# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.
THE INDIAN IN HIS CONDITION, RESOURCES, AND SURROUNDINGS.
We have abundant and trustworthy means for informing ourselves of the qualities of character, the exterior life, the resources, employments, and practical capacities of the aboriginal tribes during the whole period since the first coming here of Europeans. The intercourse has always been close and continuous between the races; and though the relations in which they have stood to each other have been prevailingly hostile, there have been occasional and agreeable exceptions to this rule. As has already been said, though the Indians have a history profoundly interesting, especially in its tragic elements, they have no historian of their own race. The few and quite unsatisfactory specimens which we have of their way of telling their own story and fortunes for the record, are to be gathered from speeches delivered by some of their chiefs, in review of their history, at great councils with the whites; and we have to accept these as they have come through the medium of interpreters more or less intelligent, honest, and qualified for the office. Occasionally, too, we have had from whites who, as captives in their early youth, have lived long with the natives and been adopted by them, and also from some of their own youths who have been educated at our schools and colleges, what may serve as the Indian's own way of communicating to us the fortunes and experiences of his race. For the most part, however, — as in the case of the ​painter and the lion, where the artist alone could represent both sides of the contest, — the history of our Indian tribes comes from the pen of their conquerors. For many and obvious reasons we have to regret what we must regard as a gap in our literature, caused by the lack of any native contributions to it. As we shall have to note in later pages of this volume, there have been a few master minds, both in reasoning and oratory, among the Indians. From more than one of these we have evidence of a capacity and acuteness of thought exercised upon the comparative attractions and advantages of a barbarous or a civilized life; cogent arguments for the right of Indians to follow their own preferences and habits; and plaintive laments over the miseries and the woes inflicted by the white man upon those whom the Divine Being had set in their own free domains, with all that could minister to their need and happiness. Rousseau was but a tame and artificial pleader for the immunities and joys of a state of Nature for man, when compared with some of these aboriginal specimens of it.
Yet we need hardly feel that we lack any information which it is desirable and interesting for us to have concerning the habits, mode of life, resources, and experiences of our aboriginal tribes. Allowing, too, for the fact already recognized, that our abounding literature on the general subject is composed of contributions from a large variety of writers, in capacity and in principles, who in their intercourse with the natives, having had widely different relations with them, and widely different ends in view, have seen and reported them differently, we have all the means for a full and fair representation of aboriginal life.
A state of savagery, however extensive the regions covered by it, and however diverse in local climatic influences and productions parts of it may be, will generally reduce nearly to uniformity the condition and habits of life of those who share it. In civilized lands, countries bordering on each other — neighboring counties, cantons, or ​departments — will exhibit a wonderful variety in the features, the dialects, the costumes, the domestic usages and the employments of the people. The range for all such diversities is restricted for the life even of semi-barbarians. There seems always to have been, as there is now, far more in common as regards all the resources and habits of life among American Indians, certainly in the northern parts of the continent, than there were of local and circumstantial diversities. We can indeed discern among various tribes, when compared with each other, the effects upon them of greater ease or difficulty in obtaining sustenance, of more or less of providence in storing up food, of degrees of ferocity in warfare, and evidences of skill, industry, and art spent upon their weapons and utensils. There were those who lived chiefly on maize and roots; others who gave no labor to the cultivation of the soil, but subsisted wholly by the chase; and others still, on the Pacific coast, and upon its vast rivers, whose diet was of the prodigious supplies of fish, fresh or dried. Of any differences among the savages arising from degrees of mental development we need to make small account.
This uniformity in the resources, methods, and experiences of the lives of the savages facilitates such a general account and description of their occupations, habits, and condition as is required for record in our own or in coming times. Not that these annals are merely “short and simple,” like those of the poor, but that they are uniform, repeating with slight variations similar narrations and incidents.
After all, the savage is best known, understood, and described by his surroundings. He is the child and companion of Nature, its product and its willing subject. The word “savage” is from the root of the beautiful word silva. He is a child and denizen of the woods; the forest, the lake-shore, the river are his nursery, his playthings, his range for life and joy. When, even from a long and weary ​journey, he can reach a sight of the salt ocean, the sight exhilarates him, and the odor of the dank kelp invigorates him. Aptly has it been said, — “Man is one world, and hath another to attend him.” There is a sympathy and a responsive relation between the senses and the mind of a wild man and the aspects and aptitudes of Nature around him. As man develops his own higher powers, Nature changes steadily in these aspects and aptitudes for him. The savage conforms and adapts himself to Nature. Never does he indulge one fretting thought or feeling about its ways, or move a muscle or effort against it. He lives in tranquil subjection to Nature, and dies as her autumn fruits and leaves fail on her bosom. But every stage and step and process of development for civilization puts man out of harmony and into antagonism with Nature. He resists and thwarts and fights Nature. For his own uses he changes all natural features and objects. He clears away the forests, kills its beasts, dams its streams, levels its hills, raises its valleys, blasts its rocks, tunnels its mountains. The Indian hears of these doings of the white man, or looks on, amazed, for he does none of them. Respect, or fear, or satisfaction, or indolent acquiescence, disposes him to accord with Nature, or to leave her as she is.
It is admitted that only civilized and cultivated man appreciates grand and beautiful objects, using his mind, soul, and taste to engage with simple senses upon them. The beauty and grandeur and glory of natural scenery — of a horizon notched by mountain tops, of floating clouds with their varying shadows, of the gorgeousness of the tinted foliage — do not appeal to a vacant mind or to a rude sensibility. But the savage mind was not a blank towards Nature, nor merely in a state of listlessness. As the savage was in accord with Nature, he was in perfect sympathy with it, and held free intercourse with it. The energy and activity of thought which civilized man gives to brooding and restless questioning and speculation, went with the ​Indian to feed some forest musings, some sylvan imaginings, and to furnish him the material of dreams and omens which entered into the traditions of his tribe and traced or clouded its history. A large part of the life of a savage was in solitariness, and except when he knew himself to be exposed to risks from lurking foes he was never lonely, timid, or suspicious. He relied on his own resources of strength, patience, and security. He could find a sufficient couch on the mossy grass, on a heap of green boughs, or in a burrow under the snow. If he did not acquire the instinct of a beast for scenting water at a distance, he was a skilled observer of all the signs which would aid him to find it. The inclination of the tops of the trees, showing the direction of the prevailing winds, and the thickening of the bark on the north side of them served him for a compass even in the depths of the forest and under a clouded and starless sky. No length of distance or obstacles in a day's tramping oppressed him with a fatigue that did not yield to a night's repose. However dampened and soaked with protracted rains or with wintry snow might be the trees and foliage of his route, he could always gather some fungi, or dry or decayed wood, for lighting a fire. He would mentally divide the spaces of a journey of hundreds of miles into equal parts without the help of any sign-post, and would reach his destination or return to his starting-point, as he had purposed to do, at the rise or the set of the sun. In all this he conformed and adapted himself to the ways and the methods of Nature. The trails through the deep forest were common to him and the beast. The deer and the buffalo made his turnpikes.
The Indians took for granted that the earth on which they were born was bound to afford them full sustenance, as it did to the animals, without any labor of their own; except such effort as they spent, like white men, in pastime, hunting or fishing. Every exertion that had the look of exacting toil was to them unwelcome, menial, and ​degrading; they assigned all such work to their squaws, who were their beasts of burden, who put together the materials of their lodges, fetched wood and water, cooked the food, carried their pappooses and household goods on their shoulders, and flayed the beasts of the hunt and cured their skins. The white man as a warrior always had the respect of the savage, but drew only his wonder or contempt when seen in any industrious occupation. Trusting thus in the fostering care of Nature, the Indians were content with its furnished resources or supplies, whether for a moment these were full or scant. They would gorge themselves to repletion, like the beasts, when they had an abundance, and would endure with marvellous fortitude the sharp pangs of hunger to the verge of starvation.
Doubtless it is to this earthward kinship and compliance with Nature in the savage that we are to ascribe his utter unconsciousness of and indifference to what we call offensive and revolting to the senses, — foul odors, uncleanliness, filth, vermin, parasites, etc. Regarding himself as akin to the elements, the soil, and the creatures around him, the savage did not recognize what we call dirt. Dirt has been well defined as valuable matter out of place. But the savage did not regard dirt as ever out of place, — whether on his person, his apparel, in his foul lodge, or in his scant utensils and his food. Consequently to him there was no such thing as dirt. He would eat with gusto frogs, toads, snakes, and decomposing animal remains just as he took them from the ground; and his first delicious repast from the game which he killed — large or small, beast, fish, or fowl — was from its raw, quivering entrails and its warm blood. The ordinary functions and processes of his organism were exactly like those which he recognized in animals: obedience to their impulses and necessities was as unrestrained as was the use of the lungs and the voice in breathing and speaking. The relief of nature was as seemly a process as was that of satisfying it: ​privacy was not prompted in either case. The crowded wigwam did not admit of diffidence, modesty, or concealment in exercising the functions of nature. Anything like fastidiousness, delicacy, or squeamishness, was not only foreign to the savage, but was utterly inconceivable and inexplicable to him when exhibited by the white man. The Jesuit Fathers domiciled with the savages, with that exquisite tact and self-control by which they uniformly sought to conciliate and attach to them the subjects of their patient toils, very soon learned to conceal all their antipathies and qualms amid the untidiness, the filth, and the indecencies of an Indian wigwam. Suffocated with the vile odors of their surroundings, the vapors of the kettle, and the close-packed humanity; tormented by vermin, their eyes scorched and blinded by the smoke, with children and dogs crawling over them by night, — these gentlemen and scholars from France adapted themselves to the situation; to them certainly an unnatural one, though to the natives it presented no annoyance, no discomfort. Occasionally, for a long fixed residence at a mission, the priest would set up a separate cabin for himself. But this was rather that he might have a place of retirement for study and devotion, than to exhibit his distaste for the domestic life of his disciples. For him there was really no escaping from conformity to Indian manners as regards food and its preparation. He was limited to their larders, as he carried with him into the wilderness none of the luxuries of civilization; content only to transport the materials and symbols of the mass, with paper for his reports to his superiors.
The first implements which the savages were most eager to obtain from the whites were hatchets and metal kettles. The latter were at once used as substitutes for the vessels of unglazed pottery, or closely woven wicker, or hollowed wooden receptacles, which had previously been in use. Though much of the food of the natives was ​prepared by being laid upon the coals or roasted on a stake, the larger part of it required to be stewed in heated water. As their own vessels, though often called caldrons, would not bear exposure to the fire or a dry heat, an ingenious alternative was resorted to. The clay or wooden vessel was filled with water, into which were thrown stones brought to a glowing heat in a clear fire close at hand. The process was repeated, if necessary, as the stones were removed and renewed. Into this water were cast the materials of a repast. They were often most incongruous; for the Indians delighted in a mess, a pot-pourri, though no skill or regard was spent upon selection or adaptation to the palate. In a banquet prepared by savage allies of the English after a bloody and protracted conflict with the French and their red allies, some of the English soldiers, though well-nigh famished, lost their craving at the sight of a Frenchman's hand floating in the stew. The conglomeration of heterogeneous articles of food in the Indian's kettle was simply another act of conformity with Nature; as not what they ate, but the eating enough of anything, was their chief object, and it was the stomach, not the palate, which they had to satisfy. It is curious to note that down to quite recent years in New England, in the families of husbandmen, domestic usage approximated to this Indian habit, — vegetables, pastry, and meat (fresh or salt) being cooked in one kettle, served on one great platter, and dispensed after the same miscellaneous fashion. At their great feasts, with a profusion of viands which might have served the Indians for successive distinct courses, the same medley method for cooking in caldrons all manner of fish, flesh, and fowls, dogs, deer's meat, buffalo, skunks, raccoons, etc., with maize, and various roots, pumpkins, squashes, beans, and peas, was the approved style of festivity, with variations more from necessity than of preference. Generally the family had but one meal in common through the day. But each member of it was at liberty to eat when ​and as often and as much as he pleased, if there was anything left in the larder. Often a hungry sleeper would rise at night to satisfy his craving. The chance stroller or guest was always made welcome to what the lodge contained, and was first served. When the ears of Indian corn were in the milk they afforded a rich repast, either as eaten from the stalk or roasted before an extemporized fire.
As the natives did not use salt, either at their meals or in preserving meats or fish, they availed themselves of the sun's heat, the air, and fire, to dry any surplus of such food gathered when it was abundant among them. Some of the abounding salts of the prairies have impurities which impair their preservative qualities. Often, however, as the natives were generally improvident, or, still in conformity with Nature, trusted that each day would provide for itself as to “what they should eat,” they were reduced to extreme need. They bore the pangs of hunger with stiff, uncomplaining patience and philosophy, passing many nights and days without sustenance. In their utmost straits they would eat roots, bark, buds, and the skins of their own mantles and moccasons. In the western valleys Nature produced in luxuriant abundance a large variety of succulent and edible roots, and expanses of wild rice. As a last resort, reliance might be placed upon the somewhat stingy nutrition found in what is known as tripe de roche, — a sort of mossy mushroom which covers some of the damp rocks. When this was cooked with scraps of any kind of meat, or marrow bones, it was quite satisfying. Their own dogs, and in times of famine their ponies, are essential parts of the banquets of the Indians.
In the matter of apparel the Indian put himself into the same harmony with the promptings of Nature. He wore clothing, not as a covering or concealment, but for convenience, comfort, and necessity under the weather. He felt most at his ease when wholly free of it; nor was ​it from the want of abundant materials needing but slight help from hand-labor. The hide of the buffalo, and the skins of the deer, the beaver, and the smaller animals furnished him with loose or with close-fitting mantles. His feet and legs needed protection while he was tramping over rocks or through the bushes with their prongs and briers. Not till reaching years of maturity were the children of either sex subjected to the incumbrances of clothing; and in general the breech-cloth for men and a half-skirt for women served for all except state occasions. The more elaborate garments now seen among the aborigines owe more or less of their skill and ornaments to materials obtained from the whites, such as needles, beads, cords, silks, and bits of metal, though the Indian was by no means stinted in his own resources for a gala day. His well-dressed robes, soft and pliable, cured and tanned with or without the fur, wrought with porcupine quills and the feathers of birds, and his necklaces of bears' claws, the plumage of the eagle, and other devices, set him off in good forest guise. For extra adornment, or to add to his fierceness in some of his games, festivals, war, or scalp dances, he would add to his array, besides paint, the horns or the skins of the heads of some of his relations, — the bison, the bear, the deer, or the owl.
The aborigines, whether sedentary or roving, constructed their abodes for single families — wigwams, tepees, or lodges — by natural rules and for natural uses. They might have learned their art from the beaver. Where anything of lengthened or permanent habitation was looked for, more of solidity and thoroughness was given to them. Barks or skins, according to the abundance or ease with which they were to be procured, served equally well for the fabric. A few poles, planted as stakes in the circumference of a circle, brought together at the top, with an orifice for the smoke, a hole in the centre for the fire, bunks raised on bushes or skins, and a platform or shelf for storing ​implements or superfluities, answered all necessities. Generally the men gathered the materials while the squaws put them together. When these lodges were numerous they were sometimes arranged as in lanes, and surrounded with palisadoes. On removing from one place to another, if the materials of the lodge were worth the labor, or were not to be readily replaced, the squaws bore the burden of their parts. What they could not carry on their shoulders they attached at the further end of some of the poles, confining the other end to their waists, while they dragged the skins and utensils. Where the Indians now have ponies they use this style of an extemporized barrow.
An indispensable article of the outfit of every male Indian is what is known by the whites as the “medicine-bag.” This cherished possession has an intimate connection with the superstitions of the aborigines, reference to which will soon be made. To the eye of an indifferent observer this “medicine-bag” serves the use of a pocket or a satchel, to receive certain light articles of use and convenience on an emergency. It is much more than that to an Indian. The term “medicine,” as current among the natives through the continent, in its equivalents in all their languages and dialects, carries with it all the associations which the word has for civilized people, and far more mysterious ones beside. The treatment of disease by the conjurers, jongleurs, or “pow-wows” among the natives, as has been before noted, is believed to be more or less of a magical art. So, every process and means connected with it is associated for the Indian with some quality of mystery and charm. “Medicine,” therefore, becomes to them a term mixed with religious, superstitious, and marvellous significance. Every object that startles them by its ingenuity, its show of skill, its wonderful properties, — like a burning-glass, a watch, a clock, a compass, or a bell, as well as any drug, — is to them “medicine.”
The carefully guarded and cherished receptacle, always ​jealously watched over by its owner, which the whites and the Indians now alike called the “medicine-bag,” combines all the qualities of a Jewish phylactery, a New Zealander's fetich, and the amulet or charm of a superstitious devotee. The “bag” is generally made in the form of a pouch, of the skin of some small animal, carefully prepared, and its contents are the secrets of its owner. Among these contents may be the usual miscellaneous articles of a pocket; with scraps of tobacco, the pipe, and the materials for kindling a fire. But the sacred thing in the receptacle is some scrap or relic — it may be a tooth, a bone, a claw, a stone, or some rude device with the totem or tribal designation of the owner — which is to him as a protecting amulet, a medium of prayer or worship, connected with his private superstitions or dreams. The Indian communes with this mysterious symbol when alone; he trusts to its protection on a journey and in emergencies, and he clings to it in all the frenzies of the battle. To lose this special treasure of his “medicine-bag” would cause to its owner inexpressible and overwhelming sorrow and dismay; he would apprehend all possible calamities as likely to befall him. Sometimes when the whites have pried into these secret bags, the contents have been found hideous and disgusting. To the owner they are his most sacred possession. Not more fondly and devoutly did the Spanish marauder cling to his amulet of the Holy Virgin, than did the savage to this guardian of his spirit.
The concentrated and sharpened use of a few of the mental faculties threw the whole force of mind of an Indian into the directions most engaged in the restricted exigencies of his condition. He had less volume and less range of mind than a civilized man, but more sagacity, skill, and directness in the use of what he possessed, — as a man deprived of one or more of his senses stimulates those left to him. It was soon noticed, however, that the white man, with a larger active-fund and capital of brain than the ​savage, after a chance to learn his ways, could far more easily appropriate the keen and sagacious qualities of the Indian than the Indian could avail himself of the cultivated and expanded faculties and ingenuities of the paleface. The European would not at first trust himself in the woods without a compass. The Indian despised the contemptible little index. But the white man was not long in acquiring the Indian's craft in all forest weather-signs and trail-marks. General Braddock allowed whole ranks and files of orderly marching English soldiers to be picked off one by one by ambushed Indians, skulking in the bushes of a ravine. But the white man soon learned how to do this bush-fighting behind tree or stump; and as the Indian, seeing the flash of the rifle, if not struck by the ball, would instantly rush upon his victim before he could reload, the white man would have a substitute by his side, or two guns.
Doubtless there has been some exaggeration in the picturesque and fanciful relations of the almost preternatural skill and cunning of the Indian, when with all his faculties alive and strained, in caution or suspicion, he exhibits a craft in the woods, on the trail, or in circumventing his enemies, beyond anything of the same kind which the white man can attain by ingenuity and practice. In the woods, amid decaying leaves, on the moss or the grass, or on the lichen of the rocks, the Indian will detect the marks of any feet that have passed over it. He will divine whether the marks are recent, or the number of days which have elapsed since they were pressed, the number of the company, and the direction and sometimes the object of their course. True, the same skill in detection is offset by the same ingenuity in concealment or deception. Sometimes the moccasons or shoes of one or more skulking persons will be reversed on the feet as if to mislead the pursuer in his search. Sometimes a single person will multiply his own foot-prints, or a portion of a party will carry others on ​their backs, or a water-course will be forded at an angle to throw the pursuer off the track. The game is a keen one when those on both sides are well matched.
And how fitted for his uses and his accordance and sympathy with Nature were the surroundings and conditions of the Indian's life! This magnificent domain of earth, water, and sky was his. Here was no desert; seldom a spot inhospitable to an Indian so far as to forbid at least his passage through it. The lake-surface of our own Northwest, with its borderings, is of larger area than the whole European continent. We take in hand one of the latest maps of the United States, that we may trace the course and linkings of its railways. By sections, in the brains of single Indians, and as a whole among their various tribes, there once existed, without map or draft, quite another but as complete and accurate a delineation of previous thoroughfares all over this continent, in its length and breadth, and quite as well suited to previous uses as are our iron highways. The maps which we have now, covering our whole national domain, have been provided at Government expense, as the reachings out of power and enterprise have made necessary. They are the results of patient and laborious exploration with the help of skilled engineers. Take one of those maps, leave all the land surface in blank to represent the original condition of things, and you will have a reticulated system of threading nerves, fibrous and ganglionic, of the lakes and water-courses, which seem to have been disposed as streams and basins respectively to renew and interchange their waters in vigorous and healthful circulation. The waters are generally clear and pure, save as the swelling freshets of the spring tear away the rich mould of their shores and tangle them with huge uprooted trees. One of the main rivers gathers contributions it may be from hundreds of different rills and streams, just as, by a reversed process, a branch of a majestic tree, standing isolated from a forest which might ​cramp it, sends its sap into boughs and twigs, and through them into each leaf. When the smooth downward flow of one of these streams was broken by falls the Indian would boldly shoot them, unless the water was shallow or the rocks were too many and rugged.
The lakes, ranging from inland seas to ponds, are fed by trickling streams, rivulets, and brooks, pouring in their contributions it may be from three points of the compass, and they find their outlet by rivers running to the fourth point. The mouth of each river leads it into another larger stream, whose tributaries connect another series of lakes and brooks and rivulets. The portages, or carrying-places between these water-courses, may be only a few rods for land-travel; very rarely do they stretch to a half score of miles. The sedgy, reedy swamps, the cascades and cataracts must also be circumvented by portages. Study carefully one of those skeleton maps of this vast continent, giving only these expanses of water and the broad and attenuated streams, as you would a town or State map showing the highways of the country: you will marvel at the grandeur, the beauty, the ingenuity, and, in these practical days we must add, the convenience of the arrangement. The white man soon learned to follow these water-highways for curiosity or traffic; but he made first rude and then improved drafts of them on paper for those who should follow him. The red men carried in their heads and minds all this elaborate reticulation of our continent; and so they traversed it by land and water, when they had occasion to do so, for thousands of miles, with but trifling deflexions from a straight course. Just as our railroads have their junctions and their branches, so the water-highways of the Indian afforded many central stations, with a large liberty for diverting the course. One of the most remarkable of these water-basins for extent of communication is Lake Winnipeg in the Northwest, 270 miles in length, and 80 in its broadest width. It is fed by almost innumerable streams, ​some of them quite large, and is the source of as many more that flow from it. Its central position on the continent makes it, as it were, a grand junction for routes to the Atlantic and the Pacific. Every bend in a stream, every widening or contracting of the channel, every bay of a lake, every swamp, hillock, grove, or barren spot, had a name kept in use by successive voyagers. When the gatherings of furs or game, or other spoils of the woods, exceeded the capacity of the canoe, the surplus would be committed to a cache, carefully prepared in the rocks or the earth, secured from the beasts, and so skilfully indicated in its exact locality for the eye of the owner that he was never at fault to find it on his return way, or to direct another to the depositary. Where there was no fear of an enemy, the voyager would bring his canoe to land at night, draw it upon beach or shore, turn it over him for a roof in foul weather, prepare his evening meal generally from extemporized resources, and start afresh in the early hours of the morrow. Though for many purposes of hunting and trapping partnership was desirable, many an Indian in his solitary way would be absent for months from his lodge on his private business.
What pure poetry or stern prose, of adventure or peril as we may view it, invested the life of the Indian in his converse with Nature, as he threaded these watercourses, — having for his guiding compass, sure and unerring for his way, his own wilderness instinct! Whole stretches of the native forest offered scarce any obstruction as he threaded his course alone, — or in companies marched, as we say, in Indian file over the crispy or velvet moss. But he would have to climb at times over the prostrate giant trunks, in which he would sink gently up to the waist in the red mould of sweet decay. Where storms and tempests had swept over the scene, two or three score trees might have fallen to each survivor that rose in majesty over them. And then what delicious ministrations there were to a creature so largely organized for simple ​sensations, in his course by day and his couch of moss or hemlock by night! The draught from the cold, pure spring; the juicy berry, the grape cluster, the extemporized meal from the game brought down by his arrow or taken in his snare; the fragrance of that mysterious earth-smell in the springtime, after the scentlessness of the forest in winter; the mingling of the damp ooze from the decay of leaves and mossy trunks with the sweet bloom of swelling buds, — these were the luxuries of the wilderness.
The Indian, in the lack of help from any artificial educational processes, gathered his wood-craft and his skill from two sources. His main reliance was ever on his own individual observation, the training of his own senses, the increasing and improving of his own personal experience. Beyond this he was helped in anticipating such acquisitions, or in extending his knowledge, by the free communication from his elders of facts and phenomena beyond his immediate ken. While hours of listless indolence, of sleep, or dull taciturnity might pass among a group, or in the lodge, or the open camp, there were frequent occasions for free and lively gossip, for relations of experience and adventure, and for keeping alive traditionary lore by renewed repetition. It was in this way that the legends of the tribes were transmitted; and these doubtless had for those most interested in them a significance and dignity which we try in vain to find in such fragmentary and trivial relations as have come to us. The natural and the supernatural made for the Indian one continuous, blended, and homogeneous aspect of things and events. He made no distinction between them; still less did he divide them by any sharp line. He thus anticipated one of the results reached by many of speculative mind in our own time, in recognizing the impossibility of parting fact and phenomena respectively between the natural and the supernatural.
It was thus that the Indians became such experts in the ​ways and workings of Nature, which gave them all their tuition and training. They kept themselves close to it, and regarded themselves as simply a part of it. They could describe to a stranger merely by signs, without language, the face and features of a region; its growths and its game; its hills and valleys; its rivers, swamps, lakes, and mountains; its water-ways and its portages. Adapting themselves to the slow wits of the white man, who needed illustrative help for guidance, they would take a piece of bark, and with a tracing of charcoal or bears' grease they would indicate his way with more exactness than our school-children get from their maps and geographies. A more or less rapid motion of the fingers or feet would signify easy or fast travel by day; and the head inclined on the hand, with closed eyes, would describe the rest of the night: thus denoting the number of days for a journey.
The Indian, too, had variety in his life. He anticipated many of our people in having two residences in the course of the year, without paying taxes in either of them. He made, once a year at least, a long tramp, for change of scene and food. If far inland, he sought the border of a great lake, or climbed a mountain. If he could reach it, he sought the roaring seashore, and had his tent on the beach. There is some conflict of testimony as to whether the abstinence from salt was universally, as we know it was largely, prevalent among our aborigines. The Indians at the West observed that the deer in the spring season gathered to any salt-licks that might be near their ranges, and seemed greatly to enjoy the alterative waters. Seeing the white or gray crystals of the condiment which, as the result of evaporation, lay round the shores of lakes or springs, they could hardly have refrained from tasting them. They seem never to have resorted to the artificial processes of evaporation. It would appear from the general testimony that the Indians did not use salt with their ordinary diet, nor employ it as a pickle, though when it was ​near them they might occasionally have recourse to it as a medicine. But they did universally depend upon that annual alternation of their residence just referred to, which for them served as an interchange of city and country; and this, too, independently of their tramps on the warpath or the hunt. Those of the tribes were most favored who had ready access to the ocean shores, especially to the greater variety of fish in the briny waters, and those larger products of the sea which yielded blubber and more serviceable bones.
There were many other significant and ingenious tokens and devices by which our native races put themselves into sympathetic relations with Nature around them, and with natural objects, — scenery, animals, and birds, — as if they were themselves vital parts of the same organism, its elements and products. The names which they took for themselves and gave to their children and to each other illustrate this statement. The names borne by Indians, though so fantastic and not euphonious to us, are generally far more appropriate and characteristic than those in use among civilized people. Nature, its aspects and objects, were drawn upon by the red men for names of groups and individuals, often with admirable aptness. These names of theirs have in many cases become vulgarized to us, as grotesque and disagreeable; for the most part, however, they are simply meaningless, fragments of a wild jargon. Not so with those who bore them. The name assigned to a child was given in view of some trait or feature in him which suggested a natural scene or object, or instinctive prompting; or it had reference to some quality which it was hoped he might develop, or in which he was to be trained. We all recognize the appropriateness of the designation, made familiar to us by Walter Scott, by which a clan in a peculiarly foggy region of the Highlands were known as “Children of the Mist.” So in every feature of a natural landscape, — mountain, hill, meadow, valley, ​grove, forest, swamp, river, brook, torrent, or bog, and also in every animal, bird, insect, or reptile; in the instruments of war and of the chase; in all fruits and products, branches, twigs, and leaves; in rain, snow, fog, lightning, and thunder; in the sun, in the phases of the moon, and in the starry constellations, — the Indian found his vocabulary for names. This method helped their memories, and also served as a sort of index of characters. Custom and privilege always allowed to the young Indian the right to change his name as he grew to maturity; to take the title by which he would be known as a brave from any exploit, achievement, or aim which he could associate with himself. Nothing in these names indicated parentage or family relationship; nor does there appear to have been any rule of gender in their use which restricted them respectively to males or females. The renderings which are given of them seem to have more significance as interpreted in the French than in the English language.
The observing and reflecting powers of the Indians were trained to remarkable concentration and acuteness, as they were exercised upon natural objects, signs, and phenomena. They were skilled in all weather signs; so they valued least of all, among the white man's trinkets and gewgaws, the pocket compass, for they had a better in their native sagacity. They marked accurately the phases of the moon, or “the night sun,” the ante and post meridian of the day; and they gave to the months names from Nature's signs and aspects, from animals, crops, and fruits, far more expressive than our own.
A most vivid illustration of the sympathetic relation into which an Indian put himself with Nature, was the consequent relation into which he put himself with the animal creation. All wild creatures had some tie of kinship to him. Beavers and bears especially were a sort of cousins-german. He shared the terms, conditions, and means of life with animals, being in some things only ​their superior. The beaver worked much harder than the Indian, for he had to build a dam as well as a lodge, and to gnaw down trees, and carry mud for mortar; and the beaver's lodge was cleanlier than the red man's, and well stocked for winter's food. The Indian was content to live on food similar to the animal's, and to get it in a similar way, — by strength or guile. He was content to learn his best practical wisdom from animals, and then to outwit them from their free teaching by exercising a keener faculty of his own. His knowledge of their habits and instincts, gathered from patient, watchful study and keen observation, surpassed that which we can get from the most accurate and interesting books on natural history. And when the Indian had made himself an adept in all the shifts and devices and all the sly and subtle artifices of animals, in self-protection, or to hide their holes or to cover their tracks, he had only to exercise a little more cunning in his trick to circumvent them. He was housed and fed and clothed precisely as were these animals; and, like them, he was often gorged by food or pinched by starvation.
And while the Indian knew his own way by forest, lake, and river, he was careful to mark it, for reference for others, by naming every feature and object of it. He had a name for every region and for each part of it; for every rill and spring, every summit, swamp, meadow, waterfall, bay, and promontory. The most intelligent explorers among us have often remarked upon the exquisite taste and fitness of the names which the Indians attached to every spot and scene of the country, — as Athabasca, “the Meeting-place of Many Waters;” Minnehaha, “Laughing Waters;” Minnesota, “Sky-tinted Water.”
Often has the regret been strongly expressed over all parts of our country that there has not been more of effort, pains, and consent to preserve more extensively the aboriginal names of localities, of rivers, lakes, mountains, ​and cataracts, of hill-tops, glens, and valleys, through the continent. Wherever this has been done it is a matter of gratification to the taste and sentiment of our day. Of the six New England States, only two — Massachusetts and Connecticut — bear their original titles. The new States and Territories of the West, and some of our grandest rivers and lakes, are favored in this respect. Most fitly do some of the scenes richly wrought into the romantic stories of French missionaries and explorers — Marquette, Allouez, Hennepin, La Salle, and others — retain their memories. The greatest of our cataracts perpetuates, in the roar of its waters, the sonorous melody of its aboriginal name. It is to be regretted, however, that as it was on St. Anthony's day that Hennepin discovered the western cascade, he should have displaced for that title the Indian name of the “Falling Waters of the Mississippi.” Worse yet was the rejection of the beautiful name Horicon, borne by the fairest of our lakes, allowed to do honor to an English king (George). It may be that, under some æsthetic enthusiasm asserting itself among us, there may be a general consent to restore the Indian nomenclature over our country for memorial or penitential purposes. Mount Desert was once “Pemetie.”
Another very curious and interesting token of the relations into which the Indians put themselves with the animals, as their kindred, if not their Darwinian progenitors, is found in their choice of symbols from the creatures with which they were familiar, as the totems, or badge-marks, of their tribes and families. At first sight these ​totem-marks seem to us simply an element of rude, natural barbarism; but they mean more to us the more closely we study them. And there is another thing to be said about them; for there is an affinity, strange and unexplained, between these forest totem-symbols and some of the proud escutcheon-bearings of monarchs and nobles, states and empires, in the old civilized world. A simple prejudice or habit of association of our own makes us ridicule in the savage what awes or flatters us among white men. The totems of the Indian tribes were the bear, the beaver, the wolf, the tortoise, the squirrel, etc. The emblems were generally — not always, however — rudely sketched and grotesque. But the design and purpose of them were exactly the same as of similar devices in proud Christian nations; for example, England's unicorn and lion, Scotland's thistle, Ireland's shamrock, the fleur-de-lis and the cock of the Frenchman, the bear of Russia and of the canton Berne, the double-headed eagle of Austria, etc. And if we should follow the comparison down through the shields, the armorial bearings, the escutcheons and coats of arms of nobles and private families, with all their absurd devices and figurings, — perhaps Indian pride and ingenuity might find more countenance. Indeed, the roguish and waggish La Hontan — who so scandalized the French Jesuits by his awful truth-telling that he has been unfairly depreciated, though doubtless often sagacious and trustworthy — heads a chapter of his racy volumes on French Canada with the title, “The Heraldry, or the Coats of Arms, of the Savages.” This he illustrates with lively etchings of tribal symbols, — the beaver, the wolf, the bear, etc., so fitting to wilderness and forest men. The “coat of arms” of the kings of Mexico was an eagle griping in his talons a jaguar. It was a pity that they could not have put life into the emblem in their treatment of their Spanish tormentors.
In the ingenuity that has been spent in tracing tokens of a former relationship between the people of the Old ​World and the New, it is remarkable that so little recognition has been made of the affinity between totems and coats of arms.
Something similar is to be said about the costume, the ceremonial adornment, the got-up finery and ornaments, of the red man. Here he exhibits some strange imitations, approximations at least to those of the white man. True, the costume of the Indian was for the most part simply that with which he came into the world. But here again we find an accord with Nature. The Indian, as already noted, did not go naked because he could not procure clothing, but because he preferred freedom of limb and motion. As has been said, he had but a scant sense of shame, modesty, or decency: he took himself as Nature had made him. If he wanted covering — as he did and had — in the winter, he had but to transfer the skins of his brother animals to his own shoulders, often naïvely apologizing to the animals for doing so. At times he would smear his body with clay or paint, to ward off heat, cold, and insects.
There seems a long distance between their forest garb on state occasions and the gold, the lace, and brocades of court pageantry. But let us look a little closer at the matter, and compare aims and the means for reaching them. The Indians sometimes, no doubt, wished to appear fine and grand, like other people. They availed themselves of such ornaments and trinkets as they could get. They had not our range of commerce for stuffs, shawls, laces, ostrich feathers, jewels, etc.; they had not access to our shops and modistes: but they did the best they could. The deerskin, the leggings, the pouch, were richly dressed and embroidered with shells, fibrous roots, and porcupine quills; they mounted the feather and the plume, and had for earrings and necklaces the bear's claw and the snake's rattle. But few of them bored the cartilage of the nose for a pendant. The young and the old squaws, when coming into ​or gracefully retiring from society, had but a limited range compared with our ladies for the choice of cosmetics; but they turned to account such as were within reach, — bears' grease and vermilion. They were content with the hair that grew on their own heads, and they wholly dispensed with corsets and paddings. Their parade in strange feathers and skins with hanging tails, their boring of the nose sometimes, as well as generally the ears, for rings, and their magniloquent titles and stately forms appear grotesque to us. But how very much in such matters depends upon association and use! Do not the curious garb and ever-changing and sometimes unattractive and uncomfortable fashions and ornaments of women, in the most refined circles of life, furnish matter of fun and raillery — not always in secret — for the other sex? In this country, in all our public ceremonials, inaugurations, etc., we have found it possible to dispense with crowns, sceptres, maces, and other insignia, with judges' wigs and all liveries. But foreign courts and shows and forms retain them all as essential or expedient; they go with the griffins and vampires and phœnixes of the Old World still. Foreigners in attendance among us on great state occasions, like the inauguration of a President of the nation, are often disagreeably impressed with the entire disuse of the costumes and emblems familiar to them at home. Our Indians also did the best they could, with their orders of the collar, the fleece, and the garter. The slashed doublets of cavaliers, the hooped or trailed skirt of the lady and her face patched with court-plaster, the ermine of the judge, the curled wig of the barrister, the rod of the tipstaff and the beadle, the sword of state and the black or white wand of the master of ceremonies, the woolsack and seal-wallet of the chancellor and the staff of the drum-major, — all manifest the richer and more abundant material for farce and ceremonial of the white man, not a more elevated and ennobled nature.
​And as for high-sounding titles, where among our aborigines shall we outmatch those of “August,” or “Most Christian Majesty,” and their “High Mightinesses” of Holland? What effrontery would be shown by a European tradesman who should presume to dun a Continental petty prince, whose title is “His Most Serene Highness”! What more of significance is there in the Emperor of China assuming his title from the whole heaven, than in the Indian chieftain's contenting himself with appropriating a half-moon?
The Canoe, the Moccason, the Snow-Shoe, and the Wigwam, — these four words suggest to us the most characteristic and distinctive objects identified with the Indian and his life. They mark the quality of his inventiveness and the measure of his skill in adapting himself to his conditions, and in turning to use the materials at his hand. Stress, too, is to be laid on this fact, — that these four devices of the American savage were original inventions of his own, and that he has learned nothing from the white man which has helped him to improve upon them, so perfect are they in themselves.
What the horse is to the Arab, the dog to the Esquimaux, and the camel to the traveller across the desert, the canoe was and is to the Indian. It was most admirably adapted to the two requisite uses which it must serve, — for it was to meet two exigencies, and in no other case of a vehicle invented by man have the two conditions been realized. The canoe was intended both for carrying its owner and for being carried by him. Incidentally, also, it served a third use, affording a temporary roof or covert from the sun and storm by day or night on land. The Indian ventured far out into the open water of our bays, as he ventured in calm weather to cross our sea-like lakes in this frail bark. But its chief and constant and most apt service was for the Indian's transport with his furs and commodities, as he traversed the curiously veined and ​reticulated region which has been described as the wonderful feature of our continent. The proportion which the water-ways bore to land-travel for the routes which the Indian traversed, was at least nine parts out of ten. The lake-shore was skirted, the swamp was cunningly threaded, the river channel was boldly followed, the rapids were shot and leaped, and the mazy stream of shallows and sand-bars was patiently traced in all its sinuosities by the frail skiff. True, the Indian canoe seemed to need an Indian for its most facile use and its safest guidance. The best position for the occupant was to lie flat on his back if he trusted to floating, or to rest still on bended knees if he plied the single paddle with strokes on either side. All uneasy, restless motions, all jerks and sidelings were at the risk of passenger, canoe, and freight. Count Frontenac, when first as Governor of Canada for Louis XIV. he began his experience as a voyager with the natives, expressed in strong terms his disgust at the cramped and listless position to which he was confined in the birch canoe; and the Jesuit missionaries, the most patient and heroic of all Europeans as they met every cross and hardship, were very slowly wonted to it. They give us many piteous narrative touches of the constant risks and the need of a steady eye and of a stiff uniformity of position in the buoyant but ticklish vehicle of transport. When they had in it their own precious sacramental vessels, they needed an ever nervous watchfulness against disaster. Till the passengers had learned to adapt themselves to the exacting conditions, their timidity and anxiety furnished a constant source of ridicule and banter to their native pilots. The merriment was loud and unsympathizing when the passenger tipped himself into the waters, still or foaming, unless at the same time he swamped the canoe with a valuable cargo. Yet when the uses and the craft needed for them were fully appreciated and acquired by French voyageurs, the canoe in their hands became a more favorite and facile thing than it was to the ​Indian. When we read of La Salle as contriving to transport an anvil, as well as the essentials of a forge and many of the heavy and bulky materials for building a vessel, from Quebec to the mouth of the Illinois River in one or more canoes, we put a high estimate upon the capacity of the craft, as also of the paddlers. The shore of lake or river afforded the ready means in bark and pitch for repairing damages if the canoe sprang a leak, or was bruised or perforated by a sharp rock.
But the lighter the bark was when on its own element it carried its owner, the more easy was its burden when in turn it had to be borne on his own back or shoulder over a stretch of the tangled forest, or round the rough rocks of a cascade, by the portages. Its freight would be transported on one transit, itself by another, or by several successive trampings. The canoe as a product of wilderness art and ingenuity is to be judged not only by its own adaptations, but also by the resources at hand for materials and the scanty tools available for its construction and repair. Some curious conflicts of testimony as to the ventures and discoveries of early navigators along our coasts and into our bays depend upon the accounts given us of the style and material of the skiffs seen in use by the natives, — whether they were birch canoes, or so-called “dug-outs.” The birchen boats were always preferred by the Indian where the trees furnished the bark, as most readily fashioned, the most light and strong, and the most easily repaired. The laminations of the bark, of any size and thickness desired, were bended around a simple frame-work of light and stiff slits of any hard wood well seasoned; they were firmly bound and held by fibrous roots and animal sinews, and made impervious to water by a compound of pitch and grease. A fracture or leak was, as just stated, at once repaired by pulling the canoe to the shore or the beach and drawing on the stores of the woods. Fitly does Longfellow give to it life and motion in his picturing lines: —
* And the forest life is in it, —
* All its mystery and its magic,
* All the tightness of the birch-tree,
* All the toughness of the cedar,
* All the larch's supple sinews.
* And it floated on the river
* Like a yellow leaf in autumn,
* Like a yellow water-lily.”
It was desirable that a canoe should be fashioned with as large strips of bark as possible, to reduce the number of joints uniting them. These joints were originally sewed with long fibres from the roots of the spruce-tree. One or more transverse bars kept the craft in shape. The bow and stern turned sharply upwards. It was usual to lift the canoe from the water at night, and as often as was convenient during stoppages by day, to give it a chance to dry, as the bark readily absorbs water, increasing its weight. For two hundred years canoes of great carrying capacity, for many tons of freight and many paddlers and passengers, have been in use by the employés of the Hudson Bay Company, and are known as Canots du Nord. The steerage of these vessels through the rapids is a critical and exciting work. The chief responsibility is with the bowsman, really the captain, who sharply gives his directions by words and gestures to the paddlers in the middle and the steersman in the stern. Sometimes in smooth waters, with a moderate wind, a sail is availed of. The management and navigation, with a valuable load, require the utmost caution of all concerned to keep the balance, as the only way to “trim the ship.”
Where the materials for the birchen fabric — varying as it would in size for one or for fifty human passengers and their goods — were not to be found, nor its less facile substitutes, elm or oak bark, the Indian had an alternative craft. By the help of fire and his stone axe he would bring down a giant tree from the forest, and sever a section of the trunk of desired length, ​with regard to proportions of width and depth. This solid butt he would then split with wedges, and by burning and gouging would hollow it out, reducing the sides and bottom to the utmost thinness consistent with buoyancy and security. This was the “dug-out.” And this, as well as the birchen canoe, admitted of gay ornament or of frightful and hideous devices, in carving and painting, as a vessel of war, according to the taste and skill of the artist. Nor were the skill and cunning of the Indian exhausted in these two serviceable styles of watercraft. With a single buffalo or deer skin, or with several of them stitched together and stretched over a frame of osiers, he would readily extemporize a conveyance through the waters for one or many. As readily, too, from the trunks or branches of prostrate trees would he improvise a sea-worthy raft.
The moccason, also, in name and device, was original with the North American Indian, and, without being patented, holds the ground as — for him, and, we might add, for many of us — the most fitting, convenient, and healthful foot-gear. The dressed or tanned hide of the deer furnished its upper and lower leather; a small bone of a fish, or one near the ankle-joint of the deer, provided the needle, and the sinews the thread, for sewing. The seam was behind the heel and over the foot, instead of, as in our fabrics, at the sole or bottom. The moccason was made of one piece of skin. Unlike our heavy boots, it did not impede the perspiration of the foot, and it saved the Indian from corns and bunions. The wearer was not apt to take cold, as by a leak in a shoe or boot. It was easily dried, and easily mended. It was equally adapted by its smoothness for treading upon the tender bottom of a canoe, and, by its pliancy and elasticity, for coursing forest paths or climbing rocks.
In the rougher regions of the Northwest, and especially for the uses of the “voyageurs, the trappers, and the ​coureurs de Bois” in the service of the various fur-trading companies, some more substantial fabrics for apparel and travel than those of the natives were necessarily introduced. These combined materials and processes brought from Europe with those which were indigenous, just as knives and firearms and metal vessels, shared with aboriginal implements an equal place. Warm under-apparel and capotes for covering head and ears, though not in favor with the natives, were essential to the whites, till, as was generally soon realized, the roughest of them became Indians. The form and style of the moccason were retained, while it was made so large as to admit of being drawn over several pairs of stockings, — needful in the extreme severities of the weather and in deep snows. Strings of dogs, harnessed singly or by couples, attached to slight-built sledges and carioles, transported loads of goods into the country and took out of it returns of peltry. These dog-trains required skilled drivers, as they were generally fretful and rebellious under such forced service. A passenger rolled in furs might ride with the load, but the driver must go behind or by the side of the train on foot, and often an assistant was required to precede it to trample down the snow. Never were emphatic words — a jargon of French, which language contributed the oaths and imprecations — more constantly in use than by the drivers of these dog-trains.
The snow-shoe, as the winter supplement to or accompaniment of the moccason, enabled the Indian to go upon the war-path or to chase down the beleaguered game when the earth was covered with its fleecy mantle piled in mountain drifts. This simple device exercised the wilderness skill of its inventor and tested practically his apt intelligence to apply materials, proportions, and disposals of parts and measurements, in ways which science cannot mend. It resembled in shape a miniature skiff, two feet or more in length and more than a foot in breadth, pointed ​at the toe, and running back with elliptical sides to a square in the rear. The frame was slight but strong, of some well-seasoned wood, like the handles of a large basket. A network of sinewy thongs was united with the frame, for bearing on the snow without heavy pressure, releasing the snow as the foot was lifted. It was confined to the foot behind by a cord tied over the instep, so that the heel could readily act freely in rising and resting. A small loop near the point of the shoe received the toes, and retained the shoe on the foot. Of course the whole pressure of the weight of the body came upon the front of the foot and over the line of junction of the toes. The more rapidly the wearer walked or ran, the easier was it for him to bear this light burden, and the less did he sink into the drift. When the snow-surface was glazed by ice, the simple moccason was preferable as a covering, and the snow-shoes were carried upon the back. Only practice could give facility and comfort in the use of this native invention for travel, without which a struggling wanderer would often sink to his neck at every attempt to step forward. The Indian would go like a deer when thus shod. But piteous are the entries in the journals of many white adventurers when in the company of savages on the route; the alternative was before them either of giving over in the tramp, or suffering sharply till they had “caught the hang” of the snow-shoe. Chilblains were but the slightest part of the infliction. The constant friction of the tie over the instep and of the loop over the toes galled the flesh, and the oozing and freezing blood were sorry concomitants for the traveller. Glad was he when the stint appointed for the day's journey was ended, and resting in the camp, though roofless and with a cordon of snow, he could soothe and dress his stinging extremities. Yet even then he had to contemplate a renewal of his journey before the morrow's daylight, with the increase of his sufferings. The Indian ​wasted no commiseration on such tyros, well knowing that there was but one way of permanent relief, and that that would come through endurance and patient practice. Sometimes, when there was but a thin coating of ice over the snow, which by yielding lacerated the flesh of travellers — man or beast — by edges sharp as glass, it was usual to bind strips of skin or fur round the legs of the dogs, and thus give them shoes.
Little needs to be added to what has been already said about the wigwams or lodges of the aborigines. These, where they were constructed for anything like permanency of habitation, might be made comfortable, bating only the annoyances of smoke, vermin, and untidiness, — which, however, to the Indian were hardly an abatement of comfort. When a war-party or the necessity of hunting for daily supplies did not call the master of the lodge away, but left him an interval of domestic leisure, he divided his time between eating, sleeping, and working upon his simple tackle and implements. Where there was a group of such lodges in a village, the men would have their coteries by themselves; while the squaws, when not engaged upon the family food or apparel, would find a congenial resource in gossip. The practice of polygamy, though universally allowable, seems to have been indulged in only in the small minority of households. There was nothing to prevent a man from having as many wives as he had means to purchase from their parents, and was able to maintain. The usual risks incidental to married life, especially where there were duplicated or multiplied demands upon the care and attention of a husband, were of course in some instances realized. But all testimony accords in assuring us that there was no more, if not really less, of discord in an Indian lodge, even with this provocative occasion for it, than in the homes of all the degrees of civilized people.
Doubtless there were seasons, especially in the northern regions of the country, when in the grip of a lengthened ​winter — buried in mountain heaps of snow, whirled by the wild blasts, and scant or wholly destitute even of the least nutritive food — life in the wigwam for a solitary person or a family combined all the miseries of a dismal and dreary existence. The Indian's self-mastery and philosophy bore him through these dark extremes of his experience. The bear was hibernating; the deer had sought the thickest woods; the beaver's lodge was fast bound in ice; and even the fish in the streams were not longer to be reached by the gleam of torches or tempted by an air-hole through the thick covering of hard and soft snow. There was not a bird in the air. The weary season wore away: and when the spring came — as it does in those northern realms — with a rushing cheer and vigor, the spell was broken; for Nature provided bountifully for her children when she was released from her own bondage.
The prevailing view and representation of the habits of the aborigines is that they were wasteful and improvident as to provision for their own most common needs of sustenance; and that in consequence there was a period in every year, in the extremities of winter, when they were hopelessly annoyed by the pangs of hunger, — often to the extremities of starvation. And this was said to be the case, not from the absolute conditions and necessities and exigencies of their way of life, but from sheer indolence, recklessness, and an utter incompetency in forethought and prudence. There may be a general accordance with fact and observation in this view, but it needs qualification; very large and very significant exceptions are found to it in many cases. Of course the Indian's habits as to thrift and providence in providing for his needs put him most strongly in contrast with those of the first white settlers on his lands. The wise and laborious Northern colonists, in foresight of a stern winter, built their log-cabins strong and tight, with chimneys to carry off the smoke. They provided cellars banked against the ​penetrating frost, where they stored their vegetables and kept their tubs of salted meat. They raised their wood-piles nigh at hand, and very soon had shelters for domestic cattle, — goats, cows, pigs, — and for poultry. The Indian had resources within his reach which he only in small part improved. He had no salt for pickling, and could only smoke and dry his surplus meat or fish. His native vegetables were peas, beans, melons, squashes, pumpkins, gourds, maize; the forest yielded in abundance juicy berries, some succulent roots and grasses and grapes, as well as game; and the ocean shore, lakes, and rivers gave up their finny spoils. White men on the frontiers have contrived to live, and after a fashion luxuriously, on these resources. The Indian, also, had his feasts upon them, but not wholly to the exclusion of fasts. Gathering details from a wide and varied list of early authorities about their way of life and habits in these respects, we can make rather a favorable show for them. It seems evident that white men learned from the Indian the process of making sugar from the sap of the maple-tree, and also the medicinal virtues of several roots and herbs. The natives, as before stated, unquestionably anticipated their white visitors in their sudatory treatment of the sick, after the fashion of our modern Turkish baths; though Lafitau finds the process and contrivance in the old classic world, as he traces so many parallels there with things supposed to be peculiar to our aborigines. They buried heaps of their ripe maize, or Indian corn, in pits, or packed it high on scaffoldings, and a skilful squaw could make a variety of dishes from this substantial grain. In fact, it would appear that the early European colonists, in all their widely separated harboring places on the whole stretch of our sea-coast, were indebted to the surplus maize which the Indians had in store, to save them, on one or another exigency, from starvation.
When Jacques Cartier first ascended the St. Lawrence, ​in 1534, he says the Indians gave him great quantities of good food and palatable bread. The next year when he was taken by them to their village, Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal, he describes far-stretching fields covered with ripening maize, — probably one of the last crops of that soon after war-havocked region.
The early Jesuit missionaries all write of well-cultivated fields cared for by the natives; who pursued the same course as our frontiersmen have followed ever since, — girdling and then burning the trees, leaving the stumps to decay, grubbing up bushes, and then planting. Sagard, a Recollet missionary in 1625, gives a very particular account of the Hurons as dividing their lands into lots which were well cultivated.
The first act of the Plymouth Pilgrims in the extreme needs of their first winter here was a trespass upon the contents of a pit of corn buried by the Indians, though they afterwards made payment for what they appropriated. The friendly natives taught the Plymouth people how “to set corn,” — that is, to plant the kernels of maize, which was a strange grain to them. The beautiful streams, the Town Brook and the Jones River, poured in in the springtime, in season for planting, immense shoals of alewives. One or two of these, fish were put with the kernels into each drill, and served for an enriching manure. A brook running in from the Mystic, near the classic grounds of Harvard College, still bears the name of Alewife Brook. The first white settlers found the natives drawing from it a fertilizer for a wide extent of their planting grounds. The Pilgrims very often sent their shallops to the coast of Maine to buy corn of the Indians. When the first settlers of Connecticut were once in dread of famine, they sent up the river from Hartford and Windsor to Pocumtock, now Deerfield, and the river Indians brought down to them fifty canoe-loads of corn. In Governor Endicott's raid on the natives in Block Island, mention is made of two hundred ​acres of “stately fields of corn” which were destroyed by the whites. In the frequent and destructive onsets made by the French, with Huron allies, against the Iroquois or New York Indians and their beautiful fields, marvellously large garners of corn were burned, in fruitless attempts to starve the natives, who had supplies for two years in store. The party under General Sullivan, in his Indian expedition in 1779, saw with surprise the evidences of thrift among the Iroquois, and noted not only vast quantities of maize and vegetables, but old apple-orchards, the stock of which must have been obtained from the French or Dutch. In the campaigns of Generals Harmer and St. Clair beyond the Ohio, after the close of the Revolutionary war, we read of the destruction of vast fields of corn in the river bottoms, belonging to the Miamis.
The early French missionaries describe the more thrifty of the natives with whom they first became acquainted, — the Abenakis, around the Penobscot and in northern New Hampshire, — as industrious and prosperous. They had fixed palisaded villages and substantial bark-cabins. Their ornaments were rings, necklaces, bracelets, and belts skilfully wrought with shells and stones. They had fertile and well-tilled fields of maize and other vegetables, planted in June and harvested in August. Further west the wild game was in abundance, different kinds of it alternating in different seasons. Enormous flocks of fowl made their spring and autumn migrations, offering a rich variety. It would appear, that, according as the natural crops or products of various parts of the country admitted of preservation by any artificial process within the skill of the Indian, they were stored for use. The maize was the most substantial and the easiest for culture and preservation, through heat and cold. A quart of the kernels roasted and pounded, to be as needed mixed in water, with or without being boiled, committed by the Indian to his pouch, would serve him for a long journey. It was usual for the squaws to dry large ​quantities of summer berries, and to renew the juices in them by mixing them in cooking with flesh food.
So far from agreeing with the general judgment about the wastefulness and improvidence of the Indians, there are intelligent persons who have lived among them, observant of their ways, who have given strong statements of quite other qualities of theirs, especially in some of the Western tribes. Indeed, their economy and thrift have in some matters been set in censorious contrast with the recklessness of the whites. For example, in some recent years there is evidence that at least a million buffaloes on the Western plains have annually been slaughtered by whites and Indians in the way of trade, merely for their hides and tongues, — the carcasses being wantonly left to poison the air for many miles, and to fatten wolves and coyotes. Before this greed of traffic came in, the economical natives made a good use of every part of a single buffalo, killing only such as they could thus improve. The flesh, either fresh or dried, was for food. The skins were dressed with all of the white man's skill, though by different processes, as were those of other animals, either to remove or to preserve the hair. They were well oiled and dried and made pliant. These skins were variously employed for blankets, lodge-covers, and beds, for temporary boats, for saddles, lassos, and thongs. The horns were wrought into ladles and spoons; the brains furnished a material which had a virtue in the process of tanning; the bones were converted into saddle-trees, war-clubs, and scrapers; the marrow into choice fat; the sinews into bow-strings and thread; the feet and hoofs into glue; the hair was twisted for ropes and halters. So that the Indians left nothing of the carcass — as do the whites — to feed the ravenous and unprofitable packs of prowlers. Nor did the Indians generally kill the buffalo at a season when his flesh was not in keeping for food, or his hide for dressing.
There were also preferred delicacies of the wilderness ​well known to and highly appreciated by the Indian. Among these were the buffalo's tongue and hump, the elk's nose, the beaver's tail, and the bear's paws. Of the cookery of the squaws it may not be well to give any more particulars than those on a previous page. Doubtless it was and is unappetizing, repulsive, revolting often, especially when the process was watched and the materials in the kettle were known. But wilderness food and wilderness appetites went together; and the kitchen, even a French one, is not for the eye a good provocative for the dining-table.
Readers who are versed in the voluminous and highly interesting literature of the Hudson's Bay Company, the narratives of the Arctic and Northwest voyagers and explorers, the adventures of fur-traders, trappers, etc., know well how an article called “pemmican” appears in them all as a commodity for subsistence and traffic. This highly nutritive, compact, and every way most convenient and serviceable kind of food, for preservation and transportation, might rightfully be patented by the Western and the Northern Indians. It was invented by them, and by them it is most skilfully and scientifically prepared. The flesh of the buffalo, the deer, the bear, or the elk is shredded off by the squaws, dried in the sun to retain its juices (two days of favorable weather are sufficient), pounded fine, and then packed in sacks made of the skins of the legs of the animals, stripped off without being cut lengthwise. The lean meat, without salt, is then covered from the air by pouring the fat upon it. The proportions are forty pounds of fat to fifty of lean; and sometimes, when the articles are at hand, there will be mixed in the compound five pounds of berries and five of maple sugar. This may not make the most palatable of viands, but it is admirably adapted for the uses which enormous quantities of it have served alike for men and their sledge-dogs.
​The diversity of languages among our aborigines, already referred to, and the relations between the roots of their words, their vocabularies, and grammatical constructions have been the subjects of a vast amount of inquiry and discussion. The least learned and the most learned have contributed about equally to such information as we have on these subjects. Illiterate white men residing with the Indians as traders or agents, or sharing with them the camp, the hunt, or the war-path, have been forced to become linguists; and in some cases they have quickened their intelligence and sharpened their faculties to learn what they might about languages or dialects which, in their inflections and constructions, differ radically from all those in use among civilized men. With the single exception of that of an ingenious scholar among the Cherokees, no attempt, so far as we know, has ever been made by the natives on the whole stretch of this continent, from north to south, to construct a written language, — not even in the simplest phonetic characters. All has been left to sound and intonation. The tablets and scrolls inscribed or painted with symbols and hieroglyphics by the Aztecs to preserve the chronicles of the people, as described to us by the Spanish invaders, and as appears from the specimens of them still extant, were in no sense linguistic or phonetic transcripts or representations. The preponderance of evidence seems to favor the inference that ages ago more or less of intercourse was maintained between the aborigines, all the way through the continent from the Missouri to Mexico and Peru. This, however, seems to have ceased before the time of European discoveries. Certain it is — whether from devastating internal wars, from the difficulties of extended intercourse, from natural barriers, or the interposition of large spaces of vacant wilderness — there was then almost a total lack of intercommunication between widely separated ​tribes. The variety of languages and dialects was so great, that, in the lack of a common tongue, the Indians could hold but little communication by speech. Certainly the original tribes have been more mixed and confused together since they have been scattered, reduced, and driven from their original homes by the whites. But this fact does not appear to have availed towards aiding them to understand each other's speech. The penalty visited upon our whole race, in the confusion of tongues at Babel, has inflicted its full share on our Indians.
General Custer, rehearsing his experience among Southern and Western tribes in our own days, says: —
“Almost every tribe possesses a language peculiarly its own; and what seems remarkable is the fact, that, no matter how long or how intimately two tribes may be associated with each other, they each preserve and employ their own language; and individuals of one tribe rarely become versed in the spoken language of the other, all intercommunication being carried on either by interpreters, or in the universal sign-language. This is noticeably true of Cheyennes and Arapahoes, — two tribes which for years have lived in close proximity to each other, and who are so strongly bound together, offensively and defensively, as to make common cause against the enemies of either, particularly against the white man. These tribes encamp together, hunt together, and make war together; yet but a comparatively small number of either can speak fluently the language of the other. I remember to have had an interview at one time with a number of prominent chiefs belonging to five different tribes, — the Cheyennes, Kiowas, Osages, Kaws, and Apaches. In communicating with them, it was necessary for my language to be interpreted into each of the five Indian tongues, no representatives of any two of the tribes being able to understand the language of each other.”
De Soto, in his invasion of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, — as we have noted, — had valuable service from Juan Ortiz, as an interpreter, in 1539 and onwards. Ortiz had, eleven years before, been captured by the Indians, in ​the expedition of Narvaez, and then had lived for those years among them. But he could speak only the Floridian language; and we are told, that, in a council or talk with a company of natives of the Chickasaws, the Georgians, the Coosas, and the Mobilians, he had to address himself to a Chickasaw who knew the Floridian, while he passed the words to a Georgian, and the Georgian to a Coosan, the Coosan to a Mobilian, and the Mobilian to a Chickasaw; and so for each reply the process was inverted.
The exigencies imposed by the variety and the peculiar qualities of the Indian languages, have from the first coming hither of Europeans made the office of interpreters a prime necessity. Circumstances have facilitated the appearance from time to time of a class of men with very different degrees of fitness for that office. One is puzzled to imagine how the early navigators who reached and landed on these coasts, and had transient converse with the natives, managed to hold such intelligible intercourse with them as is reported in their narratives. It must have been by signs and gestures. The second set of voyagers and visitors here occasionally found some help in communicating with the savages through one or another waif who had been kidnapped and kept on board the vessel of a previous comer to the coast. In a few cases such kidnapped savages had been taken to Europe for a while, and then brought back, — like Samoset, the Pilgrims' friend at Plymouth, and those transported from Acadia and Canada by the French explorers, to be soon referred to. This was a natural and indeed a necessary resource of the Europeans; not requiring any violence or cruelty, if properly explained, and affording the only possibility for facilitating intercourse. The European navigators could generally obtain willing Indian passengers for visiting Europe.
The necessity of the case soon furnished the skill of interpretation so far as immediately required. It is observable, however, that all effective and really intelligible ​intercourse, beyond the command of a few words of ordinary range, which has been reached between red men and white men, has been by the white man's learning the language of the red man. The missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, when their work was most fresh and earnest and hopeful, gave themselves with devoted zeal to a mastery of the Indian tongues for instruction and preaching. For the lowest forms and uses of intercourse, — as in contention and traffic and barter, — it was comparatively easy for a savage and a European to learn how to quarrel with each other, to cheat and be cheated; but when it came to the higher ends of intercourse, — in instruction, — the white man found his task to lie in mastering such resources as the Indian had for the communication of thought, and in supplying or devising methods or words for conveying ideas, suggestions, and lessons to an Indian on objects and themes wholly new to him. New England in its early years furnished several examples of whites who preached with great facility in the Indian tongue, while the fact has been mentioned that the first funds of Dartmouth College were largely raised by an Indian preaching in Great Britain.
A most apt and curious device, in almost universal use among the Indians, and showing an amazing acuteness and vivacity of mind in them, is their power to communicate with each other, with full intelligence, by sign and gestures and symbols. Very many white experts agree in describing to us the wonders and the perfection of this sign-language. In the multiplicity and variety of their own native tongues and dialects, as they roamed abroad, it would have been utterly impossible for those of different tribes to have held any intelligible communication by words: they would have been as deaf-mutes, had it not been for a similar conventional sign-language. This had no resemblance whatever to the taught finger-alphabet used by deaf-mutes; it was wholly of gesture and symbol. Shakspeare — who has ​images, phrases, and descriptions for everything — admirably sets it forth: —
* “I cannot too much muse,
* Such shapes, such gesture, and such sound, expressing
* (Although they want the use of tongue) a kind
* Of excellent dumb discourse.”
Indians of most widely separated tribes can understand each other and amuse each other, in perfect silence, without a single word, — though with an occasional grunt, — in giving long and minute relations and descriptions, and in telling funny tales. They will impart the length of a journey, on horse or foot; the number of days and nights; describe the route, and countless particulars. A semicircular motion of the hand from horizon to horizon marks a day; the head reclined on the hand, a night; the finger pointed to space in the sky on either side of the zenith, the hour in the day; fingers astride and galloping signify riding, another motion walking rapidly or slowly; the palm of the hand passed smoothly down the face and body describes one of the fair sex; one finger straightly pointed means a true speech; two fingers forked means a snake-tongue, or a lie; a fore-finger raised to the ear means, “I have heard,” or “I approve;” the back of the hand on the ear, “I did not hear,” or “I believe;” the hand laid flat on the lips and then raised, means a prayer or an oath. And this sign-language served as a basis or a guide for such symbolic or hieroglyphic writing as the Indians had.
When General Custer was in retirement for a season at Fort Leavenworth, he made a study of the sign-language and became a great proficient in it, so as at times afterward to dispense with an interpreter. Professor J. W. Powell, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institute, has for several years been engaged on the most systematic attempt and method that have as yet been devised for the study of Indian languages, in their affinities and variances of ​vocabulary and construction. He has sent forth an elaborate syllabus, with blanks and directions for filling them, to guide the inquiries of intelligent residents among the Indians, hoping to receive a very comprehensive body of returns. Colonel Mallory, U. S. A., is an adept in the sign-language, and has made valuable contributions upon it.
The human need and craving for fun, jollity, and amusement found their gratification among the aborigines in means and expressions in full consistency with their nature and condition. True, we should not look for a prevailing mirthfulness and hilarity among such a race of savages as occupied this continent. It is said that young camels are the only animals that never frisk, sport, or gambol in the spring of their existence; and the fact is referred to as a forecast of the sombreness of their cheerless service as soon as they are able to bear a burden and to tread the dry desert. So we associate with our Indians in their native state apathy, reserve, gloom, and sullenness of temper inconsistent with mirthfulness, abandon, and any spring of joy in fun and revelry. There is much that warrants this general view; for even the sports of the Indians, as we shall see, have a grimness and severity of aspect and method in full keeping with their prevailing characteristics. But there are exceptional individuals, occasions, and manifestations. Even without any concert of a company among them for a set purpose of play or revelry, there is an impulse in them for any easy and ready method for relieving the monotony or the seriousness of their experience. When only two or a small group of them are resting in their trampings or lounging indolently about their lodges, they will chaff and banter each other for anything that can be turned to ridicule, though seldom to the extent of provoking resentment. The Indians are much addicted to practical joking, ready to play off a funny or an annoying trick on each other, raising a roar and boisterous response for its success. There is large opportunity for this in the ​freedom of wild life, the exposure of the person, the liability to mishaps and accidents, and especially when any weaknesses like cowardice or boastfulness, or a vaunting of exploits — which is one of the indulgences most habitual to an Indian — enables a companion to turn the laugh upon him.
Only the slightest reference possible is to be made to a subject which, if presented in the details for which our Indian literature affords such abundant materials, would turn the eyes of most readers from the page before them. One of the most painful and repulsive characteristics of savage life, in its debasing influences, — contrasting most sharply with all the resources for employing time and thought, and adding softening and refining charms to society under civilization, — is the free license for impurity and measureless immorality. The obscenity of the savages is unchecked in its revolting and disgusting exhibitions. Sensuality seeks no covert. If the Indian languages are wholly destitute, as we are told, of words of profanity and blasphemy, there is no lack of terms in them, as neither is there of signs, symbols, and acts in open day, for the foulest display of indecency and beastliness.
The Indians are universally persistent and greedy gamblers. This one vice, at least, they did not learn from the whites. It was native among them in its practice, and they throw into it an earnestness and a passion rarely manifested so intensely and widely among white men. For the most part, gaming is confined to the males; but squaws are fond of catching a sly hour and place for it when the eyes of their masters are withdrawn. The squaws themselves are not infrequently the stake between the players, for there is nothing of value to the Indian which he will not put at hazard. This passion may indicate a longing for relief from the tediousness of that supine and listless indolence which the Indian indulges when not hunting or fighting. But as this utter vacancy and torpidness is also ​a fond passion of his, the impulse for gaming, which overmasters it, must be something stronger and more goading. The playing-cards of the white men are greedily seized upon by such of the savages — and they are very many on the frontiers, in California and Oregon and in Washington Territory — as have caught the art of their use from seamen and miners. Nor is the Indian confined in playing with them to the distinctive games common to the white men. They serve him well through his own ingenuity within a large range for chance, though they would not probably in his own hands derive much service for calculation and skill. Doubtless he knows well how to turn them to account for “tricks that are dark.” His own methods and implements for gaming are to white men either trivial or uninteresting, though sometimes exciting. Sleight-of-hand, agility, velocity of movement, a quick eye, and supple muscles in manipulating the sticks or stones of his simple inventory serve his purpose. The working of intense excitement and passion, and the complete concentration of all his faculties in gaming show how absorbing is the occupation to himself. Feats of strength and agility, running, lifting, archery, pitching the quoit, and practising contortions, athletics, and difficult poises of the body give him a wide range for exercise with one or more companions.
Beyond these private methods for occupying idle hours or finding stimulus and excitement in the ordinary run of life, the natives fairly rival the civilized races in the number and variety of their jubilant, festive, and commemorative occasions, independently of those connected with warfare. There were and are general similarities in the occasions for merriment, games, and periodical festivals of commemoration, among the tribes all over the continent. But there are many such that are special and distinctive of single tribes or of a group of tribes. There is not much that is interesting or attractive for ​relation in either class of them for us. Violent bodily exercise in almost superhuman strainings of nerve and muscle; yellings and howlings, accompanied with rattles and drums; gormandizings on their rude and miscellaneous viands, the dog-feast having the pre-eminence; running for a goal; pitching a bar; driving a ball by parties on divided sides, whose heated rivalry when they are huddled in close struggles barely keeps the distinction between play and mortal combat, and occasionally a contest similar to that of the prize-ring among the whites, — these constitute the more stirring and festive gayeties of the Indians. More calm and dignified observances there are, connected with periodical and distinctive festivals among various tribes. A happy occasion is found by some at the season when the green corn is in the milk: the sweetness and simplicity of the repast would seem to engage the gentler sentiments. There is much resemblance also to the New England Thanksgiving in the pleasant recognition of the maize harvesting, the squaws doing the ingathering; while the husking, and the “trailing” or braiding of the ears in strings by the inner husk was an amusement for both sexes and all ages. Graver still, and often with subdued manifestations, were certain lugubrious occasions of fasting and lamenting connected with commemorations of their ancestors and relatives, or the re-disposal of the remains of their dead. Though these occasions generally ended in a breaking of the fast, there were often in them true solemnity, thoughtfulness, and right sentiments. If we can separate from all these occasions the drawbacks incident to the wildness and roughness of the mode of life, the untutored tastes, the poverty of material, and the hold of tradition with its arbitrary requisitions on the minds of the savages, we shall conclude that the ends which they had in view were as nearly compassed in their festivities as are the intents of civilized people in their most elaborate materials and methods ​of amusement, relaxation, or observance. Cruelty in some form was apt to intrude itself even upon the amusements of the savages. Where this was excluded, the whites who have been observers of these spectacles — even of some which are jealously reserved from the eyes of strangers — have reported them as often pleasing for their vivacity, from the evidently keen enjoyment of them, and for their grateful relief from the monotony of a grovelling life. Occasionally a gifted genius among the savages, filled with the traditions and skilfully turning to account the superstitions of his tribe, with all the spirit and imagination, though lacking the metric and rhythmic art, of the poet, would engage for hours the rapt attention of his hushed auditors, as in his generation he was made the repository, for transmission, of their legendary lore.
The preparations for the hunt and the return from it when it had been successful — with exception only of the going and the return of war-parties — were the most noisy and demonstrative occasions of Indian life. The skilled watching of the signs of the seasons, with their keen observance of the periodicity which rules in all the phenomena of Nature, and the reports of their scouts sent only in one or two directions, gave them due notice of the day when the beasts or the fowl — “who know their appointed times” — were ready to be turned to the uses of their more privileged kindred the red men. Their weapons and foot-gear were ready. The squaws were to accompany them to flay the victims and to secure the meat. The night or the day before the start, some simple observances were held to secure propitious omens. The older braves consulted the secrets of their “medicine-bags,” and the youths who were to make their first trial of early manhood were like dogs in the leash. The hunters knew where to go, how to creep in noiseless secrecy, and when to raise the shout. They had agreed whether they were to rush in free coursing upon their game, either to outrun ​them or to strike a panic among them, or whether to surround them and drive them into a circle, or to some pit or precipice or snare. They did not pause a moment, where the animals were tempting in number, to secure any one of them which a hunter had struck down or severely crippled. Each hunter knew his own arrow, or, if armed with a gun, the direction of his bullet; and when the wild scrimmage was over there was no dispute or rivalry, as each selected his own spoils. Care was had, if possible, to gather enough for a gluttonous feast on their return to their lodges, and for the season's store. With the scrupulous economy before referred to, so long as the natives had not learned wastefulness from the whites, they put every fragment of the animal to some good use. More than in any other demand upon their strength or dignity, the male savages were ready, on the occasion of a return from the hunt, to share the burden of the squaws. Sometimes, if the game had led them to a considerable distance from their lodges, it was necessary to cache, or bury in concealment, all that they were unable to convey, returning for it at their leisure. It was only at a special season of the year that different species of game were in good flesh, and that the fleeces of the animals were in proper condition for preserving the hides or skins. The ranges of the different species of game — the buffalo, the moose, the caribou, the mountain sheep, the elk, the otter — were sometimes limited. The bear, the deer, the beaver, and several smaller creatures were widely distributed. The more dependent any tribe was upon hunting, rather than upon other food, the more wild were its habits and the more robust its physique.
But life among these men of the woods and streams had its dark side, — dismal and appalling in its dreads and sufferings. Not to these untutored men, women, and children, more than to the civilized, was existence relieved from real or from imaginary and artificial woes. The ​Indians, through the whole continent and under all variety of circumstances, were and are the victims of enfeebling and distressing superstitions. These are associated with the most serious and the most trifling incidents of their lives. They find dark omens and forebodings not only in events, but even in their own random thoughts. Dreams have a deeper, a more serious, a more potent influence over them than do any occurrences and experiences of the noonday light. They brood for hours of keen and anxious musing over the interpretation of any vision of a night, — its counsel, command, or warning to them. It is in their dreams that their own guiding or guardian spirit comes to them. His own revered and familiar fetich, or especial companion for life, comes to each of the youth passing on to manhood, in some special dream connected with his period of retirement and fasting, as he is in training for a brave. It may come through the shape of some animal or bird, which henceforth is the cherished confidant of the rest of his life.
Among the mysterious treasures of the “medicine-bag” is some article, meaningless to all but the owner, which is identified with this dream messenger. The course of action of an Indian in some of the most important of his voluntary proceedings is often decided by some direction believed to have been made to him in a dream. If forced by companionship or necessity to do anything against which his superstitious musings have warned him, he complies with a faintness of heart which unmans him far more than does a faltering courage in the thick of carnage. A pleasant dream will irradiate his breast and his features for long days afterwards. He cheerfully complies with any acts of self-denial to which he is prompted through this medium. A pleasant story is told of a chief of the Five Nations in warm friendship with Sir William Johnson, British agent among those tribes. Seeing once the portly officer arrayed in a splendid scarlet uniform, with chapeau ​and feather and epaulets and gold lace just received from England, the chief suggestively assured him soon after that he had dreamed a dream. On being questioned as to its purport, he candidly said that he had dreamed that Sir William was to make him a present of a similar array. Of course the politic officer fulfilled the dream. After a proper lapse of time Sir William also communicated a dream of his own, to the effect that the chief would present him with a large stretch of valuable land. The chief at once conferred the gift, quietly remarking that the white man “dreamed too hard for the Indian.”
The significance which the superstition of the Indian gives as omens to signs in heaven among the stars and clouds, or to aspects or incidents or objects which haply attract his notice around him, will either quicken him to joy or burden him with terror. The boldest warrior will wake with shudderings from a profound sleep, and nothing will bend his will to a course of which he has thus been instructed to beware. His own mind in fear or hope gives an ill or a propitious significance to things which have in themselves no suggestion of either character. The dream of a brave whose character or counsel carries weight with it will often decide the issue of peace or war for a tribe. As superstition, like most forms of folly and error, predominates with shadows and fears over all brighter fancies which it brings to the mind, so the Indian's reliance upon his visionary experiences tends to a prevailing melancholy. The traditions of his tribe, also, were inwrought with some superstitions which on occasions turned a bright or a dark counsel in emergencies, and served to inspirit or to depress them in projected enterprises.
The Jesuit missionaries among the Indians soon learned that some of the most embarrassing conditions of their residence, and some of the most threatening dangers to which they were exposed, — thwarting their efforts at conversion, and keeping their lives in momentary perils, — came ​from the superstitious suspicions of the natives. Cases of individual disease did not alarm them; but anything like an epidemic, contagious, or prevailing malady they always ascribed to an evil charm. They bent a lowering gaze upon the missionary as he went on his errands of mercy, suspecting him of communicating disease. Often did the zealous Father in cunning secrecy draw the sign of the cross on the forehead of the sick infant; for even baptism came to be dreaded under some circumstances, as if that also were a charm. The darker passions of treachery, revenge, cherished animosities, cunning watchfulness for opportunity to gratify a grudge, and the practice of dissimulation were, of course, as human proclivities, found in their full power among the men of the woods. Among the romantic views which enter into the prevailing conceptions of savage life is that which attributes to the Indian a somewhat remarkable exercise of gratitude in keeping in long remembrance any service or favor towards him, and waiting for an opportunity to repay it. Much will depend upon the sort of service or favor thus to be compensated. But there is nothing peculiar to the savage in this manifestation.
The advocates of a resolute and vigorous military policy by our Government, as alone effective in the management of our Indian tribes, would pronounce it a most serious omission from a volume covering our whole subject if it failed to draw strongly, and in full and harrowing detail, the horrors and barbarities of Indian warfare, and the characteristic qualities of the savage as above all things a born fighter, blood-thirsty, ferocious, and destitute of all human feelings in his brutal conflicts with his own race or with the whites. Perhaps as much as most readers will care to peruse has been already put before them on previous pages in reference to the inhumanity and barbarity of the savage in warfare, to his fiendish torturings of his victims, and to his frenzied passion, unslaked even by the ​flesh and blood of his foe. Enough more will needs be said or recognized in pages yet to follow, in the various divisions of our subject, to keep in our minds these repulsive qualities of the Indian as a fighter. In general it is to be said, that, apart from those qualities as a torturer and a cannibal, — which are simply inherent in full barbarism, — the savage Indian, like the civilized white man, uses against an enemy, in warfare, all the arts and implements — the guile, the ambush, the stratagem, the surprise, the deceit, the weapons, and the flames — which he can put to his service. Lacking the steel sword, knife, and bayonet, the pistol, firelock, and cannon, the armor, the horse, and the bloodhound, of the European, his armory was drawn from the stones, the flint-barbed arrow and spear, occasionally tipped with poison, the sharp fish-bone, the tomahawk, and the war-club. He did the best he could under the circumstances. The “calumet,” first mentioned under this Indian name by De Soto, is familiar to us as the emblem of peace when smoked and passed from hand to hand in an interview or council. This pipe was often lavishly ornamented.
There is occasion here, in connection with the relation of the other incidents and elements of savage life, to note not so much the methods as the customs of the savage tribes in preparation for and in the return from their fields of blood. The savage, in all the northern parts of our continent, was and is a born fighter. A state of warfare is his chronic condition. So far as it relieves the burden of reproach on the white man in his long and generally, but not always, prevailing conflict with the savages, — and the relief is a considerable and a serious one, — we have to emphasize the fact that the Indians have been each others' most virulent and fatal foes. They were found to be fighting each other when the white man came among them; and each and all the tribes, as one by one they have been brought into communication, had stories to tell ​of previous and recent conflicts, and traditions of others running back into undated periods. It would indeed be difficult to say whether more of havoc had been wrought among the Indians in their internecine strifes than by the white man in his comprehensive warfare against them. From the formation of our own National Government its humane services have been often engaged in very embarrassing and sometimes costly efforts to repress the hostilities between various tribes. These strifes have generally been hereditary, with a long entail. The Indian's memory, reinforced by faithful transmission through the traditions of the elders, is for these matters an equivalent substitute for records. Only within quite recent years our Government came as an umpire and a pacificator into one of these hereditary feuds between the Sioux, or Dakotas, and the Chippeways, in the Northwest. Neither of the parties could date the beginning of the alienation; or, at least, each of them referred it to a different cause in its origin. The successive forts built by our Government at the junction of Western rivers and other strategic points, while mainly designed to aid its own purposes, have often served to overawe or prove a refuge for a prowling or a hounded tribe of hostiles against hostiles.
With such training for the field of conflict and blood the savages were always ready in preparation for any new scene and enterprise. They had, as well as white men, their military code, with rules and principles, their system of signals, their challenges, — except where a bold surprise was essential, — their conditions and flags of truce, their cartels, and terms of peace through reparation and tribute. We are familiar enough with the aboriginal figures of speech, the “burying” or the “lifting” the hatchet. “Laying down the hatchet” signified the temporary suspension of fighting, as in a truce. “Covering the hatchet” was condoning a cause of feud by presents. It is probably a mistake to suppose that the savages in their own tribal ​warfare always sought to come upon the enemy in secret surprise: this was their method with the whites; but most frequently the savage enemy had reason to expect a blow. Generally, too, while with provocation and a reasonable hope of success a single tribe would take the war-path alone, alliances were sought for by them, especially when their foes were multiplied. There was in the latter alternative full deliberation upon strength, resources, and methods. Messengers passed between these allied tribes; the council fires were lighted; the pipe was passed from mouth to mouth; intervals of deep silence were observed, for thoughtfulness and the summoning of wise speech. There was no clamor, no interruption of a speaker, whose forest eloquence enlarged upon grievances and deepened hate, roused courage by satire upon the cowardice of the enemy or flattery of the prowess of the hearers. When the speaker closed, a single deep ejaculation was the sole comment on his words. After due pauses, as many orators as were moved to utterance were patiently heard. Those who had best proved their bravery and ardor were most closely listened to. There was no place for cowards, though words of caution and hesitancy were not discountenanced.
The scene in an Indian village the night preceding the going forth to the fray was hideous and diabolic. The painted, bedizened, and yelling fiends lashed themselves into a fury of passion, with contorted features and writhing gestures, striking their hatchets into the crimson warpost, and imitating the laments and shrieks which they intended to draw from a mastered foe. The clatter of drum and rattle is in keeping with their tuneless music. Thus with all the aspect and array of devils they prepared themselves to strike the blow. The aged and feeble, the women and children, were left in the lodges to await in dread the return of the braves; never, however, disheartening them, but following them with rallying parting cheers ​of praise and promise. The “war-whoop” is a phrase which has had terrific meaning for those who have quailed before its pandemonium fury. True to their proud kinship with the animals, the braves borrow from bears, wolves, owls, and the rest those howls and yelps, those shriekings and barkings, by which to strike a panic through their victims and to paralyze their energies.
In such of the Indian towns as were strongly fortified by palisades there was often occasion for much strategy in attack and defence. We need not follow this war-party, nor rehearse its doings, but take it up again at its return to the village. Those who are there on the watch for them are informed first by scouts sent in advance of the party. The first announcements, made in gloom and wailings if the occasion calls for it, are of the disasters of the expedition, of the number and names of the slaughtered, or of those left as captives, of their own side. The women who are bereaved by these losses are allowed full indulgence in their screams and lamentings, finding in the sharpening of their grief a keenness for the savage passions which they are soon to wreak on victims, if any such come in as captives.
When the full war-party comes in, if it has been even but moderately successful, all these laments must yield to boastful shouts of elated triumph. The warriors rehearse their exploits, with mimicry of their own actions and those of the enemy. The scalp-locks are swung in the air, the bloody weapons are brandished, and the scenes connected with those of the night preceding the start on the war-path are re-enacted. If there are prisoners, their fate is direful. Occasionally the privilege is granted to any one of the tribe, man or woman, who has been bereaved of a relative, to claim that one or more may be spared for adoption in place of the deceased; and, according to circumstances, the rescued captive may become a hard-tasked slave, or be received in full friendship as a member of the ​tribe. According to circumstances, too, he will henceforward be on the watch for an opportunity to escape, or, becoming reconciled to his lot, will make the best of it. The methods of torment are graduated by processes leading on through intensified trials of endurance and sensibility to a result which, while stilling the tide of life, shall dismiss the spirit in a quiver of agony. The victims of this barbarity are usually first subjected to the running of the gantlet between two defined goals, the women and the children lining the way, inflicting blows, with bitter taunts.
It is when, under the insults, the lashings, the kicks, and maulings of this preliminary ordeal, and in the fiercer agonies of the stake, the brave can maintain his calm and serenity of countenance, with exalted spirit, taunting his tormentors because their devices are so weak and harmless, boasting of the number of them whom he has treated in the same way, and raising his death-song above their yellings, — it is then that they reward him with their admiration. This may prompt a generous enemy — not in pity perhaps, but in responsive nobleness of spirit — to deal the final blow of deliverance. The coward, who shrinks and weeps, and pleads for mercy, only raises the scorn of his tormentors, and leads them to prolong and multiply the ingenuities of cruelty.
This sketch of the war-customs of the savages conforms more particularly to the periods preceding their intercourse with the Europeans, and to those after the races were brought into their earlier strifes. Among the Western and Northern tribes these war-usages have continued substantially unchanged to our own times; but slight modifications have come into them within this century. There have been occasions in very recent conflicts between the whites and the Indians, when, under the goadings of some deep-felt sense of wrong and perfidy in their treatment, all the most furious passions of the savages ​seem to have been kindled into an intensified rage and desperation. Military officers now in service, and frontiersmen on our border lines, testify that the war-spirit, with all its attendant savage characteristics, has not been mollified or subdued in some of the tribes, but has rather been exasperated by the experience of the white man's potency, and by the dark forebodings of destiny for the red race. The slaughterings which we call massacres, when wrought by the Indians, have been as hideous and as comprehensive in their fury within the lifetime of the present generation as were any on the records of the past. Our military men have found their savage foes as quick in stratagem and as artful in their devices as if they had been learning in their own school something equivalent to the modern civilized advance in the science of soldiery. Our campaigners against a body of hostiles, when seeking to conceal their motions and trackings, have learned to look keenly towards all the surrounding hill-tops to discover any of the “smoke-signals,” made from moist grass and leaves with a smouldering fire, by which the ingenious foe, hidden in their retreats, make known to their separate watch-parties the direction and the numbers of their jealously observed white pursuers. The frontier settler, telling his experiences of the prowling Indian thief, incendiary, and murderer, will not admit that the savage has been either awed or humanized by feeling the power or influence of the white man. The ingenuity of the Indian is taxed in arraying himself in war-paint, especially as he has no mirror to aid him. Very few of our natives seem to have practised tattooing, except of some small totem-figure on a limb. Le Moyne, in his illustrations, represents the Florida Indians as elaborately and even artistically tattooed over the whole body, except the face.
The first fire-arms that came into the hands of our savages, giving them the aid of the white man's ​implements for warfare, were those which the Dutch on the Hudson, about the year 1613 and subsequently, bartered with the Iroquois or the Mohawks for peltry. This was most grievously complained of afterwards by the French in Canada and the English on the Atlantic seaboard as an act of real treachery, for the sake of gain, against the common security of all European colonists. The French and the English protested against it, and vainly sought by prohibitions and enactments to prevent any further traffic of the sort. The mischief was done. The savage now felt himself to be on an equality with the white man, of whose artificial thunder and lightning he no longer stood in superstitious awe. Not again were the savages to quail before the report and the deadly missile, as they did on that first campaign of the French, when Champlain, near the lake to which he gave his name, fired his arquebuse with fatal effect. The Indian's eye and aim with the rifle have heightened his skill and prowess as a fighter. As we shall note further on, upon the plea that as game has become scarcer and more timid the bow and arrow have lost their use, the Indians on the reservations and under treaty and pensions with our Government, some of whom are of worse than dubious loyalty, have been freely supplied with the best revolvers, rifles, and fixed metallic ammunition. Fierce have been the protests from our soldiers and frontiersmen, that the instruments of their annoyance and destruction come from our national armories.
There has always been a general tendency among the Europeans here to overestimate the presence, method, and influence of anything to be properly called government in the internal administration of Indian tribes. The nearest approach to what we regard as organization, representation and joint fellowship among the Indians is presented to us in what is known as “The Iroquois League,” which has had an imaginative delineation in the exquisite poem of ​“Hiawatha,” and proximately a truthful historical description by the late Lewis H. Morgan, — an adopted member of the tribe, and familiar from early years with its rich traditions. There seems to have been more of system and method in the confederated League of the Tribes composing the union, than there was of like organization in each of its component parts.
In the several independent or even affiliated Indian tribes with which the Europeans came into contact from the first colonization, the latter assumed that there was a tolerably well-arranged method in each of them for the administration of affairs of peace and war by a chief and his council, who had an almost arbitrary authority; that he received tribute, which was equivalent to a system of taxation; and that the proceeds constituted a sort of common treasury to be drawn upon for public uses. One of the grievances alleged by King Philip and other sachems when, under the influence of the Apostle Eliot, many of the Indians had been gathered into villages of their own that they might be instructed and trained, was that they ceased to pay the tribute which they had previously rendered to their chiefs. There may, therefore, have been instances, more or less defined, in which such usages prevailed among the tribes. But it is safe to say that they were by no means general, still less indicative of a universal custom of Indian government. There was no occasion for endowing a chief, or for furnishing him a salary. The probability is that there has been more of organized and of administrative order in several of the tribes since the coming of the whites than there was before, and that modifications and adaptations of original Indian usages, or a recourse to some wholly new ones, have necessarily followed upon intimacy of relations with the strangers. When the whites wished to make a treaty with a tribe, to obtain a grant of land, or to execute any other like covenant, they would naturally call for such persons among them as had authority, ​executive and decisive, for acting for the tribe. These the whites called kings, chieftains, sachems, councillors, while the commonalty were called subjects. The facts certainly soon came to conform to this view of the whites; but it is doubtful whether such had previously been the state of things. Especially is it doubtful whether the members of a tribe considered themselves as subjects of their chief, in our sense of the word. Our term “citizens” would more properly apply to them. They spoke of themselves as the people of a tribe. We shall have again to refer to this point in connection with the matter of the cession of lands.
There was a wide variety as to headship and methods of organization among the scattered tribes of the aborigines on this continent. We find frequent instances in which headship was divided into two distinct functions, there being a chief for affairs of war and another for civil administration, — a fighter and an orator. The “powwows,” priests, or medicine-men had functions in the government. Sometimes the hereditary headship ran in the male, sometimes in the female line, and occasionally it ran off into collateral branches. The holding of a headship, if its possessor was of marked ability, gave him a large range to assert authority, and assured to him full liberty and acquiescence in its exercise. The ablest Indians with whom the whites have had the most serious relations, in peace or war, have been without exception chiefs of their tribes. There have been but few of these great men, born sovereigns and patriots, compared with the vastly larger number of the ordinary and petty sachems who have held their places. Often, too, the character and qualities of the so-called subjects would influence the functions and authority of a chief, as well as indicate what sort of a man he had need to be.
Under the term “Belts,” Europeans name the wrought and ornamented strips of skin or cloth in use by the natives, made by themselves, and employed to signify or ratify covenants, pledges, and treaties in their councils upon the ​more serious affairs, among their own tribes or with the whites. As first known to the whites through the Indians near the coast, these “Belts,” called “Wampum,” were often used as currency and ornaments. There they were made of little fragments of sea-shells; in the interior, of other hard and glittering fragments, — glass, beads, etc. The laying them down or passing them from hand to hand marks emphatic points in an address, or impresses its close. The intent is that these belts shall be preserved and identified with the occasion and pledge in giving and receiving them. The nomadic and inconstant habits of the natives do not favor this preservation. But in some instances they have been cherished and handed down through careful transmission in a tribe, and acquire sacred associations.
The Indians over our whole northern continent, at least, are indebted to the Europeans for the addition to their own natural resources of what is now the most valuable of their possessions, — a compensation for much which they have lost, and a facility admirably adapted to their use in perfect keeping with their own wild life. This is the horse. Whatever support may be assured for the theory that the horse was at any time indigenous on either section of this continent, or whether, as has been asserted, its bones have been found among fossils, it is certain that the present stock of the animals is from the increase from foreign importations, — first and chiefly by the Spaniards through Florida and California. How marvellous has been the change which time and circumstances have wrought since the simple natives of our islands and isthmus quailed in panic dread and awe at the first sight of those frightful monsters, with their steel-clad and death-dealing riders, till now when the useful and almost intelligent beast has become the Indian's plaything in sportive pastime, and his indispensable resource in the chase and in his skirmishes with the white man! The rifle and the horse have spanned the chasm between the two races in most of the occasions on which they now confront ​each other. The “pony,” as the animal is now affectionately named by the owner, is the chief object in an Indian's inventory of his private possessions. It is the standard estimate of value for the purchase-price in marriage of the daughter of a brave by the young buck who wishes to enter into the bonds of wedlock; and the more ponies the buck possesses, the more of such helpmeets can he gather at the same time in his lodge. And when he wishes the privilege of divorce, he can always salve the wounded sensibilities of a father-in-law by giving him some of the same sort of currency which obtained for him the bride who has become an incumbrance: the father will always take her back if she is well mounted and has relays, — only the animals become his, not hers. The pride of the Indian all over our central and western regions now rests upon his ponies (their number not infrequently running into the hundreds), their training for the chase of beasts, or men, and their fleetness in flight. Symmetry of form, grace of movement, quality of blood, are not generally to any extent objects of critical concern to their owners. They are seldom groomed, though often petted; they are rough and shaggy in appearance, and untrimmed. The breed, as modified from progenitors under a different clime and usage though not wholly unlike forms of service, has adapted itself to new conditions of food, exposure, riders, and treatment. Wholly in contrast with the sleek and glossy Arab courser, the Indian pony, who never knows stable, and but seldom shelter, conforms himself patiently and as by consent of Nature to these changed terms of his experience. Coralled in companies by night, or singly fettered or tied to tree or stake, with a range for browsing, according as security or apprehension from all furtive prowlers might dictate to the owner, the pony finds his chance for resting and for eating at the same time. His food, as well as that of his master, is always contingent, often meagre, and sometimes lacking for days together. On favored expanses of the prairie ​he is at times better fed than is his rider. In his straits he will paw away the deep snows that cover rich or scant herbage, or relieve his pangs by branches of the cottonwood, or other juiceless forage. His training was that which should adapt him to the special requirements of his master. No circus ring shows us more facile or daring equestrians than are common, indeed universal, among the savages. Their accomplishments are marvellous. To overcome the pony's reluctance to draw into too close proximity with the wounded buffalo, and when by his front or side to help the pony to avoid the short horns propelled by muscles of gigantic pressure, is a matter of understanding between him and his master. The pony also easily acquires a conformity of his movements and attitudes to help the purposes of his rider in throwing the lasso. A brave will cling by one arm or leg to the neck or back of the animal, suspending his head and body out of reach by his enemy, and catch his chance to take aim and fire his rifle.
Not the least of the acquired accomplishments of the Indian in equestrianism is that of plying every artifice of cunning and skill, of crawling in the covert, and watching his chance for stealing the horses of his neighbor on the frontiers, or of his enemy in camp. This is one of the highest on the catalogue of the virtues of the Indian. Success in horse-stealing is equal in merit to courage in battle. The Indian in boasting his feats gives a high place to the tale of his equestrian spoils. If after having made a successful raid for such booty he is followed up by the rifled owner, he stands wholly unabashed before the claimant, and seems rather to expect a compliment than a rebuke, appearing outraged at the suggestion of reprisals. The Indians have added horse-racing, in which they are fiery and boisterous adepts, to their own native games; and they love to have white men for spectators. The last resource of the famishing Indian, as indeed it has been of many parties of hunters and explorers among the whites, buried in winter ​snows or on desert plains, is to commit the pony to the kettle, or to tear his raw flesh. In this extremity, however, the beast like his owner is but a bony skeleton.
Nothing answering to our ideas of instruction or even of training was recognized among the Indians for each generation of the young. All the teaching they received was by the approved method of example; only the example was of a sort merely to reproduce without advance or improvement all the characteristic degradation of the same barbarism which had been perpetuated for an unknown lapse of time. The words home, school, pupilage, discipline, morality, decency, find no place in any of the multiplied Indian vocabularies. The catalogue of qualities which we call virtues did not enter even among the idealities of the savage. With scarce an exception in his favor, all who as intimates and observers have best known the Indians report them as fraudulent, insincere, skilled in all the arts of guile and artifice, with habits filthier and more shameless than those of beasts. Such being the most marked traits of the elders among them, and in the lack of any aim or purpose to improve upon themselves in their children, the utmost we could expect of fathers is that they would be simply indifferent to their pappooses, until, growing up to maturity, the girls were about to be salable as wives, and the boys were to put themselves into training for warriors. A common mode of paternal discipline for an offending youth was to throw water upon him by sprinkling or dashing. Indians, however, are often very fond of their children, and excessively indulgent in the liberty allowed them.
The Indian youth — who had been repressed as an infant, left alone for long hours strapped on his birch or bark cradle leaning against tree or wigwam, and not given to crying, because he learned very early that there was no use in crying — was trusted as a child to growth and self-development. He was inured to cold, hunger, and pain; to rough dealings on the ground, in the air, and in the ​water. He had been nursed by his mother for three, four, or even more years, because of the lack of other infantile nutriment. As soon as he was free for the use of his limbs, for the training of his senses, and for the gaining and exercise of physical strength, his prospective range and method of life, with the conditions under which it was to be passed, decided what he was to learn and practise. Upon the females, as soon as they could take their earliest lessons in it, was impressed the consciousness of what their full share was to be in what we now call “women's right to labor.” Their lords and masters never questioned that right, or interfered with it, except to see that it was fully exercised in doing all the work, the easy and the hard alike; for the male Indian would not do a stroke of either. The Indian women were not prolific; their families were generally small. Their happy and indulgent hours were found in their groupings together on the grass or around the fire, with their work in their hands and their tongues busy and free. The boys could gambol, play ball or other games, and practise with their bows and fish-hooks. The girls were equally free until reaching their teens, and in some tribes never came under any discipline of withdrawal or restraint till they became wives. The earnest and laborious efforts which have been made most effectively, in quite recent years, for the school education of young Indians, have profited by a lesson of experience. Trials were made among them of schools after the usage of the whites, the children being gathered before their teachers at the school hours, and then left to return to their parents' lodges. No advance was made by this method, either in the intellectual training or the elevation of the pupils. Recourse is now had to boarding-schools, in which the children are withdrawn from all the influences of their wild life, and are taught decorum, cleanliness, and self-respect, with the alphabet and primer. This is one of the hopeful methods of dealing with our Indian problem.
* ↑ Mr. Parkman, in his “Jesuits in North America” (p. 219), gives us an interesting note on the original name of Lake George, which, he says, was not Horicon, — that word being merely a misprint on an old Latin map for “Horiconi;” that is, “Iroconi,” or “Iroquois.” The first of Europeans who saw the lake was Father Jogues, in 1646, who called it “Lac St. Sacrament,” from the day in his calendar when he beheld it. Mr. Parkman says that Cooper had no sufficient historical foundation for the name “Horicon.”
* ↑ Tempest, iii. 3.