all practical wisdom for the present, all reasonable forecasting of what may be before us compel us to face the terms of that alternative. And even this limitation within two conditions comes to us prejudiced by the decision already reached by very many persons — it would be difficult to say whether a majority or a minority among us — who, satisfied that the Indians are incapable and intractable for the process of civilization, accept for them the doom of extinction as a race. This decision has been reached and avowed by many of the most eminent and humane of our statesmen during the whole century; it has been almost uniformly approved by our military men; it has been adopted by vast multitudes of those who have had the fullest and most intimate knowledge of Indian character and life. Whether those who hold this opinion or conviction follow it out in their own minds with the course of measures on the part of our Government and people which is to be engaged to verify it and to effect the result, must be left to inference. Those who reject and denounce this dismal decision as too abominable and hideous even for discussion, will of course insist that the civilization of the Indians is at all events ​from this year onward to be the solution of the problem that has so long vexed us. As to any indisposition of the Indians to submit to the process, any intractability or positive resistance to it on their part, the answer is, If civilization is not voluntary on their part it must be compulsory; and the whole force of the Government, arbitrary and irresistible if need be, must be engaged for a peaceful and rightful method, which in its severities will always stop short of the inhumanities of war. These are the leading statements which introduce our present subject. Not unfrequently, in place of the milder word extinction the sterner word extermination is boldly used to define the alternative fate of the Indians. The difference between the words hardly needs to be morally defined here. One may speak of the extinction of the Indians as a result which might follow from natural agencies, irresistible and not requiring any external force to insure it. Extermination implies the use of violent measures to effect it.
The Indian as a subject for civilization furnishes us a topic of profound and varied interest. It does so because it gathers up so many efforts, earnest but futile, for effecting the civilization of savages; because it has called forth such extreme differences of opinion among wise and good men; and, more than all, because, with the dread alternative of extinction or extermination, it suspends the inevitable destiny of the aboriginal race. The whites assume the arbitration on this issue, and do not leave preference or even the right of choice with the Indian. Over and over again civilization has been proffered to and urged upon tribes of Indians. The proffer seems, till quite recently, to have been considered by them with such intelligence as they have, to have been appreciated and weighed by them, and then deliberately rejected; yes, even in dispassionate and kind terms, and with reasons and arguments offered for declining the favor.
It seems but rarely to have occurred to civilized white ​people to consider whether the indisposition on the part of the savage to adopt our ways of life — instead of being wholly chargeable to ignorance, dulness, or indocility on his side — may not also indicate that our civilization is not in all respects a desirable or faultless thing. There may be in it qualifications and abatements of good which the Indian may detect, and which signify more to him than they do to us. At any rate, he considers himself rid of all class distinctions of the rich and poor, the humble and the privileged. The whole slavery of industry, toil, struggle, and rivalry for a living presents to him an uninviting aspect. More than this: if our modern communists, pleading for the removal of individual rights of property and the joint ownership of everything, are really the advanced and wise theorists which they claim to be, the Indians have long had the start of them in that matter. The Indians, too, might quote many pages of our own literature, if known to them, — essays, for instance, of Burke and Rousseau, — favoring the wilderness state as the natural and happy state for man. Nor is it at all to be wondered at, that not only idealists, but also some thoughtful, experienced, and practical persons, feeling the oppressive burdens of the social state under all the thickening and threatening problems which, once opened, are never disposed of, recur to former less advanced stages of human society as really preferable to our own. Some in this backward gaze rest simply with the pastoral, agricultural stage; others fondly seize on the charms and freedom of the wild hunter's life. The Indian, as we shall see, is more than content with the latter.
We have to note the very positive fact that civilization assumes as its prerogative the natural right to force itself upon people who do not ask for it nor want it, and who even refuse to receive it. We practise first upon animals, — wild cattle, parrots, and other creatures, — and tame and domesticate as many of them as possible. The horse, ​the camel, the dog, the elephant, and the domestic fowls yield to our will. We try our skill also on flowers, fruits, vegetables, and berries. As nations become powerful and learn to course the seas, they spy out the people of countries, continents, and islands, who, having long been left to themselves, have fallen into ways of their own. Then they assume the right “to open” (as they say) those countries and people to the daylight, to bring them into the comity of nations, to compel them into intercourse and commerce. So India, China, and Japan have been “opened,” and made to open their ports, to enter into consular arrangements, exchange commodities, etc. We quietly assume that if such places and people are civilized at all, their civilization is of a lower grade than ours. They do not invite us, nor welcome us. So much the worse for them. Do you wish to be civilized? Are you willing to be civilized? — are questions which civilized courtesy might prompt; but they are generally overlooked, and no alternative is allowed. And here would naturally come in a question which to some persons seems a very simple one: Why, on the broad and ample fields of this continent, whose larger expanses are still in a wild state, have not the red man and the white man consented to keep apart, leaving each other alone, each to his own preferred way of life? Why these three centuries of warfare, this pushing and resisting, these endless collisions, waking the echoes of mountain and valley with the enginery of battle, crimsoning every water-flow with blood, and strewing forest and plain with the bleaching bones of the unburied dead? The only answer to be given is, that civilization has the restlessness and working energy of leaven. Over and over again has the Indian, alike in peaceful council and in the barbarities of his warfare, asked the white man, “Why will you not leave us to ourselves? The Great Spirit once divided us by the ocean; having crossed that, nothing stops your pathway.” Yet we press and crowd them; it is the ​prerogative of civilization to do so. Indeed, we tell them that we prefer to have them as deadly enemies than as neighbors, unless they will become civilized. And what precisely do we mean by civilization as applied to them?
Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries have, as we have noticed, in all cases and in all their fields of labor among our Indians, differed radically and widely as to the character, quality, degree, and desirable ends of the sort of civilization which is to be aimed for, which is possible, of which the Indians might be capable, which they might be willing to comply with, and which ought to satisfy the whites. One of the most interesting and (so to speak) successful, and one of the most contented and happy, of the Indian missionaries of our own times, before mentioned, has been the excellent Jesuit Father De Smet, for more than a score of years roaming with and teaching the Flat Heads and other tribes between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, Oregon, and the Columbia River. Our Government has employed him as chaplain and peace-maker under General Harney. His reports and sketches present him to us as a man of infantile simplicity and guilelessness of heart, but a hero in zeal and spirit. He is so charmed with the docility and piety of his wild flock in their observance of his religious ceremonies that he gushes fondly over their full discipleship, and actually compares them to the primitive Christians. Yet there is among them no other very evident token of civilized ways. Doubtless he would say that they had all that was desirable for them in civilization; for what is civilization?
The main, the indispensable conditions of civilization are knowledge, art, and law. But these three great qualities and characteristics of an advanced social state are matters of degree, of more or less, of higher or lower. The Indian uses the knowledge that he has, and gets more as soon as he becomes aware of his ignorance. His art is adjusted to his needs, his uses, his materials, and resources. Usages, ​for him, take the place of laws; and he is, in a very positive and practical sense, a law to himself. The very first and strongest impulse towards progressive civilization which might be expected to manifest itself among savages who had partaken of some preparatory facilities and advantages from it would be naturally a craving for, an impatience to enjoy, more. But when these primary helps are at once accepted, and any further advances are stolidly and resolutely rejected, we are prompted to seek an explanation of the well-known fact. For it is a matter of curious observation that some instinctive impulse or fixed principle in the nature of a savage will lead him to make a ready selection between such tokens or implements of civilization as at once win his approval and those which he rejects with indifference, disdain, or aversion.
The term “civilization” and the state which it describes are, both of them, wholly arbitrary. It involves a question not only of more or less in its conditions, but of varieties in its type. There are various forms of civilization, — the Oriental and the Western, the Asiatic and the European. The rudest boors may not be without its range; and the excesses of luxury, conventionality, and ceremony in courtly circles prompt the use of the word “artificial” for the most advanced range of society. To the refined and cultivated the word “civilization” includes the conditions and surroundings and appliances of a finished elegance. To humble peasants, with rude and frugal and uncouth ways, civilization is not only possible but actual, as it may centre in their own fine feelings and good customs, independently of any lack or roughness in their surroundings. How arbitrarily the terms required for defining a state of civilization are used, may be noticed by a traveller or sojourner as he passes from a city to a rural, and then a frontier life, then to a forest camp, and then to the wild woods. He will be apt to say, at an early stage of his course, that he has got beyond the limits of civilization, and that he has fallen ​among men and women whose ways and habits are uncivilized. Amusing measurements and estimates have been drawn by some amateur travellers and adventurers, as if they had a scale of degrees towards the vanishing line of civilization; as, for instance, from one of our seaboard cities to the distant West. They measure and judge by the gradual disuse of, or the dispensing with, the appliances, conveniences, usages, manners, and decencies of civilized life. They mark on their scale the last hotel where boots are blacked, the last stage where white clothes are worn and washed, where people eat with knives and forks, where there comes into service one common washbowl and towel, comb and brush; and then the stage where one takes leave of these, exchanging crockery for a tin plate, and then for a chip, and the sole occupancy of a bed for bunking in groups or sleeping on skins in shanty, tent, or on the grass. Yet a group of civilized men and women might pass through all these vanishing appliances and decencies, and be forced to live henceforward in the lack of them, and still be civilized.
Our civilization is European, for that is our standard. It is of a peculiar elementary composition, and it bears the stamp and impress of centuries of development, in which the wilfulness, the idiosyncrasies, and the eccentricities of individuals have all been put into solution, tempered, restrained, and adjusted to a common average conventionalism.
When our European form of civilization, in its details and completeness, has been offered to the East Indians and the Turks, they do not adopt it. They prefer their own, which, so far as it differs from ours, is in our opinion so far lacking in civilization.
These suggestions may lead us to modify our expectations and demands as to the form and quality of the civilization which we may expect or exact of Indians. They must recognize, and then appreciate, the nature and ​recommendations of the change in their habits which we require of them. Yet, while we admit that free-will, desire, and effort are essential on their part to their accepting civilized ways, we must not go so far as to consent to dispense on our part with the use of constraint and force. The natural propensity of an Indian is to make himself more and more an Indian. He eats raw and bloody meat and entrails to stimulate his ferocity. He tortures himself, that he may enforce his daring and his power of enduring inflicted torture. He boasts and raves at the council-fire of his brutal and fiendish exploits. There are remnants of the six savage tribes which for nearly two hundred years, in the very heart of the State of New York, have preserved all the wild and heathen traits of their race, in spite of a considerable modification of nature among a part of them.
In the course of remark which is now to be followed let it be understood and allowed for at the start, that there are humane and hopeful friends of the Indians, philanthropists, earnest advocates of the peace policy towards them, who strongly dissent from the views and the conclusions to be stated here, frankly even if offensively, as those of the vast majority among us. The dissent of the minority from these generally prevailing views and conclusions, and the grounds of the dissent shall not fail of recognition by-and-by. Doubtless there will be those who will object to having set before them what they will pronounce to be the cruel and hateful judgment of inhuman persons who foredoom the Indians to extinction. But this aversion will indicate ignorance and prejudice, which do not desire real information as to opinions actually held by others.
If I am competent to infer from the mass of what I have read, the consenting opinion and judgment of the very large majority of men of actual knowledge and practical experience of the mature Indians is that they cannot be civilized, — that the race must perish either by violence or decay. The final catastrophe, it is said, has been forecast, ​prepared for, and is steadily advancing to its dismal close. Often have we had presented to us in the pathetic rhetoric of the orator, the well-wrought verse of the poet, and the sad-colored canvas of the painter, the vision of “the last Indian jumping into eternity towards the setting sun.” The only qualification, and that grudgingly and feebly uttered, of the certainty and sweep of this fate is that there may be a remnant left, of a degraded and enervated kinship, representing not the Indian, but a poor specimen of humanity.
In a few years hence we are told that our aborigines can be studied only by their skulls in our museums. The basis of this conviction as to the fate of the Indian is that he cannot be civilized, and that he cannot exist in contact with civilization. This belief, it is insisted, has been fairly and decisively reached, as the result of full experiment and experience. More than this is urged. For we are reminded that this assurance that the Indian cannot be civilized is not a prejudgment, not a bias against him from the first, not a resource for excusing, justifying, or comforting ourselves under the compunctions for our wrong treatment of the Indians. On the contrary, the belief, it is said, has been forced on us against our wills, against actual prejudgments on the other side, and comes to us certified and sadly and disappointingly confirmed by the thwarting of all our best and most patient and costly labors and efforts in behalf of the race. There once were hopefulness, earnestness, enthusiasm, lofty expectations of what might be done and realized by reclaiming, civilizing, educating, and Christianizing the noble savage. The most heroic and holy zeal of saintly men and women, the ingenious schemes and devices of benevolent souls and societies, have gone into the work, with the combined efforts and treasures of Government. And all in vain.
So the conviction which dooms the Indian claims to be supported by full experimental, largely varied, and ​multiplied efforts for him, all thwarted; and it is also said to have forced itself upon candid and disappointed minds as a substitute for quite a different hope and belief about him. Searched down to its roots, this conviction plants itself on the assertion that there is in the heredity and the organization and birth-type of an Indian, in his tissue and fibre, in his elementary make-up, in his aptitudes, limitations, disabilities, proclivities, and drift of nature, a constitution which assigns him to savagism, and bars his transformation to a civilized state. In these respects he has qualities inherent, congenital, ineradicable, answering to those respectively of stock animals in the field and wild animals in the jungle; qualities like those which are specific and distinctive between fruit and forest trees, wild shrubs and berries, which lose their flavor under cultivation. The principles and the subtlest methods of physiological science are drawn upon to illustrate and account for this congenital quality of the Indian. There goes with the black hair, the high cheek bones, the tinted skin, the germinal cell and tissue of the race, an impregnated destiny in development which perpetuates itself in all generations.
“The Indian naturally detests civilization,” is the general and emphatic statement of those who have authority to utter positive opinions on the subject. The statement may be admitted as fully warranting the belief, that, while the barbaric and savage element is predominant in an Indian, he will hate and fret against civilization.
I will begin by admitting that the Indian yields to, and has reasons for, this hostility. And we may be sure of this, too, that the better acquainted a wild Indian became with our civilization, the more he would detest it. If the Indian could learn and see and know the secrets and shadows of a civilized state, in crowded cities and close communities, the less would he feel inclined to prefer it to his own tribal forest life.
We are apt quietly to take for granted not only what is ​most true, — the immense preponderance in gain and good of every kind in a highly civilized state over barbaric life in the wild woods, — but also to infer an absolute, complete, and exclusive blessing in the former. But civilization is not all gain and blessing, certainly not to every one living under it. An intelligent and able reasoner might keep himself within the most rigid conditions of sober truth and full experience in arguing for this plain statement: that it is the direct tendency of our form of civilization to carry human beings towards one extreme as far beyond the simple elements of happiness and every form of good as savage life falls short of them. We may leave fancy idealists to attempt to prove, with Rousseau, that the savage state is the natural and preferable state for man; but we must allow the drawbacks of civilization, — especially such as to an Indian would be most odious, — to the estimates and habits of even a remarkably enlightened savage. Unable as such a savage would be to off-set the obvious evils and blights of civilization by a deep inner discernment and appreciation of its sum of blessings, he might even be moved to plead earnestly with us to induce us to revert to the state of Nature. Civilization, in every example of it as yet ever known in the world's history, has always involved, for a portion of every community, ignorance, subjection, poverty, and repulsive menial services. And though the highest class in advancement, intelligence, culture, refinement, and virtue are the salt and salvation of the whole community, it would not be easy to decide whether civilization could more safely part with its most privileged or its most humble class. Of course in his stage and by his standard of intelligence the savage would make his estimates by contrast, would compare what he sees of the aspects and habits of civilization with his own wonted views and ways. With him all that he needs for life, occupation, resource, subsistence, is wholly free, — all at large, unclaimed, not even to be labored for, save for such effort ​and motion as in hunting, which is a form of pleasure. He goes to his free market in the wilderness for all supplies, as the thrifty farm-wife goes to hunt eggs in the hay-loft. But in civilization he finds food, clothing, fuel, dwelling, even air and water, all claimed as owned by somebody, and all under cost. The rows of shops amaze him. There is so much to be sold, so many sellers and so many buyers, and there is so much mysterious virtue in the current coin, and the way of getting it, and the embarrassment of being without it. The policemen, to say nothing of lawyers, are another bewilderment. The paraphernalia of wealth and the miseries of poverty are equally amazing to him. In his own home and surroundings, as we have said, the Indian needs free acres, a generous expanse of say four square miles for his way of life. The densest region in London has 175,000 human beings in one square mile, and on the same area in the Fourth Ward of New York it is reported that 290,000 are crowded together. And what would the Indian say to an exchange of residences? What, too, about the hospitals, the court houses, the penitentiaries, the jails of our communities? There may be heartaches and woes in savage life. But what are they to the crushing miseries, the despairing burdens, the intolerable loads of wretchedness which are directly generated by the sterner conditions of life in crowded communities.
During the period of French colonization in Canada the return ships often took to France many Indians. Some of them, after sight and knowledge of civilized scenes, ways, and pleasures, were brought back to Canada. They may be regarded as competent judges and critics as we could have for comparing by experience and natural preferences the two states, wild and civilized. In every case their decision was for their own mode of life. La Hontan follows interviews of this sort with travelled and returned savages into details, and he makes them keen and able pleaders for the savage state, sharp critics of the slavery and ​drudgery of civilization, of the greed of money, of class distinctions, of social rivalry, of avarice, family quarrels, rebellious and dissipated children, false estimates of true manhood. La Hontan, it is true, was a volatile romancer; but if he personated both parties in his dialogues, he used very pertinent and forcible pleas consistent with either party in the conferences. We shall read before we close this chapter some veritable judgments pronounced by savages, giving us the grounds of their preference of their own way of life.
The discouraging view of the whole problem presented in the failure thus far of all attempts to bring the Indian race under civilization has been stated in its full force, with all the facts and evidence by which it is supported. Are we, therefore, to accept it, to acquiesce in it, and so to look only to the decay, the wasting away, the extinction of the original occupants of this continent as an inevitable decree of fate?
It would be fatal to the interests and prospects of humanity, it would discredit the quality and work of our own civilization, if we should commit ourselves to that forlorn conclusion. However discouraging, or, as some may say, hopeless, quixotic, and even absurd, the attempt may be, we are bound to plan and act and labor as if we were sure of success in the purpose that in years to come the Indian race shall be represented here in blood and vigor by an element in our most advanced civilization. We are not to recognize failure. We are to refer all our discomfitures to our own blunders, and to institute a new trial with all the hopefulness which belongs to a first one. If all the forces of our own civilization and Christianity, backed by the pleadings and helps of a common humanity, cannot compass the reclaiming and uplifting from barbarism of an issue from the Indian stock, we may well own ourselves humbled. We may ask whether we are likely to perpetuate our own civilization, if we have not the power ​to impart and extend it. Cannot civilization civilize? If it be a severely hard task to impart civilization to a wild race, let us remember what a constant struggle and effort, with all ingenious and complicated appliances, are needed in order that we may keep our civilization. A civilized community, apprehending its fearful risks and perils, does not grudge the task and toil, the watchfulness and the anxiety needful to perpetuate it. Is it much harder to increase and extend it than it is to preserve what we have? Nor must we be disheartened or borne down by the tone of ridicule which may be used in the way of presenting our own Government with all grave tasks of administration for our own people, in its home and foreign relations, as assuming the training and educating in all forms of industry of a horde of savages. There will be more loss of honor and dignity to our country — vastly more of demoralization and peril — to be risked in looking on, even indifferently and without actually aiding in the process, as an aboriginal race comes to extinction before our eyes.
The opportunities, inducements, and facilities which have been offered to the Indian for accepting civilization, and which have always so pointedly failed to win him to it, deserve notice here, for they have much significance. When a group of wild chieftains and braves from the forests or the Western plains has been guided through our civilized country to hold a talk with the President at Washington and to be made spectacles of in our cities, they may well have been dazed, confounded, appalled, by the full significance of civilization, and utterly bereft of any sense of capacity or desire for what is so hopelessly out of their reach, so contrasted with their own rude ways. The panting steamer, the thundering locomotive by which they make stages of their route, the ingenious, complicated, and cumbrous devices of the white man, his refined habits of dress and eating, the noisy pavements, the crowded shops and ware-houses, the thick throng of the streets, the varied ​industries, the sometimes repulsive tasks, the rush and turmoil and fever of life, may so overwhelm and distract the savage as to persuade him that civilization is not for him either to accomplish or to share, and, like all of his race who have come on such errands and seen such sights, he longs to get back to the woods again. If the Indians were not radically unlike the white man in the matter of curiosity and speculation, the report by these braves on their return to their tribes of what they had seen in their strange journeyings would cause a rush of most of the men and women too into our cities, such as would appall us. Yet the returned visitors excite no such curiosity, nor do the white man's ways raise discontent or jealousy in the description.
But it is not in this overwhelming, distracting way that civilization from the first and always has offered its inducements, attractions, and facilities to the Indians. It has presented itself to them in its simpler, more facile, and elementary forms and methods. The first European colonization here in patches of the wilderness, and in each successive stage of its advance through our inner belts and borders, was made by men who, save that they had with them a few tools and implements, were in all outward respects very much on a level with the Indians themselves as to conditions, circumstances, and means of life. The Indians first saw civilization in its inchoate, elemental stages. The early white settlers were glad even to help out their wardrobes with the skins which the Indian wore; to learn from him how to plant and dress corn, how to hunt and trap, how to penetrate the wilderness and to make themselves comfortable. The Indian had, and has had, continually before him the examples of poor, rude white men and women, amid the simplest, the earliest, and the roughest processes of civilization; not ladies and gentlemen, in ceiled houses, costly apparel, with servants and equipages, with furnished kitchens and luxurious tables, but plain ​yeomanry, getting used to wilderness life before they could secure a single means for a better one. The first cabins of the whites were no better than those of the Indian; their food, their drink, fire, exposure to all risks were the same, save, as has been said, that the white man had a few metal tools and implements, not forgetting, however, that he had also something in his skull, and in his Saxon spirit, which the Indian had not.
The Indian witnessed, wondered over, or was disgusted by every successive act by which the white man, as we say, improved his condition. He saw him cut down trees and build a lodge: the Indian had seen the beavers do that, and build a dam over a water-course beside. The Indian saw the white man cut down more trees, make a clearing for planting and fencing, using boards and timber for his second house instead of bark. Then came the saw-mill and the grist-mill. Then a brood of chickens appeared around the shanty; then the cow, which had a strange resemblance to the familiar buffalo, save that milk and butter came from her, which the Indians might have got from the buffalo, but had not thought of. Then the Indian saw the white man using salt for preserving food, which he had never done. And day by day, and year by year, as the savage visited the white man's cabin or framed house, his fenced fields and flower-gardens, he saw something new and cunning and useful, not costly, nor ostentatious, nor intricate, nor perplexing, but simple, contrived, adapted to make more out of everything than the savage had done. So tentative, elemental, and easy of imitation have been the signs and processes by which civilization has offered itself to our Indians on the frontiers for nearly three hundred years.
And what has been the effect on the savages of these seemingly prompting, soliciting, tempting, we might even say provoking, examples, — silent, winning, and simple lessons, — given him by the white man? The effect has been ​almost entirely the direct opposite of what we should have looked for. Beads, needles, trinkets, very soon became objects of desire by the squaws. The white man's gun and knife and metal kettle, his fire-water and his horse and his woollen blanket, had the same attraction for the wild warrior. But as to everything done or gained by the white man which required industry, toil, labor, he would have none of it, — the thing was not worth its cost. He looked on with a contempt which smothered his curiosity. The white man was a squaw. Perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of an Indian is that he never could be made into a slave. But the most discouraging thing about him is his enslaving himself to himself.
Admitting the generally asserted and acknowledged fact that the Indian has so often, if not in all cases, so dismally disappointed the expectations of what he would or might be as the result of efforts made in his behalf under some processes and stages of civilization, the fact may help us to form more correct views of his actual place on the scale of humanity and of his natural endowments. Much of our disappointment over the failure of efforts for him may be accounted to the fancy into which we had been led by previous false estimates of his latent nature, — to imagine that under the limitations and disablings of his wilderness growth there was a nobleness of being, a wealth of innate and repressed capacity; that he was at the core and potentially a high type of man. We knew that he had the virtues of self-reliance, pride of nature, high self-estimate, courage, fortitude, and a command of the resources of the forest and the wilderness. These qualities we regarded as similar to those presented by the unsightly and rude ores in our mines, in our varied minerals, and in the woods of our forests, — admitting through the smelting process, the grinding, the polishing, the tempering, and the cunning work of hand and brain, of being turned to grand and varied products of use and beauty. So we thought that ​the man of the wilderness would, within his range, develop his wealth and capacity of being under training, example, and civilization. He would give us a new style of man, — one born for something better than mere toil, whose conceit or pride would turn to real dignity, and whose acute and cunning instincts would avail for high and keen insight, intelligence, art, and science.
So it has not proved. The savage is really a nobler, a more impressive, a more interesting, and (so to speak) a more capable being in his native than in his civilized state. He does not gain by civilization: he loses by it. The very nobleness which shows in him in the woods, his reserve, his taciturnity, his suppression of feeling, — all disappear under social subjection to white men. His mental gaze, which seemed to be withdrawn or concentrated, now seems wholly vacant and disappears. His special faculties and aptitudes fail because he has no use for them. He despises what we estimate most highly. Our appliances and comforts are a fret and torment to him. He generally becomes abject and mean, like the beast of the woods or the jungle in a menagerie.
There is a remnant, a trace, of savagery — sometimes even a very large and positive ingredient of it — actively present in individual persons under the highest civilization. In this respect, after all that the elevating and refining influences which, through generations struggling upward from barbarism, have done to remove us from primitive rudeness, we none the less may find a parallel in some of our surviving instincts and propensities to manifestations observable in tamed and domesticated animals. Squirrels, birds, and many other pets, born and hatched in their cages, are seen to do things which would be perfectly proper and of use to them in their native, free state which are wholly out of place, aimless, and ridiculous in their artificial condition. The pet dog by our firesides will be seen to turn himself quickly round and round before lying down ​on the soft rug. This act seems to come from a reminiscence of an ancestral condition under which, having something less comfortable than a rug to lie upon, he had to make sure of a tolerably smooth couch by circling around it. Many and significant are the acts and promptings of human beings — ladies and gentlemen — which Darwin would tell us indicate reversionary tendencies in us.
Very much more might be suggested on this point; and if we should follow up the hint just dropped into details, it would open for us matter of curious interest. One fact bearing closely upon it may in the mention of it draw response from many of us. What healthful boy, born in city or country, has ever among us grown to manhood, and then lived in the toil and hurry and restraint of civilization, without feeling at some time the reversionary impulse or instinct towards barbarism in the form of a wild, free life, — of “camping out” (as it is called) in a tent in the woods or the meadow, or on the beach, or at least of making a fire in the woods? Year by year this impulse manifests itself among our young and healthful people, and even poor, wasted invalids are drawn by it to bivouacs in the Adirondack region. One or more generations of our ancestors in the Old World were born and nursed, and lived and were buried in the wilderness. Our first ancestors on this soil were compelled to conform themselves to a wilderness life, and some of its conditions passed down to their lineage. So we have reversionary instincts for it. Hardy and enterprising men there are who annually visit us from Europe (gentlemen, nobles), who, well aware what they must leave behind them, come here and seek the farthest wilds of the red men, in rocky fastnesses or in valleys amid dreary plains, and conform themselves to all the rough and repulsive and filthy conditions of life among the Indians, — in clothing, bed, and board, in the tramp, the hunt, the chase, the dreary winter desolation with the thermometer deep below zero. More frequently among us this ​reversionary instinct stirs a couple or a group of young men, for a summer change, to go for an interval into some primitive spot and try to live awhile as the Indians lived, repudiating the effeminacies of civilization. True, there is often an intrusion of that ubiquitous quality which we bluntly call “humbug” in these restorations of savagery. If we looked sharply into the equipments of some of these camping-out and tenting trampers, we should detect certain suspicious appliances which the Indians never carried with them, in fact never had, — the comfortable India-rubber blanket, for dew and rain, and rest on the damp earth; the salt and other condiments; the pork firkin, the canned meats, and certain cases which need to be “handled with care.” Yet these campers — perhaps carrying with them the works of their patron saint Thoreau — persuade themselves that they have got nearer to the lap and nursing bosom of Mother Nature; that they like game flavors, the smoky smell of food cooked in ashes, to see the sun rise after they are up; and when they have deigned to conform to civilized ways again, and have had a bath, put on their “store-clothes,” and lunched at some luxurious restaurant, they will tell you that “the Indians do not have such a bad time of it after all.” So far goes the reversionary instinct of civilized man back to barbarism. An occasional draught of milk at the farmhouses on their way has preserved these campers-out from a thorough and hopeless relapse to savagery. If from exhaustion under the fretting tasks, and sometimes from vexation and disgust under the shams and frivolities of conventional life, there is a strange zest which might even be prolonged beyond a temporary trial in this reversion to the rude simplicities of existence, we cannot wonder that the mature savage prefers the condition into which he was born.
Much to the point it is in connection with the Indian's aversion from civilization to note this fact of which the evidence is varied and abounding, and has been accumulating ​for three centuries: a vastly larger number of white men and women have been barbarized by contact and life with the Indians than there ever have been of Indians won to civilized ways. The tendency of single white persons when living for any considerable time with the Indians to conform to and adopt their habits, is not only natural, but often unavoidable and irresistible. Besides the charms and license of release from all conventionalities, the throwing off of all artificial and galling restraints, the very necessities of the case compel this conformity. Toilet arrangements, garb, dress, food, and the ways of cooking and eating it are matters in which one has at once to part with all squeamishness. So also whether sleep be found in the open air, or round the camp-fire, or in a crowded and filthy lodge, with humanity, dogs, smoke, and vermin, the frontiersman, the trapper or hunter, already used to rough and coarse ways, becomes very soon a full conformist. And those who have been wonted to finer and cleanlier usages, even to luxuries, yield to the influences of scene, condition, and company. Our own army officer, Captain Bonneville, who found in Irving a sympathetic editor for his journal across the continent, yielded himself to this outburst: —
“He who like myself has roved almost from boyhood among the children of the forest, and over the unfurrowed plains and rugged heights of the Western States, will not be startled to learn, that, notwithstanding all the fascinations of the world on this civilized side of the mountains, I would fain make my bow to the splendors and gayeties of the metropolis, and plunge again amidst the hardships of the wilderness.”
The captain and others try to persuade us that there are even delicacies in Indian cookery, though of course the wilderness appetite brought to them is a stimulating sauce. We read of some of these Rocky Mountain delicacies to which it may be well to call the attention of our city ​epicures and caterers. They are happily for the most part root-food, such as the kamask, about the size of an onion, said to be delicious; the courish, or biscuit-root, the size of a walnut, and which is reduced to flour; the jaekap, the aisish, the quako, etc.
Instances innumerable there are on record from the pens of cultivated men, who, in their intercourse with the Indians in their wild, free life, became so fascinated with it and perhaps demoralized by its license, that they have substantially avowed with Baron La Hontan, “The manners of the savages are perfectly agreeable to my palate.”
The Earl of Dunraven, having resided with the Absaruka, or Crows, presents the following summary of his views of the Indians in general: —
“However degrading their religion may be, I doubt if a change ever is morally beneficial to a savage race. Roman Catholicism suits the red men best, with its spiritualism in some respects so like their own; its festivals and fasts at stated times, resembling their green-corn dances and vigils; with its prayers and intercessions for the dead, its ceremonial, its good and evil spirits, its symbolism, its oblations, its little saints and medals. The red Indian does not see such a great difference between the priest and the medicineman. It is a difference of degree, not of kind; and, if backed by a little pork and flour, he is apt to look upon the cross and medal as greater talismans than claws of beasts and bits of rag and skin, and to think that the missionary makes stronger medicine than his priest. The dry, cold philosophy of the Methodist finds little favor with an imaginative race worshipping the Great Spirit in the elements and in all the forms and forces of Nature; thanking the Principle of Good for success in hunting and in war; propitiating the Evil Principle that brings the deep snows, ice, fever, starvation, shadows of the night, thunder-storms, and ghosts. To the Indians mind there is nothing intrinsically good or desirable in the doctrines of the various Christian sects; nor is there anything whatever in our mode of living or in our boasted civilization to prepossess him in favor of the religion of the white race. These red-skinned savages have no respect whatever for the pale faces, — men whose thoughts, feelings, occupations, and pastimes are ​entirely at variance with their own. Aliens they are to us in almost all things. Their thoughts run in a different channel; they are guided so much more by instinct than by reasoning. They have a code of morals and of honor differing most materially from ours. They attach importance to matters so trifling in our eyes, are gratified or offended by such insignificant details, are guided through life by rules so much at variance with our established methods, that it is impossible for us to foresee what, under particular circumstances, their conduct will be. They are influenced by feelings and passions which we do not in the least understand, and cannot therefore appreciate. They show reverence to superstitions and religious ceremonies which we, knowing nothing whatever about them, declare at once to be utterly foolish and absurd; and they attach much importance to observances which seem to us almost as utterly meaningless and ridiculous as many of the doctrines preached by our missionaries must appear to them.
“White men who have dwelt all their lives with the Indians have to confess that they know very little about their inner lives, and understand nothing of the hidden springs of action and of the secret motives that impel them to conduct themselves in the strange and inexplicable manner they sometimes do. . . .
“We regard them as cowards, lacking bravery; they regard the bull-dog courage of the whites as fool-hardiness. A life is very valuable to them; hence it is that they admire the man who can creep, and watch, and lie out for days and nights in bitter cold and snow, without food or warmth, and who, by infinite patience, cool courage, and a nice calculation of chances, secures a scalp or a lot of horses without risk to himself; but who, if he found circumstances unfavorable and the odds against him, would return without striking a blow. That is the man they look up to.
“In our great cities they see just enough to degrade the inhabitants in their eyes. They can learn nothing of the blessings and advantages attendant on civilization. They see the worst only. . . . He is free, and he knows it; we are slaves, bound by chains of our own forging, — and he sees that it is so. Could he but fathom the depths of a great city, and gauge the pettiness, the paltry selfishness of the inhabitants, and see the deceit, the humbug, the lying, the outward swagger and the inward cringing, the toadyism and the simulated independence; could he but view the lives that might have been honorably passed, spent instead in struggling for and ​clutching after gold, and see the steps by which many a respected man has climbed to fortune, wet with the tears of ruined men and women; could he appreciate the meanness of those who consider no sacrifice of self-respect too great provided it helps them to the end and object of their lives, and pushes them a little higher, as they are pleased to call it, in society; could he but glance at the millions of existences spent in almost chronic wretchedness, lives that it makes one shudder to think of, years spent in close alleys and back slums, up dismal, rotting courts, — without sun, ray, air, grass, flower, of beautiful Nature, — with surroundings sordid, dismal, debasing; if he could note how we have blackened and disfigured the face of Nature, and how we have polluted our streams and fountains so that we drink sewage instead of water; could he but see that our rivers are turned to drains and flow reeking with filth, and how our manufactures have so impregnated the air we breathe that grass will not grow exposed to the unhealthy atmosphere, — could he but take all this in and be told that such is the outcome of our civilization, he would strike his open palm upon his naked chest and thank God that he was a savage, uneducated and untutored, but with air to breathe and water to drink; ignorant, but independent; a wild but a free man”
Another sympathizer with the Indian mode of life expresses himself thus: —
“I saw so much harmless fun and amusement among these Indians [a fishing party], and they evidently find so much enjoyment in hunting and fishing, that I could only wish they might never see much of the white man, and never learn the baneful habits and customs he is sure to introduce.”
A scientific English gentleman who had passed a year of wild life near the Rocky Mountains thus describes his disinclination to return to civilized restraints. Reaching St. Louis, he says: —
“I that night, for the first time for nearly ten months, slept upon a bed, much to the astonishment of my limbs and body, ​which, long accustomed to no softer mattress than mother earth, tossed about all night, unable to appreciate the unusual luxury. I found chairs a positive nuisance, and in my own room caught myself in the act, more than once, of squatting cross-legged on the floor. The greatest treat to me was bread; I thought it the best part of the profuse dinners of the Planter's House, and consumed prodigious quantities of the staff of life, to the astonishment of the waiters. Forks, too, I thought were most useless superfluities, and more than once I found myself on the point of grabbing a tempting leg of mutton mountain fashion, and butchering off a hunter's mouthful. But what words can describe the agony of squeezing my feet into boots, after nearly a year of moccasons, or discarding my turban for a great boardy hat, which seemed to crush my temples! The miseries of getting into a horrible coat — of braces, waistcoat, gloves, and all such implements of torture —” etc.
To the same effect — as showing the reversionary tendencies and proclivities of many whites for barbarism, and as encouraging the Indian in casting the balance against civilization — is to be noted a fact which has had a very painful significance in many saddened affections. As soon after the settlement of this country as the savages learned in their constant border raids on the whites that they could get a ransom price in money or goods for captives, they, in many cases, spared from torture and death young persons, and women first, and then men, whom they carried back with them to their haunts. From time to time arrangements were made with them for the exchange of prisoners and the redemption of captives. Then in very many cases it was found to the dismay of parents and friends that even young girls, as well as males, who had lived with the Indians for quite a short time, — a year or two, — were so fascinated with their new ways as to be utterly averse to return to their homes and kindred in civilized scenes. There was something in the wild life and its ​companionships, the deep forests, the alternate excitement and tranquillity of the lodges, which wrought a spell over young persons. In the settlements, sparsely spread or formed into villages at that period, household life had much drudgery, very little abandon or amusement, a rigid domestic and religious discipline, under which the buoyancy of youth often fretted, longing for change or relief. Farm labor and home tasks, from early day till night, restraint upon youthful gayety, and cheerless views of the years to come showed strong contrasts to those of restless and adventurous spirits with the Indian's free range. Our records and literature, beginning with the first negotiations with the savages for the return of prisoners for a ransom down to quite recent years, are filled with illustrative instances of this fact. Some of the cases are very touching ones. Colden tells us how difficult it often was to persuade white prisoners in the hands of the French and Indians to accept a proffered restoration to their friends. Some of them, on hearing they were to be carried back to the settlements, would run off and hide in the woods till the peril was over. Here is a scene described by Colden, when some prisoners were brought in: —
“No argument, no entreaties, no tears of their friends and relatives could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian friends and acquaintances. Several of them that were, by the caressings of their relatives, persuaded to come home, in a little time grew tired of our manner of living, and ran away again to the Indians and ended their days with them. On the other hand, Indian children have been carefully educated among the English, clothed and taught, yet not one, when come to age and at liberty, but what returned to their race and mode of life again” (p. 203).
Take as an instance a story of profound interest here nearly two hundred years ago. The town of Deerfield, Mass., was set upon and burned by the French and Indians in the depth of winter, February, 1704. Of the inhabitants, forty-seven were killed and about one hundred taken prisoners, ​to pursue the long tramp of three hundred miles to Canada. Among them was the minister, Mr. Williams, and his family. His exhausted wife fell a victim to the hatchet on the second day of the dreary journey. He himself, and fifty-six other captives, were redeemed in 1706 and brought to Boston. Many remained by preference in Canada with the Indians. Among these was his daughter, Eunice Williams. No persuasions or entreaties of her father could induce her to return. She was converted by a priest, married a savage, and passed a long and contented life as the mistress of a wigwam. After the peace, she, with her red husband, visited her friends and father in Deerfield, in full Indian dress, was kindly received, but would not stay.
Another wildly romantic narrative is that of Mary Jemison, known among the Indians as the “White Woman.” Her father, mother, two brothers, a sister, and other relatives were all murdered by the Indians in 1755, on their frontier farm in Pennsylvania, and she alone, at the age of thirteen, was allowed to live as a captive. Within two years she had an opportunity to join the whites. But her Indian mother and sister, by adoption, treated her kindly, and she preferred to stay with them. Through the remainder of her life, protracted to ninety-one years, — living on the Genesee river, and naturalized that she might hold land-property, and thrown into frequent contact with the whites, — she preferred to live like and to be an Indian, surviving two savage husbands (kind to her, but fiends in ferocity) and five children, leaving three more at her death.
Thus not only the natives of the forest, but equally so — and under circumstances which have presented a very striking lesson to observers — white persons of various ages and of both sexes not only reconcile themselves of necessity to barbarous life, but by preference yearn with strong proclivities to enjoy it, feeling it a cross to natural inclinations to accept or to return to civilization. We may not marvel ​at this manifestation in mature Indians. But it seems to run in the blood of their little children. Two inferences seem naturally to follow from the fact: first, that any hopeful work in the civilization of the Indians must satisfy itself with effecting its results with the third generation from the present full-grown stock; and, second, that we must be content with accepting fragments, degrees, and stages of full civilization, as all that we are likely ever to realize in those of Indian blood.
A good illustrative case of Indian diplomacy in meeting that of civilization is found in the full reports given to us of a Council held on several successive days in July, 1742, at Philadelphia, for the cession of territory, between the representative chiefs of the Six Nations and the officers of Penn's Proprietary Government, — George Thomas, being lieutenant-governor.
Six years previous, the chiefs in council had agreed to release their claim to a certain extent of territory on both sides of the Susquehanna River, within the province, for a stipulated amount of Indian goods. The contract was then completed as regards the lands on the eastern side of the river, and half of the goods were paid over, as the chiefs declined at that time to receive the other portion for the lands on the western side. The goods were in the store-house of the proprietor awaiting them on another visit. This was made on the date above mentioned, when the rest of the contract was to be ratified. The proceedings were deliberate and protracted. Pains were taken to write down the almost unpronounceable names — as lavish in vowels as Russian and Polish names are in consonants — of some hundred of the Indian representatives. The list of the goods was read, including forty-five guns, powder, lead, blankets, hats, coats, hatchets, knives, various small articles, and twenty-five gallons of rum. The leading Indian speaker, Canassateego, chief of the Onondagoes, said of the goods proffered: —
​“It is true, we have the full Quantity according to Agreement; but if the Proprietor had been here himself we think, in regard of our Numbers and Poverty, he would have made an Addition to them. If the Goods were only to be divided amongst the Indians present, a single Person would have but a small Portion; but if you consider what Numbers are left behind, equally entitled with us to a share, there will be extremely little. We therefore desire, if you have the Keys of the Proprietor's Chest, you will open it and take out a little more for us. “We know our Lands are now become more valuable. The White People think we do not know their value; but we are sensible that the Land is everlasting, and the few Goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone. For the future we will sell no Lands but when Brother Onas [Penn] is in the Country, and we will know beforehand the Quantity of the Goods we are to receive. Besides, we are not well used with respect to the Lands still unsold by us. Your People daily settle on these Lands and spoil our Hunting. We must insist on your removing them. . . . It is customary with us to make a Present of Skins whenever we renew our Treaties. We are ashamed to offer our Brethren so few, but your Horses and Cows have eat the Grass our Deer used to feed on,” etc.
The Governor said in reply: —
“In answer to what you say about the Proprietaries, they are all absent, and have taken the keys of their chest with them; so that we cannot, on their behalf, enlarge the quantity of goods. Were they here, they might perhaps be more generous, but we cannot be liberal for them.”
He promises, however, that the Government will consider the matter with a view to a further present. But he reminds them that the moiety of territory now ceded is, by their own estimate, less valuable than the other portion, though the proprietor overlooked this in awarding the goods. He adds: —
“It is very true that lands are of late become more valuable; but what raises their value? Is it not entirely owing to the industry and labor used by the white people in their cultivation and improvement? Had they not come amongst you, these lands would ​have been of no use to you any further than to maintain you. And is there not, now you have sold so much, enough left for all the purposes of living? What you say of the goods — that they are soon worn out — is applicable to everything; but you know very well that they cost a great deal of money, and the value of land is no more than it is worth in money.”
When the Governor said that magistrates had been sent to remove the trespassers on their lands, the chief interrupted him with the stinging censure, which has not lost its point or truth to this very year as applied to similar officials sent by our Government year by year for like purposes: “These persons who were sent did not do their duty. So far from removing the people, they made surveys for themselves, and they are in league with the trespassers. We desire more effectual methods may be used and honester persons employed.”
Quite a valuable present in goods — more than half in quantity to those of the stipulated payment — was given to the Indians. It was very evident that their orators managed their side of the case ably, and that they had their fair half of the argument. The Indians readily admitted that cultivation added to the value of lands for such uses as the white men had for them. But they were by no means disposed to allow that the only value of lands was that given to them by cultivation. Such cultivation spoiled lands for the Indians' uses. They preferred the growths which Nature raised upon them, — the wild fruits, the deer and game, and the uncleared forest, and the undammed stream. The contrast was fully in their view; they preferred Nature — their old mother, nurse, and companion — to Art.
Gachradadow, a chief of the Six Nations, in a Council at Lancaster, Pa., June, 1744, thus addressed the Governor of Virginia: —
“Brother Assaragoa! The World at the first was made on the other side of the Great Water different from what it is on this side, ​as may be known from the different colors of our Skin and of our Flesh; and that which you call Justice may not be so amongst us: you have your Laws and Customs, and so have we. The Great King might send you over to conquer the Indians, but it looks to us that God did not approve of it; if he had, he would not have placed the Sea where it is, as the Limits between us and you. . . . You know very well when the White People came first here they were poor; but now they have got our Lands, and are by them become rich, and we are now poor; what little we have had for the Land goes soon away, but the Land lasts forever.”
The Governor having told the Indians that the English had recently beat the French in a war on sea and land, the chief said: “You tell us you beat the French; if so, you must have taken a great deal of Rum from them, and can the better spare us some of that Liquor, to make us rejoice with you in the victory.” The Governor and Commissioners ordered a dram of rum to be given to each in a small glass, calling it a French glass.
The great object of this Council, after settling cessions of territory in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, was to pledge the Six Nations to alliance with the English, or at least to neutrality, in apprehended further hostilities from the French. Canassateego, on the next day, desired a dram out of an English glass. Governor Thomas answered: “We are glad to hear you have such a dislike for what is French. They cheat you in your glasses as well as in everything else.” Reminding the Indians that they had almost drunk out a good quantity of spirit brought so far from their “Rum Stores,” he said that there was still enough left for English glasses; and so, with bumpers, closed the Council. A deputation of the Osages at Washington, being pressed to adopt civilized ways, a chief said: —
“I see and admire your manner of living, your good, warm houses, your large fields of corn, your gardens, your cattle, your ​wagons, and a thousand machines that I know not the use of. I see that you are able to clothe yourselves even from weeds and grass: in short, you can do almost what you choose. You whites have the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. But you are surrounded by slaves: everything about you is in chains, and you are slaves yourselves. I fear if I should exchange my pursuits for yours I too should become a slave. Talk to my sons: perhaps they may be persuaded to adopt your fashions, or at least recommend them to their sons; but for myself I was born free, was reared free, and wish to die free.”
The chief of the Pawnees, in a council at Washington in 1822, said: —
“My Great Father [the President]! The Great Spirit made us all; he made my skin red and yours white; he placed us on this earth, and intended we should live differently from each other. He made the whites to cultivate the earth and feed on domestic animals; but he made us to rove through the uncultivated woods and plains, to feed on wild animals, and to dress with their skins. He also intended that we should go to war, to take scalps, to plunder horses from and triumph over our enemies, to cultivate peace at home, and promote the happiness of each other.”
He frankly added that he did not wish “good people,” i. e. missionaries, sent among them to change their habits and make them live and work like white people. They preferred much their own wild freedom and customs, and having lived so long without what the white man called “work,” preferred to continue so, till at least the game became extinct, and life became so precarious that they might be compelled to admit the “good people” among them. In the mean time they would hunt the buffalo, the beaver, deer, and other wild animals, and gladly barter for them with the whites; but they did not wish to “follow the white man's road.” These strong pleadings for a life conformed to the free air and scenes and habits of Nature by no means fail of responsive yearnings not only from those ​who are crushed by poverty, toil, and struggle in civilized life: they touch what is left of the springs of simplicity and sincerity in many, pampered and jaded, in the highest ranges of artificial society. So it is not strange that to the one question, “Can an Indian be civilized?” some persons add another, “Why should he be civilized?”
When the astute and heroic Indian patriot Tecumseh was plying all his energies and eloquence to engage the Northern and Southern tribes in a vast confederacy, and in alliance with the British, in our last war with them, for the suppression and extinction of the power of our Government in the Mississippi Valley, he brought to bear upon his wild and maddened followers, as well as upon some tribes who were halting in purpose, a direct attack upon civilization. He knew well the forces and attractions, as well as the enfeebling and demoralizing influences, of the white man's mode of life. In his own mind he had balanced well the life of civilization and of barbarism, and his savage instincts decided him to retain for his people the state of Nature. With a power of appeal — pointed with sarcasm, scorn, and invective — which proved him able to stir the wildest passions of his hearers, he bid them despise the plough and loom and all the implements of thrift and toil, and cling to their primitive customs. He warned them against the destruction of their magnificent forests and the pollution of their crystal rivers. Reminding them of the darker-colored race from Africa, in slavery to the whites on their violated domains, he foretold that fate as their own if they came under subjection to the white man. He exhorted them to rid themselves of every symbol and token of their previous intercourse and traffic with the peddling and tricky adventurers from the States, to abandon their new clothing and even their guns, to dress themselves in the skins of the beasts which the Great Spirit had provided for their food and covering, and to resume the war-club, the scalping-knife, and the bow. The late chief Ouray, whose name ​was so familiar in our most recent complications with the Indians, was a man of fine endowments; and though he adopted the comforts and many of the luxuries of the whites, he retained by preference much of his savagery. His eminent medical practitioners found him afflicted with “Bright's disease,” with his end not distant. He preferred, however, to meet that end under the hands of his Indian “medicine-men,” and to have his horses killed for burial with him.
We have also to recall the fact, which has presented itself to us in another connection, that the noblest specimens of the Indian race — who, as endowed with mental vigor, even with genius, chieftains, orators, patriots, and diplomatists, pleading with and for their people, have argued their cause with the whites for more than two centuries — have been the most resolute in opposition to civilization. If we look to them as the exponents of their own preference for nature, freedom, and the woods, we can hardly fail to infer that they speak from a profound instinct, a proud consciousness of a sort of manhood in them contemptuous of the drudgery, emulation, conventionalisms, and subserviences of artificial life. They have had reason to know that hollowness and falsehood underlie the white man's life and qualify his dignity and his happiness. Intercourse such as there has been between the two races has alienated the Indian from the white man, as it has also increased the early dislike of the whites for the Indians.
For to all the occasions of antipathy and hostility between the Indians and the whites — coming from the embitterment engendered by the wrongs of the stronger against the weaker, and the memory of savage strifes with their horrors and atrocities — is to be added another, already recognized in these pages. The contempt and disgust with which the English colonists very soon began to regard the natives have strengthened rather than yielded, and have manifested themselves in their intensest indulgence as the ​Indians have been humiliated and crushed. A savage reduced to the will, and to dependence on the support or charity, of a white man is indeed a forlorn and repulsive spectacle. There is about him none of the sad repression of spirit of the caged lion, but rather the mean aspect and submission of the whipped cur. A savage loses all that made and manifested his manhood when he parts with his own way of life, with his fellows and surroundings, and becomes a dependent upon civilization; for in his mature years he will never be a helper or a sharer in civilization.
Remnants of the Indian tribes lingered long in our old colonies and towns. There were thirteen hundred of them left in Connecticut at the opening of our Revolution. There are a thousand of them now in Maine. Here and there in our country towns, as has been stated, are patches of land still pledged to them, and there are trust funds secured for their benefit. They generally present types of reversion, not merely to savagery, but to stages behind or below it. It has been said that the utmost result reached in the attempts to civilize an Indian, has been the turning of a wild animal into a tame brute. The Indian regards civilization as a form of duress and imprisonment, in indoors or local confinement, in decencies, in clothing, dwellings, intercourse, and toil. There are vastly more white men who agree with him in this than of his own race who disagree with him. If the Tartar is underneath the skin of a Russian, so in many of us is the craving for the wild license of Nature.
After King Philip's War, such of the remnants of the tribes as were too spiritless to seek affiliation with the River and New York Indians were kept under jealous watch, especially by the frontier settlements. Their condition was poor and mean, and their character answered to it, as shown in their craven and sullen demeanor. They never could commend themselves as friends or as desirable acquaintances of our farmers and thrifty householders. “Vermin” ​was still the repulsive term under which they were classed. Many of them kept in family groups in the skirts of the woods, and as they appeared occasionally in the settlements were employed as help in the fields or in lumbering. They were forbidden to enter the white man's dwelling without formal permission. Occasionally in letters and family diaries, written up to a hundred or more years ago, we read of a native man, woman, or youth being employed as a house-servant. The pitiable waifs, the objects of a feeble relenting and a strong anxiety, all under guardianship, living on the remnants of the family table, sleeping in out-buildings, mixed with negro blood, were miserable relics of the native race. There was something pathetic as well as remorseless in the frank word of the whites to these wretched loiterers: “It is not well for either of us that you should stay. Go off.”
Many significant tokens manifest themselves among the printed and still manuscript papers of the old times among us of the shrinking antipathy even of Christian-minded people against coming into very close contact, in hospitality or intercourse, with the better sort of Indians. As I am writing, I recall a few sentences in the journal of Chief-Justice Sewall, a merciful friend both of Indians and negroes. He writes under date of Jan. 30, 1708, that John Neesnummin, an Indian convert and approved preacher, called on him with letters from Rev. Roland Cotton, on his way to Natick to preach, and needing hospitality for the night. “I shew him,” writes Sewall, “to Dr. Mather.” But no invitation came from that quarter. Then, “I bespoke a lodging for him at Matthias Smith's [probably an innkeeper]; but after, they sent me word they could not do it. So I was fain to lodge him in my study.”
Horace Greeley, sensitive as he was to every right and claim of humanity, in a letter during his travels in the far West, wrote thus in the “New York Tribune,” June, 1859: —
​“The Indians are children. Their arts, wars, treaties, alliances, habitations, crafts, properties, commerce, comforts, all belong to the very lowest and rudest ages of human existence. Some few of the chiefs have a narrow and short-sighted shrewdness, and very rarely in their history a really great man, like Pontiac or Tecumseh, has arisen among them; but this does not shake the general truth that they are utterly incompetent to cope in any way with the European or Caucasian race. Any band of school-boys from ten to fifteen years of age are quite as capable of ruling their appetites, devising and upholding a public policy, constituting and conducting a State or community, as an average Indian tribe. “I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more allowance for the dislike, aversion, and contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince any one that the poetic Indian, the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow, is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to human nature, — a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion save by the more ravenous demands of another. As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the Reservations of the Delawares, Pottawattomies, etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on earth, and saw their owners sitting round the doors of their lodges in the height of the planting season, and in as good, bright, planting weather as sun and soil ever made, I could not help saying, ‘These people must die out — there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree.’ ”
Mr. Greeley would have reconciled himself to the extinction of the Indian race by the working of natural and irresistible forces, incident to their own condition and qualities, stimulated in their processes of decline and decay, without any further agency of the white man to effect its extermination other than his proximity as destructive to the Indians.
What then is to be said as to the conditions and ​prospects of the alternative lot of the Indians, of rescue, help, and survival in their race, by civilization?
Experience and facts have in all cases proved that when a body of Indians have been brought under the influence of civilized life and habits, the first results are for some years discouraging. There is always observable among them an increased mortality and disease. The change from a wild life in the open air to domestic restrictions, the change in food and its cooking from wild meats, roots, berries, and fish to pork and heavy bread, the heat of stoves, etc., tend to develop in them cutaneous diseases, scrofula, consumption, and corrupt blood. The most forlorn and repulsive aspect in which an Indian is ever presented to us is when he is in the state that may be called semi-civilization, — with a show and pretence, often a mockery of the white man's ways, in shiftlessness, wastefulness, and squalor, both in aspect and reality. The Indian roaming in free vigor, — with fresh air and soil and simple food, with the odor about him of the forest-pine and the berry, lifting the brook-water to his lips, — is in some sort a pleasing, never repulsive, object. But in the filthy hovel planted in the mud, with refuse in and around it, with greasy utensils, rags, and all disgusting accompaniments, the sight is revolting. There are sights one can see, truthful pages one may read, of scenes of what we call a degree of civilization, as among the Cherokees, — the most advanced of all, with their laws, their legislature, their papers, churches, schools, etc. As for domestic ways, a New England housewife would go distracted in any one of those homes. The mixture of breeds — white, red, and black — in more shadings than German worsted admits of, and the mingling of squalor with intimations and materials of thrift, are in no sense attractive. The native preacher or teacher — it may be educated in one of our minor colleges, and carrying home with him books — will, either of necessity or yielding, fall back from more than one stage of his advance.
​All those, however, are marks of transition from a savage to a civilized state. If there is a persistency, a reinforcing of effort, with wise helpfulness and guidance from the white man, the experiment slowly advances. The increase of mortality is arrested after some ten or a dozen years.
One of the instigating and most helpful agencies in the transition from savagery to civilization is found in the ownership, oversight, and breeding of domestic animals. They create an interest and responsibility which are humanizing; they demand and foster forethought and discretion; they prompt to the making of fences, barns, and sheds; they require stay-at-home habits, and the provision for winter food. Indeed, one might construct a scale of degrees to mark progress towards civilization through these tokens of a transition from barbarism. The Indian pony, — accommodating himself in his reversion from the Spanish stock to the habits of his new owners, shaggy, ungroomed, unshod, and tangled in tail and mane and hide with brambles and briars, — has greatly advanced the Indian. He is property. He sets a standard for values. As the wild buffalo disappears from the plains, the less wild domestic cattle, with their herders, come in by thousands. The semi-civilized tribes win that epithet not so much because of their own personal habits as because of the roosters that crow around their barn-yards, the cattle, sheep, and hogs which indicate farms, sheds, and pens. The Pueblo Indians claim to have perpetuated their stage of civilization by the same tokens. The Navahoes go a stage beyond, with their vast herds for breeding, and their goats and donkeys. The Apaches would have a lower place on this scale; because, though they have horses and mules, instead of increasing them from their stock, they cook all their own animals in the winter, and steal a new supply in the spring. The chief Ouray was regarded as the richest Indian in the country, having, beside his annual pension of a thousand dollars from the Government, large ​numbers of domestic animals, his well-furnished house, and his well-filled larder and wine-cellar.
Some of the conditions which have been found most favorable, if not also indispensable, to the slow work of civilizing a body of Indians, are the following: —
1. They must be planted by themselves, at least twenty miles remote from any white community.
2. They must have a large, scattering place, — not a village, — with broad, separate lots, fertile, close to wood and water. Thus they must be kept away from the pernicious influences and the humiliating presence of the whites, and be prevented from huddling together, as in their old camp life.
3. All intermarriage and like intercourse between the whites and the Indians must be forbidden. The Indians never rise, and the whites are always debased by it.
4. Each Indian settlement should be a centre for a single tribe, not on a frontier, between two nations.
5. The place to be wholly free of wild animals, with a slight allowance for game, but always near good fishing.
6. Farmers with implements, to reside — two, not more — in each settlement; and missionaries, to defer their efforts till they are asked for and welcomed, as teachers of morality and the virtues, without sectarian doctrines.
7. Government to exercise a firm, though kind and friendly, oversight over all their interests.
It might be supposed that the vast numbers of half-breeds among the Indians would have some of the white man's capacity for taking care of themselves. They will, if we leave them to their own way of doing it. But in some cases they are far more troublesome than real Indians. The traits and characteristics of the red man prevail in them over those of the whites. This is true even when one parent is English or Scotch, but more especially so when one parent is French. The half-breeds intensify Indian qualities. In the woods and lodges they do not show any ​sense of being a degraded caste, but they feel it when in the settlements. This mixture of the races, with the blending of some of the least noble and some of the most perverse traits of each, is found to introduce among the Indian tribes of the more remote places, and who have shared the least in amicable relations with the whites, influences unfavorable to civilization. But, on the whole, it is probably safe to judge that this mixture of the races presents conditions which, as favorable or unfavorable to our future pacificatory relations with such tribes, balance each other. Very slow and very gradual, with many baitings, arrests, and drawbacks, must be the stages of release from the ways of barbarism, and the advance of the Indians to the acquired habits of self-dependence on their own abounding resources. It is a mediatorial work between the white man and the red man. Patience, friendliness, help in all its ingenuities of method and service, with a firm and overawing power in reserve, must not only be the agencies to promote, but also the authority and the force to insist upon, the extinction of savagery and the steady progress of civilization. For reasonable periods there will be no objection to bringing the Indians into such a condition as will render it indispensable for them to need the white man's resources and help. But a view should always be had to a critical time when the Indians, realizing how essential these appliances are to them, shall be made to understand that if these resources are within their own reach by the simple use of forethought and industry, they must henceforth draw them from the earth and not from the national treasury. It will require no effort and no justification from us to steel our hearts against the importunities of those who are wilfully thriftless and lazy.
My principal aim in this volume has been to trace out and illustrate a statement made in an early page of it, that the relations between European invaders and colonists with the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent have, from the ​first to the present time, run in a series of two parallel lines, — the one of professed, intended, earnest, and costly efforts for the benefit of the natives; the other, of outrages, aggressions, wrongs, and miseries inflicted upon them. I have frankly admitted the melancholy and humiliating fact that violent, oppressive, and inhuman measures and deeds have to a very large extent thwarted and nullified these kindlier purposes, so that they have been triumphed over. But, so far as absolute truth will allow, I have sought to relieve the reproach upon us of the wantonness of intent and purpose in wrong-doing, by referring some of the wrong to the infelicity and malignity of circumstances.
It is grateful, therefore, in closing, to recognize as the last device of ingenuity in the intention of justice and friendliness to the Indian tribes, another experiment recently put on trial, with the prompting of private benevolence and the efficient aid of the Government. The schools established at Hampton and Carlisle for the education in the rudiments of knowledge and of the industrial arts of Indian youth of both sexes have already, in the practical excellence of their plan and methods, and in the gratifying success of their work, engaged the hearty sympathy of a widely extended constituency. The leading aim in those institutions is to arrest the processes by which the pupils, withdrawn from all the habits and surroundings of their own people and subjected to those of the whites, might be in danger of becoming unfitted or indisposed to go back to their homes, and to give them only such a term of residence, and only such helps in education and training, as will best qualify them to stir and assist others of their race in an advance to civilization. This method had, previous to the institution of these two schools, won the approval of the wisest and most successful class of teachers resident among the Indians. Scarce any success attended their labors while the Indian children were merely day-pupils in their schools and returned to their own lodges at ​night. Boarding schools alone, in which the pupils were taught decorum, propriety, and above all cleanliness, were found essential. And religion also effects its best work through indirect teaching in character and influence, rather than through doctrines and professional offices.
The Indians seem now to have become aliens in the land of their nativity. There is one ray of possible hopefulness for them, and with such cheer as it may afford we may close the review of their sad history. What reason or assurance there may be for the hope now to be intimated will depend for each one on his estimate of the quality, the capacity, the destiny of the Indian race. At any rate those who, as philanthropists, grieve most over the wrongs, plead most earnestly for the rights of the Indians, and insist that there is a brighter future before them, ought to emphasize this hope. It is that the race may soon present to us one or more specimens of truly great and wise men, patriots, civilians, of lofty minds, pure aims, with the faculty of quickening, guiding, and inspiring their fellows, lifting them and leading them onward. It will be well, too, if such a man or such men may be of pure Indian blood, of unmixed native stock, with the virility and the nobleness of a wilderness birth, and that he accept without shame, ay, glory in, the tinge of his race. That the wilderness, with the help and without the bane of civilization, should produce one, two, three great leaders of men, peers of many members of our Congress, and of more than one of our Presidents, would be an easy accomplishment. May it not produce such men equal to our foremost and best? Why not? We have had a few of the Indian race whom, by our standards, we call able, gifted, great. They have indeed been few. We may count them for the centuries on one hand, — five. But all of these foremost Indian chieftains — Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola, Black Hawk — have represented savagery, have stood and fought for savagery. They have all been familiar with what civilization ​is and does; but they have loathed it, despised it, rejected it, and given their whole power and sway to forbid and crush it. Now may not this native greatness, this leadership of men, manifest itself in a few gifted with genius, nobly endowed, patriots in spirit, yet born or self-trained to a conviction that civilization is for man a state preferable to that of savagery? The elevation, if not the security from extinction, of the race of red men depends upon its furnishing masters and guides from its stock. A race that cannot itself contribute its redeemers will never be redeemed.
* ↑ The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874, pp. 104-111. London, 1876.
* ↑ Whymper's “Alaska: Indians on Hukon River,” p. 232.
* ↑ Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (p. 303). By George F. Ruxton, Esq., Member of the Royal Geographical Society, the Ethnological Society, etc.
* ↑ These extracts are from Colden's “History of the Six Nations,” p. 125.
* ↑ Ibid. p. 142.
* ↑ Morse's Report, Appendix.