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Chapter XXII
The aborigines East of the Mississippi.
on the surrender of
Acadia to
England, the lakes,
the rivulets, the granite ledges, of Cape Breton,—of which the irregular outline is guarded by reefs of rocks, and notched and almost rent asunder by the constant action of the sea,—were immediately occu-
pied as a province of
France; and, in 1714, fugitives from
Newfoundland and
Acadia built their huts along its coasts wherever safe inlets invited fishermen to spread their flakes, and the soil, to plant fields and gardens.
In a few years, the fortifications of
Louisburg began to rise—the key to the
St. Lawrence, the bulwark of the
French fisheries, and of French commerce in
North America.
From Cape Breton, the dominion of Louis XIV.
extended up the
St. Lawrence to
Lake Superior, and from that lake, through the whole course of the
Mississippi, to the
Gulf of Mexico and the
Bay of Mobile.
Just beyond that bay began the posts of the Spaniards, which continued round the shores of
Florida to the fortress of
St. Augustine.
The English colonies skirted the
Atlantic, extending from
Florida to the eastern verge of
Nova Scotia.
Thus, if on the east the strait of
Canso divided
France and
England, if on the south a narrow range of forests intervened between
England and
Spain, every where else the colonies of the rival nations were separated from each
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236]
other by tribes of the natives.
The Europeans had
established a wide circle of plantations, or, at least, of posts; they had encompassed the aborigines that dwelt east of the
Mississippi; and, however eager might now be the passion of the intruders for carving their emblems on trees, and designating their lines of anticipated empire on maps, their respective settlements were kept asunder by an unexplored wilderness, of which savages were the occupants.
The great strife of
France and
England for American territory could not, therefore, but involve the ancient possessors of the continent in a series of conflicts, which have, at last, banished the
Indian tribes from the earlier limits of our republic.
The picture of the unequal contest inspires a compassion that is honorable to humanity.
The weak demand sympathy.
If a melancholy interest attaches to the fall of a hero, who is overpowered by superior force, shall we not drop a tear at the fate of nations, whose defeat foreboded the exile, if it did not indeed shadow forth the decline and ultimate extinction, of a race?
The earliest books on America contained tales as wild as fancy could invent or credulity repeat.
The land was peopled with pygmies and with giants; the tropical forests were said to conceal tribes of negroes and tenants of the hyperborean regions were white, like the polar bear or the ermine.
Jaques Cartier had heard of a nation that did not eat; and the pedant Lafitau believed, if not in a race of headless men, at
least, that there was a nation of men with the head not rising above the shoulders.
Yet the first aspect of the original inhabitants of the United States was uniform.
Between the Indians of
Florida and
Canada, the difference was scarcely per
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237]
ceptible.
Their manners and institutions, as well as
their organization, had a common physiognomy; and, before their languages began to be known, there was no safe method of grouping the nations into families.
But when the vast variety of dialects came to be com-
pared, there were found east of the
Mississippi not more than eight radically distinct languages, of which five still constitute the speech of powerful communities, and three are known only as memorials of tribes that have almost disappeared from the earth.
I. The primitive language which was the most widely diffused, and the most fertile in dialects, received from the French the name of Algonquin.
It was the mother tongue of those who greeted the colonists of Raleigh at Roanoke, of those who welcomed the Pilgrims to Plymouth.
It was heard from the Bay of Gaspe to the valley of the Des Moines; from Cape Fear, and, it may be, from the Savannah, to the land of the Esquimaux; from the Cumberland River of Kentucky to the southern bank of the Missinipi.
It was spoken, though not exclusively, in a territory that extended through sixty degrees of longitude, and more than twenty degrees of latitude.
The Micmacs, who occupied the east of the continent, south of the little tribe that dwelt round the Bay of Gaspe, holding possession of Nova Scotia and the
adjacent isles, and probably never much exceeding three thousand in number, were known to our fathers only as the active allies of the
French.
They often invaded, but never inhabited,
New England.
The Etchemins, or Canoemen, dwelt not only on the St. John's River, the Ouygondy of the natives,
but on the
St. Croix, which
Champlain always called from their name, and extended as far west, at least, as
Mount Desert.
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238]
Next to these came the Abenakis, of whom one
tribe has left its name to the
Penobscot, and another to the
Androscoggin; while a third, under the auspices
of Jesuits, had its chapel and its fixed abode in the fertile fields of
Norridgewock.
The clans that disappeared from their ancient hunting-grounds did not always become extinct; they often migrated to the north and west.
Of the Sokokis, who
appear to have dwelt near
Saco, and to have had an alliance with the Mohawks, many, at an early day, abandoned the region where they first became known
to
European voyagers, and placed themselves under the shelter of the
French in
Canada.
The example of emigration was often followed; the savage shunned the vicinity of the civilized: among the tribes of
Texas, there are warriors who are said to trace their lin-
eage to Algonquins on the
Atlantic; and descendants from the
New England Indians now roam over western prairies.
The forests beyond the Saco, with New Hampshire, and even as far as Salem, constituted the sachemship of Pennacook, or Pawtucket, and often afforded a refuge to the remnants of feebler nations around them.
The tribe of the Massachusetts, even before the colonization of the country, had almost disappeared from the shores of the bay that bears its name; and the villages of the interior resembled insulated and nearly independent bands, that had lost themselves in the wilderness.
Of the Pokanokets, who dwelt round Mount Hope, and were sovereigns over Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and a part of Cape Cod; of the Narragansetts, who dwelt between the bay that bears their name and the present limits of Connecticut, holding dominion
[239]
over Rhode Island and its vicinity, as well as a part
of
Long Island,—the most civilized of the northern nations; of the Pequods, the branch of the Mohegans
that occupied the eastern part of
Connecticut, and ruled a part of
Long Island,—earliest victims to the Europeans,—I have already related the overthrow.
The country between the banks of the
Connecticut and the
Hudson was possessed by independent villages of the Mohegans, kindred with the Manhattans, whose few ‘smokes’ once rose amidst the forests on
New York Island.
The Lenni Lenape, in their two divisions of the Minsi and the Delawares, occupied New Jersey, the valley of the Delaware far up towards the sources of that river, and the entire basin of the Schuylkill.
Like the benevolent William Penn, the Delawares were pledged to a system of peace; but, while Penn forbore retaliation freely, the passiveness of the Delawares was to them the degrading confession of their
defeat and submission to the Five Nations.
Their conquerors had stripped them of their rights as warriors, and compelled them to endure taunts as women.
Beyond the Delaware, on the Eastern Shore, dwelt the Nanticokes, who disappeared without glory, or melted imperceptibly into other tribes; and the names of Accomac and Pamlico are the chief memorials of tribes that made dialects of the Algonquin the mother tongue of the natives along the sea-coast as far south, at least, as Cape Hatteras.
It is probable, also, that the Corees, or Coramines, who dwelt to the southward of the Neuse River, spoke a kindred language—thus
establishing
Cape Fear as the southern limit of the Algonquin speech.
In Virginia, the same language was heard throughout
[240]
the whole dominion of Powhatan, which had the
tribes of the Eastern Shore as its dependencies, and included all the villages west of the
Chesapeake, from the most southern tributaries of
James River to the
Patuxent.
The power of the little empire was entirely broken in the days of
Opechancanough; and after the insurrection of
Bacon, the confederacy disappears from history.
The Shawnees connect the south-eastern Algonquins with the west.
The basin of the Cumberland River is marked by the earliest French geographers as the home of this restless nation of wanderers.
A part of them afterwards had their ‘cabins’ and their
‘springs’ in the neighborhood of
Winchester.
Their principal band removed from their hunting-fields in
Kentucky to the head waters of one of the great rivers
of
South Carolina; and, at a later day, an encampment of four hundred and fifty of them, who had been straggling in the woods for four years, was found not
far north of the head waters of the
Mobile River, on their way to the country of the Muskhogees.
It was about the year 1698, that three or four score of their
families, with the consent of the government of
Pennsylvania, removed from
Carolina, and planted themselves on the
Susquehannah.
Sad were the fruits of that hospitality.
Others followed; and when, in 1732, the number of Indian fighting men in
Pennsylvania was estimated to be seven hundred, one half of them were
Shawnee emigrants.
So desolate was the wilderness, that a vagabond tribe could wander undisturbed from
Cumberland River to the
Alabama, from the head waters of the
Santee to the
Susquehannah.
The Miamis were more stable, and their own traditions preserve the memory of their ancient limits.
[241]
‘My forefather,’ said the Miami orator Little Turtle,
at
Greenville, ‘kindled the first fire at
Detroit; from thence he extended his lines to the head waters of
American State Papers, IV. 570, 571 |
Scioto; from thence to its mouth; from thence down the
Ohio to the mouth of the
Wabash; and from thence to
Chicago, on
Lake Michigan.
These are the boundaries within which the prints of my ancestor's houses are every where to be seen.’
And the early French narratives confirm his words.
The forests beyond
Detroit were at first found unoccupied, or, it may be, roamed over by bands too feeble to attract a trader or win a missionary; the Ottawas, Algonquin fugitives from the basin of the magnificent river whose name commemorates them, fled to the
Bay of Saginaw, and took possession of the whole north of the peninsula as of a derelict country; yet the Miamis occupied its southern moiety, and their principal mission was founded by
Allouez on the banks of the
St. Joseph, within the present
state of Michigan.
The Illinois were kindred to the Miamis, and their country lay between the Wabash, the Ohio, and the Mississippi.
Marquette found a village of them on the Des Moines, but its occupants soon withdrew to the east of the Mississippi; and Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Peoria, still preserve the names of the principal bands, of which the original strength has been greatly exaggerated.
The vague tales of a considerable population vanished before the accurate observation of the missionaries, who found in the wide wilderness of Illinois
scarcely three or four villages.
On the discovery of
America, the number of the scattered tenants of the territory which now forms the states of
Ohio and
Michigan, of
Indiana, and
Illinois, and
Kentucky, could hardly have exceeded eighteen thousand.
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242]
In the early part of the eighteenth century, the Po-
tawatomies had crowded the Miamis from their dwellings at
Chicago: the intruders came from the islands near the entrance of
Green Bay, and were a branch
of the great nation of the Chippewas.
That nation, or, as some write, the Ojibwas,—the Algonquin tribes of whose dialect, mythology, traditions, and customs, we have the fullest accounts,—held the country from the mouth of
Green Bay to the head waters of
Lake Superior, and were early visited by the
French at
Sault St. Mary and Chegoimegon.
They adopted into their tribes many of the Ottawas from
Upper Canada, and were themselves often included by the early French writers under that name.
Ottawa is but the Algonquin word for ‘trader;’ and Mascoutins are but ‘dwellers in the prairie.’
The latter hardly implies a band of Indians distinct from the Chippewas; but history recognizes, as a separate Algonquin tribe near Green Bay, the Menomonies, who were found there in 1669, who retained their ancient territory long after the period of French and of English supremacy, and who prove their high antiquity as a nation by the singular character of their dialect.
South-west of the Menomonies, the restless Sacs and Foxes, ever dreaded by the French, held the passes from Green Bay and Fox River to the Mississippi, and, with insatiate avidity, roamed, in pursuit of contest, over the whole country between the Wiscon sin and the upper branches of the Illinois.
The Shaw.
nees are said to have an affinity with this nation: that the Kickapoos, who established themselves, by con-
quest, in the north of
Illinois, are but a branch of it is demonstrated by their speech.
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243]
So numerous and so widely extended were the tribes
of the Algonquin family.
They were scattered over a moiety, or perhaps more than a moiety, of the territory east of the
Mississippi and south of the
St. Lawrence, and constituted about one half of the original population of that territory.
II.
North-west of the Sacs and Foxes, west of the Chippewas, bands of the Sioux, or Dahcotas, had encamped on prairies east of the Mississippi, vagrants between the head waters of Lake Superior and the Falls of St. Anthony.
They were a branch of the great family which, dwelling for the most part west of the Mississippi and the Red River, extended from the Saskatchawan to lands south of the Arkansas.
French traders discovered their wigwams in 1659; Hennepin was among them, on his expedition to the north; Joseph Marest and another Jesuit visited them in 1687, and again in 1689.
There seemed to exist a hereditary warfare between them and the Chippewas.
Their relations to the colonists, whether of France or England, were, at this early period, accidental, and related chiefly to individuals.
But one little community of the Dahcota family had penetrated the territory of the Algonquins; the Winnebagoes, dwelling between Green
Bay and the lake that bears their name, preferred rather to be environed by Algonquins than to stay in the dangerous vicinity of their own kindred.
Like other western and southern tribes, their population appears of late to have greatly increased.
III.
The nations which spoke dialects of the Hu-Ron-Iroquois, or, as it has also been called, of the Wyandot, were, on the discovery of America, found powerful in numbers, and diffused over a wide terriory.
The peninsula enclosed between Lakes Huron.
[244]
Erie, and Ontario, had been the dwelling-place of the
five confederated tribes of the Hurons.
After their defeat by the Five Nations, a part descended the
St. Lawrence, and their progeny may still be seen near
Quebec; a part were adopted, on equal terms, into the tribes of their conquerors; the Wyandots fled beyond
Lake Superior, and hid themselves in the dreary wastes that divided the Chippewas from their western foes.
In 1671, they retreated before the powerful
Sioux, and made their home first at St. Mary's and at Michilimackinac, and afterwards near the post of
Detroit.
Thus the Wyandots within our borders were emigrants from
Canada.
Having a mysterious influence over the Algonquin tribes, and making treaties with the Five Nations, they spread along
Lake Erie, and, leaving to the Miamis the country beyond the
Miami of the
Lakes, they gradually acquired a claim to the whole territory from that river to the western boundary of New York.
The immediate dominion of the Iroquois—where the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, were first visited by the trader, the missionary, or the war parties of the French—stretched, as we have seen, from the borders of Vermont to Western New York, from the lakes to the head waters of the Ohio, the Susquehannah, and the Delaware.
The number of
their warriors was declared by the
French, in 1660, to
have been two thousand two hundred; and, in 1677, an English agent, sent on purpose to ascertain their strength, confirmed the precision of the statement.
Their geographical position made them umpires in the contest of the
French for dominion in the west.
Besides, their political importance was increased by their conquests.
Not only did they claim some supremacy
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245]
in
Northern New England as far as the
Kennebec,
and to the south as far as New Haven, and were acknowledged as absolute lords over the conquered
Lenape,—the peninsula of
Upper Canada was their hunting-field by right of war; they had exterminated the Eries and the Andastes, both tribes of their own family, the one dwelling on the south-eastern banks of
Lake Erie, the other on the head waters of the
Ohio; they had triumphantly invaded the tribes of the west as far as
Illinois; their warriors had reached the soil of
Kentucky and
Western Virginia; and
England, to whose alliance they steadily inclined, availed itself of their treaties for the cession of territories, to encroach even on the empire of
France in
America.
Nor had the labors of the Jesuit missionaries been fruitless.
The few families of the Iroquois who migrated to the north of Lake Ontario, and raised their huts round Fort Frontenac, remained in amity with the French; and two villages of Iroquois converts, the Cahnewagas of New England writers, were established near Montreal, a barrier against their heathen countrymen and against New York.
The Huron tribes of the north were environed by Algonquins.
At the south, the Chowan, the Meherrin, the Nottoway, villages of the Wyandot family, have left their names to the rivers along which they dwelt; and the Tuscaroras, kindred with the Five Nations, were the most powerful tribe in North Carolina.
In 1708, its fifteen towns still occupied the upper country on the Neuse and the Tar, and could count twelve hundred warriors, as brave as their Mohawk brothers.
IV.
South of the Tuscaroras, the midlands of Carolina sheltered the Catawbas.
Its villages included the Woccons and the nation spoke a language of its
[246]
own: that language is now almost extinct, being
known only to less than one hundred persons, who linger on the banks of a branch of the
Santee.
Imagination never assigned to the Catawbas, in their proudest days, more than twelve hundred and fifty warriors;
the oldest enumeration was made in 1743, and gives but four hundred.
It may therefore be inferred, that, on the first appearance of Europeans, their language was in the keeping of not more than three thousand souls.
History knows them chiefly as the hereditary foes of the
Iroquois tribes, before whose prowess and numbers they dwindled away.
V. The mountaineers of aboriginal America were the Cherokees, who occupied the upper valley of the Tennessee River, as far west as Muscle Shoals, and the highlands of Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama— the most picturesque and most salubrious region east of the Mississippi.
Their homes were encircled by blue hills rising beyond hills, of which the lofty peaks would kindle with the early light, and the overshadowing ridges envelop the valleys like a mass of clouds There the rocky cliffs, rising in naked grandeur, defy the lightning, and mock the loudest peals of the thunder-storm; there the gentler slopes are covered with magnolias and flowering forest-trees, decorated with roving climbers, and ring with the perpetual note of the whip-poor-will; there the wholesome water gushes profusely from the earth in transparent springs; snowwhite cascades glitter on the hill-sides; and the rivers, shallow, but pleasant to the eye, rush through the narrow vales, which the abundant strawberry crimsons, and coppices of rhododendron and flaming azalea adorn.
At the fall of the leaf, the fruit of the hickory and the chestnut is thickly strown on the ground.
The fertile
[247]
soil teems with luxuriant herbage, on which the
roebuck fattens; the vivifying breeze is laden with fragrance; and daybreak is ever welcomed by the shrill cries of the social nighthawk and the liquid carols of the mocking-bird.
Through this lovely region were scattered the little villages of the Cherokees, nearly fifty in number, each consisting of but a few cabins, erected where the bend in the mountain stream offered at once a defence and a strip of alluvial soil for culture.
Their towns were always by the side of some creek or river, and they loved their native land; above all, they loved its rivers — the
Keowee, the Tugeloo, the
Flint, and the beautiful branches of the
Tennessee.
Running waters, inviting to the bath, tempting the angler, alluring wild fowl, were necessary to their paradise.
Their language, like that of the
Iroquois, abounds in vowels, and is destitute of the labials.
Its organization has a common character, but etymology
has not yet been able to discover conclusive analogies between the roots of words.
The ‘beloved’ people of the Cherokees were a nation by themselves.
Who can say for how many centuries, safe in their undiscovered fastnesses, they had decked their war-chiefs with the feathers of the eagle's tail, and listened to the counsels of their ‘old beloved men’?
Who can tell
how often the waves of barbarous migrations may have broken harmlessly against their cliffs, where nature was the strong ally of the defenders of their land?
VI.
South-east of the Cherokees dwelt the Uchees.
They claimed the country above and below Augusta, and, at the earliest period respecting which we can surmise, seem not to have extended beyond the Chata-hoo-chee; yet they boast to have been the oldest inhabitants of that region.
They now constitute an
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inconsiderable band in the Creek confederacy, and
are known as a distinct family, not from political organization, but from their singularly harsh and guttural language.
When first discovered, they were but a remnant,—bewildering the inquirer by favoring the conjecture, that, from the north and west, tribe may have pressed upon tribe; that successions of nations may have been exterminated by invading nations; that even languages, which are the least perishable monument of the savages, may have become extinct.
VII.
The Natchez, also, are now merged in the same confederacy; but they, with the Taensas, were known to history as a distinct nation, residing in scarcely more than four or five villages, of which the largest rose near the banks of the Mississippi.
That they spoke but a dialect of the Mobilian, is an infer-
ence which the memoirs of
Dumont would have war ranted, and which more recent travellers have con-
firmed, without reservation,—while the diffuse
Du Pratz represents them as using at once the Mobilian and a
radically different speech of their own. The missionary station among them was assigned to Franciscans; and the Jesuits who have written of them are silent
respecting the tongue, which they themselves had no
occasion to employ.
The opinion of the acute Vater was in favor of its original character; and, by the
persevering curiosity of
Gallatin, it is at last known that the
Natchez were distinguished from the tribes around them less by their customs and the degree of their civilization than by their language, which, as far as comparisons have been instituted, has no etymological affinity with any other whatever.
Here, again, the imagination too readily kindles to invent theories; and the tradition has been widely received, that the dominion
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249]
of the
Natchez once extended even to the
Wabash,
that they are emigrants from
Mexico; that they are the kindred of the incas of
Peru.
The close observation of the state of the arts among them, tends to dispel these illusions; and history knows them only as a feeble and inconsiderable nation, the occupants of a narrow territory round the spot where the Christian church, and the dwellings of emigrants from
Europe and from
Africa, have displaced the rude abode of their Great Sun, and the artless cabin of the chosen guardians of the sacred fire, which they vainly hoped should never die.
VIII.
With these exceptions of the Uchees and the Natchez, the whole country south-east, south, and west of the Cherokees, to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, to the Mississippi and the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio, was in the possession of one great family of nations, of which the language was named by the French the Mobilian, and is described by Gallatin as the Muskhogee—Chocta.
It included three considerable confederacies, each of which still exists, and perhaps even with some increase of numbers.
The country bounded on the Ohio at the north, on the Mississippi at the west, on the east by a line drawn from the bend in the Cumberland River to the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee, and extending at the south into the territory of the state of Mississippi, was the land of the cheerful, brave Chickasas, the faithful, the invincible allies of the English.
Marquette found them already in possession of guns, obtained probably through Virginia; La Salle built Fort Prudhomme on one of their bluffs; but their chosen abodes were on the upland country, which gives birth to the Yazoo
and the Tombecbee, the finest and most fruitful on the
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250]
continent,—where the grass is verdant in midwinter;
the blue-bird and the robin are heard in February; the springs of pure water gurgle up through the white sands, to flow through natural bowers of evergreen holly; and, if the earth be but carelessly gashed to receive the kernel of maize, the thick corn springs abundantly from the fertile soil.
The region is as happy as any beneath the sun; and the love which it inspired made its occupants, though not numerous, yet the most intrepid warriors of the south.
Below the Chickasas, between the
Mississippi and the Tombecbee, was the land of the Choctas, who were gathered, on the eastern frontier, into compact villages, but elsewhere were scattered through the interior of their territory.
Dwelling in plains or among gentle hills, they excelled every North American tribe in their agriculture,—subsisting chiefly on corn, and placing little dependence on the chase.
Their country was healthful, abounding in brooks.
The number of their warriors perhaps exceeded four thousand.
Their dialect of the Mobilian so nearly resembles that of the Chickasas, that they almost seemed but one nation.
The
Choctas were allies of the
French, yet preserving their independence: their love for their country was intense, and, in defending it, they utterly contemned danger.
The ridge that divided the Tombecbee from the Alabama, was the line that separated the Choctas from the groups of tribes which were soon united in the confederacy of the Creeks or Muskhogees.
Their territory, including all Florida, reached, on the north, to the Cherokees; on the north-east and east, to the country on the Savannah and to the Atlantic.
Along
the sea, their northern limit seems to have extended
[
251]
almost to
Cape Fear; at least, the tribes with which
the settlers at
Charleston first waged war, are enumerated by one writer as branches of the Muskhogees.
Their population, spread over a fourfold wider territory, did not exceed that of the Choctas in number.
Their towns were situated on the banks of beautiful man creeks, in which their country abounded; the waters of their bold rivers, from the
Coosa to the Chatahoochee, descended rapidly, with a clear current, through healthful and fertile regions; they were careful in their agriculture, and, before going to war, assisted their women to plant.
In
Florida, they welcomed the
Spanish missionaries; and, throughout their country, they derived so much benefit from the arts of civilization, that their numbers soon promised to increase; and, being placed between the
English of
Carolina, the
French of
Louisiana, the Spaniards of
Florida,— bordering on the Choctas, the Chickasas, and the Cherokees,—their political importance made them esteemed as the most powerful Indian nation north of the
Gulf of Mexico.
They readily gave shelter to fugitives from other tribes; and their speech became so modified, that, with radical resemblances, it has the widest departure from its kindred dialects.
The
Yamassees, on the
Savannah, seem certainly to have been one of their bands; and the Seminoles of
Florida are but ‘wild men,’ lost from their confederacy, and abandoning agriculture for the chase.
Such is a synopsis of the American nations east of the Mississippi.
It is not easy to estimate their probable numbers at the period of their discovery.
Many of them—the Narragansetts, the Illinois—boasted of the superior strength of their former condition; and, from wonder, from fear, from the ambition of exciting
[252]
surprise, early travellers often repeated the exaggera-
tions of savage vanity.
The
Hurons of
Upper Canada were thought to number many more than thirty thousand, perhaps even fifty thousand, souls; yet, according to the more exact enumeration of 1639, they could not
have exceeded ten thousand.
In the heart of a wilderness, a few cabins seemed like a city; and to the pilgrim, who had walked for weeks without meeting a human being, a territory would appear densely peopled where, in every few days, a wigwam could be encountered.
Vermont, and
North-western Massachusetts, and much of
New Hampshire, were solitudes;
Ohio, a part of
Indiana, the largest part of
Michigan, remained open to Indian emigration long after
America began to be colonized by Europeans.
From the portage between the
Fox and the
Wisconsin to the
Des Moines,
Marquette saw neither the countenance nor the footstep of man. In
Illinois, so friendly to the habits of
Le Clereq, Etablissement de la Foi dans la Nouvelle France, II. 172. |
savage life, the
Franciscan Zenobe Mambre, whose journal is preserved by Le Clercq, describes the ‘only large village,’ as containing seven or eight thousand souls;
Father Rasle imagined he had seen in one place twelve hundred fires, kindled for more than two thou-
208.
sand families: other missionaries who made their abode there describe their appalling journeys through absolute solitudes; they represent their vocation as a chase after a savage, that was scarce ever to be found; and they could gather hardly five, or even three, villages in the whole region.
Kentucky, after the expulsion of the Shawnees, remained the wide park of the Cherokees.
The banished tribe easily fled up the valley of the
Cumberland River, to find a vacant wilderness in the highlands of
Carolina; and a part of them for years roved to and fro in wildernesses west of the
[
253]
Cherokees.
On early maps, the low country from the
Mobile to
Florida is marked as vacant.
The oldest reports from
Georgia exult in the entire absence of Indians from the vicinity of
Savannah, and will not admit that there were more than a few within four hundred miles. There are hearsay and vague accounts of Indian war parties composed of many hundreds: those who wrote from knowledge furnish the means of comparison and correction.
The whole population of the Five Nations could not have varied much from ten thousand; and their warriors strolled as conquerors from Hudson's Bay to
Carolina,—from the
Kennebec to the
Tennessee.
Very great uncertainty must, indeed, attend any estimate of the original number of Indians east of the
Mississippi and south of the
St. Lawrence and the chain of lakes.
The diminution of their population is far less than is usually supposed: they have been exiled, but not exterminated.
The use of iron, of gunpowder, of horses, has given to the savage dominion over the beasts of the forest, and new power over nature.
The
Cherokee and
Mobilian families of nations are more numerous now than ever.
We shall approach, and perhaps exceed, a just estimate of their
numbers two hundred years ago, if to the various tribes of the Algonquin race we allow about ninety thousand; of the
Eastern Sioux, less than three thousand; of the
Iroquois, including their southern kindred, about seventeen thousand; of the Catawbas, three thousand; of the Cherokees, twelve thousand; of the Mobilian confederacies and tribes,—that is, of the Chickasas, Choctas, and Muskhogees,—fifty thousand; of the Uchees, one thousand; of the
Natchez, four thousand;—in all, it may be, not far from one hundred and eighty thousand souls.
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254]
The study of the structure of the dialects of the red
men sheds light on the inquiry into their condition.
Language is their oldest monument, and the record and image of their experience.
No savage horde has been caught with it in a state of chaos, or as if just emerging from the rudeness of undistinguishable sounds.
No American language bears marks of being an arbitrary aggregation of separate parts; but each is possessed of an entire organization, having unity of character, and controlled by exact rules.
Each ap-
pears, not as a slow formation by painful processes of invention, but as a perfect whole, springing directly from the powers of man. A savage physiognomy is imprinted on the dialect of the dweller in the wilderness; but each dialect is still not only free from confusion, but is almost absolutely free from irregularities, and is pervaded and governed by undeviating laws.
As the bee builds his cells regularly, yet without the recognition of the rules of geometry, so the unreflecting savage, in the use of words, had rule, and method, and completeness.
His speech, like every thing else, underwent change; but human pride errs in believing that the art of cultivated man was needed to resolve it into its elements, and give to it new forms, before it could fulfil its office.
Each American language was competent, of itself, without improvement from scholars, to exemplify every rule of the logician, and give utterance to every passion.
Each dialect that has been analyzed has been found to be rich in derivatives and compounds, in combinations and forms.
As certain as every plant which draws juices from the earth has roots and sap vessels, bark and leaves, so certainly each language has its complete organization,—including the same parts of speech, though some of them
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255]
may lie concealed in mutual coalitions.
Human con-
sciousness and human speech exist every where, indissolubly united.
A tribe has no more been found without an organized language, than without eyesight or memory.
The American savage has tongue, and palate, and lips, and throat; the power to utter flowing sounds, the power to hiss: hence the primitive sounds are essentially the same.
The savage had, indeed, never attempted their analysis; but the analogies are so close, that they may almost all be expressed by the alphabet of European use. The tribes vary in their capacity or their custom of expressing sounds: the Oneidas always changed the letter r; the rest of the Iroquois tribes rejected the letter l. The Algonquins
have no
f; the whole
Iroquois family never use the semivowel m, and want the labials entirely.
The
Cherokees, also, employing the semivowels, are in like
manner destitute of the labials.
Of the several dialects of the
Iroquois, that of the Oneidas is the most soft, being the only one that admits the letter that of the Senecas is rudest and most energetic.
The Algonquin dialects, especially those of the Abenakis, heap up consonants with prodigal harshness; the
Iroquois abound in a concurrence of vowels; in the
Cherokee, every syllable ends with a vowel, and the combinations with consonants are so few and so simple, that the ‘old beloved speech,’ like the Japanese, admits a syllabic alphabet, of which the signs need not exceed eighty-five.
Quickened by conversation with Europeans, Sequoah, an ingenious Cherokee, recently completed an analysis of the syllables of his language, and invented symbols to express them.
But, before acquaintance with Europeans, no red man had discriminated the
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sounds which he articulated: in all America there was
no alphabet, and to the eye knowledge was conveyed only by rude imitations.
In a picture of an animal drawn on a sheet of birch bark, or on a smooth stone, or on a blazed tree, an Indian will recognize the symbol of his tribe; and the figures that are sketched
around will give him a message from his friends.
Pic-
torial hieroglyphics were found in all parts of
America,
—in
Southern Louisiana, and in the land of the
Wyanwater's dots, among Algonquins and Mohawks.
The rudest
Vater's Mithridates, III. 324. |
painting, giving its story at a glance, constituted the only writing of the
Indian.
As his mode of writing was by imitation of visible objects, so his language itself was held in bonds by external nature.
Abounding in words to designate every object of experience, it had none to express a spiritual
Relation 1633, 36, 37, 114. |
conception; materialism reigned in it. The individuality of the barbarian and of his tribe, stamps itself upon his language.
Nature creates or shapes expressions for his sensations and his desires, and his language was always vastly copious in words for objects within his knowledge, for ideas derived from the senses; but for
Loskiel. Le Jeune.
Lafitau. |
‘spiritual matters’ it was poor; it had no name for continence or justice, for gratitude or holiness.
That each American language has been successfully used by Christian missionaries, comes not from an original store of words expressing moral truth, but from the reciprocal pliability of ideas and their signs.
It required, said Loskiel, the labor of years to make the
Delaware dia lect capable of expressing abstract truth; it was necessary to forge a new language out of existing terms by circumlocutions and combinations; and it was the glory of
Eliot, that his benevolent simplicity intuitively
Compare Lafitau, II. 481. |
caught the analogies by which moral truth could be
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257]
conveyed to nations whose language had not yet eman-
cipated itself from nature.
In another point of view, this materialism contributed greatly to the picturesque brilliancy of American discourse.
Prosperity is as a bright sun or a cloudless sky; to establish peace, is to plant a forest-tree, or to bury the tomahawk; to offer presents as a consolation to mourners, is to cover the grave of the departed; and if the Indian from the prairies would speak of griefs
and hardships, it is the thorns of the prickly pear that
penetrate his moccasons.
Especially the style of the son Six Nations was adorned with noble metaphors, and glowed with allegory.
If we search for the distinguishing traits of our American languages, we shall find the synthetic char acter pervading them all, and establishing their rules.
The American does not separate the component parts of the proposition which he utters; he never analyzes his expressions; his thoughts rush forth in a troop.
The picture is presented at once and altogether.
His speech is as a kindling cloud, not as radiant points of light.
This absence of all reflective consciousness, and of all logical analysis of ideas, is the great peculiarity of American speech.
Every complex idea is
expressed in a group.
Synthesis governs every form;
it pervades all the dialects of the
Iroquois and the Al-
gonquin, and equally stamps the character of the lan-
guage of the
Cherokee.
This synthetic character is apparent in the attempt to express, in the simplest manner, the name of any thing.
The Algonquin, the Iroquois, could not say father; they must use a more definite expression.
Their nouns implying relation says Brebeuf, always include the signification of one of the three persons of the possessive
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pronoun.
They cannot say father, son, master, sepa-
rately; the noun must be limited by including within itself the pronoun for the person to whom it relates.
The missionaries could not, therefore, translate the doxology literally, but chanted among the Hurons, and doubtless at
Onondaga, ‘Glory be to our Father, and to his Son, and to their Holy Ghost.’
Just so, the savage could not say tree, or house; the
word must always be accompanied by prefixes defining
its application.
The only pronoun which can, with any plausibility, be called an article, is always blended
with the noun.
In like manner, the languages are defective in terms that express generalizations.
Our forests abound, for example, in various kinds of oak: the Algonquins have special terms for each kind of oak, but no generic term including them all. The same is even true of the verb.
No activity is generalized; and hence come multitudes of words to express the same action, as modified by changes of its object.
So, too, they have no noun expressing simply the idea of existence; the idea is always blended with locality.
And, in this connection, it may be added, that not one of the families of languages of which we treat possessed the simple substantive verb.
As the idea of being, when expressed by a noun, was always blended with that of place, so the verb to be was never used abstractly, but included within itself the idea of place and time.
Thus arises a marvellous fertility of expression, and a wonderful precision; and yet this very copiousness is a defect, springing from the total want of reflection and analysis.
The same synthetic character appears in the formation of words.
The noun receives into itself not only
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the affixed forms designating relation, but those also
which express a quality.
The noun and the adjective are, with the pronoun, blended into one word.
The
power of combination, common to every original language, is possessed in an unlimited degree; and, as a new object is presented to an Indian, he will inquire its use, and promptly give it a name, including within itself, perhaps, an entire definition.
The
Indian never
Eliot's Indian Bible, Mark i. 40. |
kneels; so, when
Eliot translated
kneeling, the word which he was compelled to form fills a line, and numbers eleven syllables.
As, in early days, books were written in unbroken lines, without any division of the parts of a sentence, so the savage, in his speech, runs word into word, till at last a single one appears to include the whole proposition.
By this process of aggregation, a simple root is often buried beneath its environments; rapidity of movement and grace are lost; and speech is encumbered with the expressive masses which it has heaped together.
The words that enter into the compound are not melted into each other; nothing resembling a chemical affinity takes place; but the compound word is like patchwork; the masses that are joined together remain heterogeneous.
The union resembles clumsy mechanism, where the contrivance lies bare, and forces itself upon the eye. The cultivated man, with select instruments, expresses every idea; the savage is forever coining words; and the original character of his language permits him to multiply them at will.
Still more is the character of synthesis observable in the pronoun.
That part of speech hardly existed in a separated form—at least, in a separate form, was rarely in use. Its principal office, in the Algonquin dialects, is to define the relations of the noun and the
[260]
verb.
The pronoun knows no distinction of genders
for male and female; one form is common to both; another form is for the neuter, as in Latin there is sometimes a common gender, in contradistinction to the neuter.
Hence, as nouns are always used in connection with pronouns, there is in the form no distinction between masculine and feminine, but only between the form common to both genders, on the one hand, and the form applied to the neuter, on the other,—in a word, between the animate and the inanimate.
The plural of animate nouns appears to be formed by an amalgamation with the pronoun of the third person, and the plural of inanimate words by an amalgamation with the corresponding neuter pronoun.
The use of the pronoun is, therefore, to modify nouns and verbs.
The ideas which we imply by case, with the exception of the possessive, are not ideas having relation to pronouns: the Indian languages have, therefore, all the modifications of the noun that can come from the use of pronouns: but, with the exception of the genitive, as expressing possession, and
marked, as in the Hebrew, by a pronominal affix, they have no series of cases.
The relations of case are expressed by means of pronouns affixed to the verb.
The use of the adjective is in a still greater degree synthetical.
There is no such separate word, in an Algonquin dialect, as a simple adjective.
As the noun is used only in its relation, so the adjective is used with reference to that which it qualifies.
Its form, when it stands alone, is that of an impersonal verb.
But the peculiar economy of the American languages is best illustrated in their verbs.
Though destitute of the substantive verb, of which feeble and uncertain tracts only can be found in the Chippewa, and
[261]
perhaps in the Muskhogee, and those only after the
presence of Europeans,—yet the verb is the dominant part of speech, swallowing up, as it were, and including within itself, the pronoun, the substantive, and the adjective.
Declension, cases, articles, are deficient; but every thing is conjugated.
The adjective assumes a verbal termination, and is conjugated as a verb; the idea expressed by a noun is clothed in verbal forms, and at once does the office of a verb.
Here, also, the synthetic character predominates.
Does an adjective assume a verbal form, it takes to itself also the person or thing which it qualifies; and the adjective, the pronoun representing the subject, and the verbal form, are included in one word.
Thus far the American dialects have analogies with the Greek and Latin.
But the American go farther.
The accessory idea of case is represented in a form of the verb by means of a pronominal affix.
An Algonquin cannot say I love, or I hate; he must also, and simultaneously, express the object of the love or hatred.
As each noun is blended with a pronominal prefix; as each adjective amalgamates with the subject which it qualifies; so each active verb includes in one and the same word one pronoun representing its subject, and another representing its object also.
Nor does the synthetic tendency stop here.
An adjective may first be melted into the substantive, and the compound word may then assume verbal forms, and thus receive all the changes, and include within itself all the relations, which those forms can express.
There are in the American dialects no genuine de-
clensions; it is otherwise with conjugations.
The verbs have true grammatical forms, as fixed and as regular as those of
Greek or Sanscrit.
The relations
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262]
of number and person, both with regard to the agent
and the object, are included in the verb by means of significant pronominal syllables, which are prefixed, inserted, or annexed.
The relations of time are expressed by the insertion, in part, of unmeaning, in part, it may be, of significant, syllables; and, as many supplementary syllables may not always be easily piled one upon another, changes of consonants, as well as, in a slight degree, changes of vowels, and elisions, take place; and sometimes, also, unmeaning syllables are inserted for the sake of euphony.
Inflection, agglutination, and euphonic changes, all take place in the conjugation of the
Chippewa verb.
Of varieties of terminations and forms, the oldest languages, and those in the earliest stage of development, have the most.
But not only does the Algonquin verb admit the number of forms required for the diversity of time and mode; it also has numerous conjugations.
An action may be often repeated, and a frequentative conjugation follows.
The idea of causation, which the Indian does not conceive abstractly, and can express only synthetically, makes a demand, as in the Hebrew, for a new conjugation.
Every verb may be used negatively, as well as positively; it may include in itself an animate object, or the object may be inanimate; and whether it expresses a simple action, or, again, is a frequentative, it may have a reflex signification, like the middle voice of a Greek verb; and every one of these accidents gives birth to an entire series of new forms.
Then, since the Indian verb includes within itself the agent and the object, it may pass through as many transitions as the persons and numbers of the pronouns will admit of different combinations; and each of these combinations may be used positively or negatively,
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with a reflex or a causative signification.
In this
manner, changes are so multiplied, that the number of possible forms of a Chippewa verb is said to amount to five or six thousand: in other words, the number of possible variations is indefinite.
Such are the cumbersome processes by which synthetical languages express thought.
For the want of analysis, the savage obtains no mastery over the forms of his language; nay, the forms themselves are used in a manner which to us would seem anomalous, and to the Indian can appear regular only because his mind receives the complex thought without analysis.
To a
verb having a nominative singular and an accusative plural, a plural termination is often affixed.
The verb,
says
Eliot, is thus changed to an adnoun.
Again: if with a verb which is qualified by an adverb, the idea of futurity is to be connected, the sign of futurity is attached promiscuously either to the verb or the adverb; the
Indian is satisfied on finding the expression of futurity somewhere in the group.
From these investigations two momentous conclusions follow.
The grammatical forms which constitute
the organization of a language, are not the work of civilization, but of nature.
It is not writers, nor arbitrary conventions, that give laws to language: the forms of grammar, the power of combinations, the pos-
sibility of inversions, spring from within us, and are a consequence of our own organization.
If language is a human invention, it was the invention of savage man; and this creation of barbarism would be a higher trophy to human power than any achievement of civilization.
The study of these rudest dialects tends to prove, if it does not conclusively prove, that it was not man who made language, but He who made man gave
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264]
him utterance.
Speech in copiousness, and with abun-
dance and regularity of forms, belongs to the
American savage, because it belongs to man. From the country of the Esquimaux to the Oronoco, and from the, burning climes on the borders of that stream to the ice of
the
Straits of Magellan, the primitive American languages, entirely differing in their roots, have, with
slight exceptions, one and the same physiognomy.
Remarkable analogies of grammatical structure per-
Vater, Ueber America's Bevolkerung, 207. |
vade the most refined, as well as the most gross.
Idioms as unlike as Sclavonic and Celtic resemble each other in their internal mechanism.
In the Esquimaux
Vater's Mithridates, III.
Part III. p. 441-444. |
there is an immense number of forms, derived from the regimen of pronouns.
The same is true of the Basque language in
Spain, and of the
Congo in
Africa.
Here
is a marvellous coincidence in the structure of languages, at points so remote, among three races so
different as the white man of the
Pyrenees, the black man of
Congo, and the copper-colored tribes of North
America.
Now, a characteristic so extensive is to be accounted for only on some
general principle.
It pervades languages of different races and different continents: it must, then, be the result of a law. As nature, when it rose from the chaos of its convulsions and its deluges, appeared with its mountains, its basins, and
its valleys, all so fashioned that man could cultivate and adorn them, but not shape them anew at his will; so language, in its earliest period, has a fixed character, which culture, by weeding out superfluities, inventing happy connections, teaching the measure of ellipsis, and, through analysis, perfecting the mastery of the mind over its instruments, may polish, enliven, and improve, but cannot essentially change.
Men have admired the magnificence displayed in the mountains,
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the rivers, the prolific vegetation, of the New World.
In the dialect of the wildest tribe, the wilderness can show a nobler work, of a Power higher than that of man.
Another and a more certain conclusion is this—that the ancestors of our tribes were rude like themselves.
It has been asked if our Indians were not the wrecks of more civilized nations.
Their language refutes the hypothesis; every one of its forms is a witness that their ancestors were, like themselves, not yet disenthralled from nature.
The character of each Indian language is one continued, universal, all-pervading synthesis.
They to whom these languages were the mother tongue, were still in that earliest stage of intellectual culture where reflection has not begun.
Meantime, from the first visit of Europeans, a change has been preparing in the American languages.
The stage of progress, in the organic structure of a language, is that of intermixture.
To the study of the American dialects the missionaries carried the habit of analysis, and enriched the speech of the barbarians with the experience of civilization.
Hence new ideas are gaining utterance, and new forms are springing up. The half-breeds grow unwilling to indulge in diffuse combinations, but are ready to employ each word distinctly and by itself; and the wild man understands, if he does not approve, the innovation.
Already the cultivated Chippewa is gaining the power of expressing a noun of relation, independent of its relations; and the substantive verb begins to glimmer in various tongues from Lake Superior to the homes of the Choctas.
‘The sociableness of the nature of man appears in the wildest of them.’
To Indians returning to their
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family no one would offer hinderance, ‘thus confessing
the sweetness of their homes.’
They love society, and the joining together of houses and towns.
With
long poles fixed in the ground, and bent towards each other at the top, covered with birch or chestnut bark, and hung on the inside with embroidered mats, having no door but a loose skin, no hearth but the ground, no chimney but an opening in the roof, the wigwam is quickly constructed and easily removed.
Its size, whether it be round or oblong, is in proportion to the number of families that are to dwell together; and there, in one smoky cell, the whole clan-men, children,
and women—are huddled together, careless of cleanli-
ness, and making no privacy of actions of which some irrational animals seem ashamed.
As the languages of the
American tribes were limited by the material world, so, in private life, the senses held dominion.
The passion of the savage was liberty; he demanded license to gratify his animal instincts.
To act out himself, to follow the propensities of his nature, seemed his system of morals.
The supremacy of conscience, the rights of reason, were not subjects of reflection to those who had no name for continence.
The idea of chastity, as a social duty, was but feebly developed among them; and the observer of their customs would, at first, believe them to have been ignorant of restraint.
If ‘the kindly flames of nature burned in wild humanity,’ their love never became a frenzy or a devotion; for indulgence destroyed its energy and its purity.
And yet no nation has ever been found without some practical confession of the duty of self-denial.
‘God hath planted in the hearts of the wildest of the
sonnes of men a high and honorable esteem of the marriage
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267]
bed, insomuch that they universally submit unto
it, and hold its violation abominable.’
Neither might marriages be contracted between kindred of near degree; the
Iroquois might choose a wife of the same tribe with himself, but not of the same cabin; the Algonquin must look beyond those who used the same
totem, or family symbol; the
Cherokee would marry at once a mother and her daughter, but would never marry his own immediate kindred.
On forming an engagement, the bridegroom, or, if he were poor, his friends and neighbors, made a present to the bride's father, of whom no dowry was expected.
The acceptance of the presents perfected the contract; the wife was purchased; and, for a season, at least, the husband, surrendering his gains as a hunter to her family, had a home in her father's lodge.
But, even in marriage, the Indian abhorred constraint; and, from Florida to the St. Lawrence, polygamy was permitted, though at the north it was not common.
In a happy union, affection was fostered
and preserved; and the wilderness could show wigwams where ‘couples had lived together thirty, forty years.’
Yet Love did not always light his happiest torch at the nuptials of the children of nature, and marriage among the forests had its sorrows and its crimes.
The infidelities of the husband sometimes drove the helpless wife to suicide: the faithless wife had no protector; her husband insulted or disfigured her at will; and death for adultery was unrevenged.
Divorce, also, was permitted, even for occasions beside adultery; it took place without formality, by a simple separation or desertion, and, where there was no offspring, was of easy occurrence.
Children were the strongest bond; for, if the mother was discarded, it
[
268]
was the unwritten law of the red man that she should
herself retain those whom she had borne or nursed.
The sorrows of child-bearing were mitigated to the
Indian mother, and her travail was comparatively easy and speedy.
‘In one quarter of an hour, a woman would be merry in the house, and delivered, and merry againe; and within two days, abroad; and after four or five dayes, at worke.’
Energy of will surmounted the pangs of child-birth.
The woman who uttered complaints or groans was esteemed worthy to be but the mother of cowards.
Yet death sometimes followed.
The pregnant woman continued her usual toils, bore her wonted burdens, followed her family even in its winter rambles.
How helpless the
Indian infant, born, without shelter, amidst storms and ice!
But fear nothing for him: God has placed near him a guardian angel, that can triumph over the severities of nature; the sentiment of maternity is by his side; and, so long as his mother breathes, he is safe.
The squaw loves her child with instinctive passion; and, if she does not manifest it by lively caresses, her tenderness is real, wakeful, and constant.
No savage mother ever trusted her babe to a hireling nurse; no savage mother ever put away her own child to suckle that of another.
To the cradle, consisting of thin pieces of light wood, and gayly ornamented with quills of the porcupine, and beads, and rattles, the nursling is firmly attached, and carefully wrapped in furs; and the infant, thus swathed, its back to the mother's back, is borne as the topmost burden,—its dark eyes now cheerfully flashing light, now accompanying with tears the wailings which the plaintive melodies of the carrier cannot hush.
Or, while the squaw toils in the field, she hangs her child, as spring does its blossoms, on the boughs of a tree,
[
269]
that it may be rocked by the breezes from the land of
souls, and soothed to sleep by the lullaby of the birds.
Does the mother die, the nursling—such is Indian
Relation 1656, 1657, p. 179. |
compassion-shares her grave.
On quitting the cradle, the children are left nearly naked in the cabin, to grow hardy, and learn the use of their limbs.
Juvenile sports are the same every where; children invent them for themselves; and the traveller, who finds every where in the wide world the same games, may rightly infer, that the Father of the
great human family himself instructs the innocence of childhood in its amusements.
There is no domestic government; the young do as they will.
They are never earnestly reproved, injured, or beaten; a dash of cold water in the face is their heaviest punishment.
If they assist in the labors of the household, it is as a pastime, not as a charge.
Yet they show respect to the chiefs, and defer with docility to those of their cabin.
The attachment of savages to their offspring is extreme; and they cannot bear separation from
them.
Hence every attempt at founding schools for their children was a failure: a missionary would gather a little flock about him, and of a sudden, writes Le
June, ‘my birds flew away.’
From their insufficient and irregular supplies of clothing and food, they learn to endure hunger and rigorous seasons; of themselves they become fleet of foot, and skilful in swimming; their courage is nursed by tales respecting their ancestors, till they burn with a love of glory to be acquired by valor and address.
So soon as the child can grasp the bow and arrow, they are in his hand; and, as there was joy in the wigwam at his birth, and his first cutting of a tooth, so a festival is kept for his earliest success in the chase.
The Indian young man is educated
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270]
in the school of nature.
The influences by
which he is surrounded nurse within him the passion for war: as he grows up, he, in his turn, takes up the war-song, of which the echoes never die away on the boundless plains of the west: he travels the war-path in search of an encounter with an enemy, that he, too, at the great war-dance and feast of his band, may boast of his exploits; may enumerate his gallant deeds
by the envied feathers of the war eagle that decorate his hair; and may keep the record of his wounds by shining marks of vermilion on his skin.
The savages are proud of idleness.
At home, they do little but cross their arms and sit listlessly; or engage in games of chance, hazarding all their possessions on the result; or meet in council; or sing, and eat, and play, and sleep.
The greatest toils of the men were, to perfect the palisades of the forts; to manufacture a boat out of a tree by means of fire and a stone hatchet; to repair their cabins; to get ready instruments of war or the chase; and to adorn their persons.
Woman is the laborer; woman bears the burdens of life.
The food that is raised from the earth is the fruit of her industry.
With no instrument but a wooden mattock, a shell, or a shoulder-blade of the buffalo, she plants the maize, the beans, and the running vines.
She drives the blackbirds from the cornfield, breaks the weeds, and, in due season, gathers the harvest.
She pounds the parched corn, dries the buffalo meat, and prepares for winter the store of wild fruits; she brings home the game which her husband has killed; she bears the wood, and draws the water, and spreads the repast.
If the chief constructs the keel of the canoe, it is woman who stitches the bark with split ligaments of the pine root, and sears the seams with resinous
[271]
gum. If the men prepare the poles for the wigwam,
it is woman who builds it, and, in times of journeying, bears it on her shoulders.
The
Indian's wife was his
slave; and the number of his slaves was a criterion of his wealth.
The Indians of our republic had no calendar of their own; their languages have no word for year, and they reckon time by the return of snow or the springing of the flowers; their months are named from that which the earth produces in them; and their almanac is kept in the sky by the birds, whose flight announces the progress of the seasons.
The brute creation gives them warning of the coming storm; the motion of the sun marks the hour of the day; and the distinctions of time are noted, not in numbers, but in words that breathe the grace and poetry of nature.
The aboriginal tribes of the United States depended for food on the chase, the fisheries, and agriculture.
They kept no herds; they never were shepherds.
The bison is difficult to tame, and its female yields little milk, of which the use was unknown to the red man: water was his only drink.
The moose, the bear, the deer, and at the west the buffalo, besides smaller game and fowl, were pursued with arrows tipped with hart's-horn, or eagles' claws, or pointed stones.
With nets and spears fish were taken, and, for want of salt, were cured by smoke.
Wild fruits, and abundant berries, were a resource in their season; and troops of girls, with baskets of bark, would gather the fragrant fruit of the wild strawberry.
But all the tribes south of the St. Lawrence, except remote ones on the north-east and the north-west, cultivated the earth.
Unlike the people of the Old World, they were at once hunters and tillers of the ground.
The contrast
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was due to the character of their rain.
Wheat
or rye would have been a useless gift to the
Indian, who had neither plough nor sickle.
The maize springs luxuriantly from a warm, new field, and in the rich soil, with little aid from culture, outstrips the weeds; bears, not thirty, not fifty, but a thousand fold; if once dry, is hurt neither by heat nor cold; may be preserved in a pit or a cave for years, ay, and for centuries; is gathered from the field by the hand, without knife or reaping-hook; and becomes nutritious food by a simple roasting before a fire.
A little of its parched meal, with water from the brook, was often a dinner and supper; and the warrior, with a small supply of it in a basket at his back, or in a leathern girdle, and with his bow and arrows, is ready for travel at a mo ment's warning.
The tobacco-plant was not forgotten; and the cultivation of the vine which we have learned of them to call the squash, with beans, completed their husbandry.
During the mild season, there may have been little suffering.
But thrift was wanting; the stores collected by the industry of the women were squandered in
festivities. The hospitality of the
Indian has rarely
been questioned.
The stranger enters his cabin, by day or by night, without asking leave, and is enter-
tained as freely as a thrush or a blackbird that regales himself on the luxuries of the fruitful grove.
He will take his own rest abroad, that he may give up his own skin or mat of sedge to his guest.
Nor is the traveller questioned as to the purpose of his visit; he chooses his own time freely to deliver his message.
Festivals, too, were common, at some of which it was the rule to eat every thing that was offered; and the indulgence of appetite surpassed belief.
But what could be more miserable than the tribes of the north and north-west,
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in the depth of winter,—suffering from an annual fam-
ine; driven by the intense cold to sit indolently in the smoke round the fire in the cabin, and to fast for days together; and then, again, compelled, by faintness for want of sustenance, to reel into the woods, and gather
Relation 1662, 1663, p. 100 |
moss or bark for a thin decoction, that might, at least, relieve the extremity of hunger?
Famine gives a terrible energy to the brutal part of our nature.
A shipwreck will make cannibals of civilized men; a siege changes the refinements of urbanity into excesses at which humanity shudders; a retreating army abandons its wounded.
The hunting tribes have the affections of men; but among them,
also, extremity of want produces like results.
The
aged and infirm meet with little tenderness; the hunters, as they roam the wilderness, desert their old men;
Clarke, if provisions fail, the feeble drop down, and are lost, or
life is shortened by a blow.
The fate of the desperately ill was equally sad. Diseases were believed to spring, in part, from natural causes, for which natural remedies were prescribed.
Of these, the best was the vapor bath, prepared in a tent covered with skins, and warmed by means of hot stones; or decoctions of bark, or roots, or herbs, were used.
Graver maladies were inexplicable, and their causes and cures formed a part of their religious superstitions; but those who lingered with them, especially the aged, were sometimes neglected, and sometimes put to death.
The clothing of the natives was, in summer, but a piece of skin, like an apron, round the waist; in winter, a bear-skin, or, more commonly, robes made of the skins of the fox and the beaver.
Their feet were pro tected by soft moccasons; and to these were bound
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the broad snow-shoes, on which, though cumbersome
to the novice, the
Indian hunter could leap like the roe. Of the women, head, arms, and legs, were uncovered; a mat or a skin, neatly prepared, tied over the shoulders, and fastened to the waist by a girdle, extended from the neck to the knees.
They glittered with tufts of elk hair, brilliantly dyed in scarlet; and strings of the various kinds of shells were their pearls and diamonds.
The summer garments, of moose and deer skins, were painted of many colors; and the fairest feathers of the turkey, fastened by threads made from wild hemp and nettle, were curiously wrought into mantles.
The claws of the grisly bear formed a
proud collar for a war-chief; a piece of an enemy's scalp, with a tuft of long hair, painted red, glittered on the stem of their war-pipes; the wing of a red-bird, or the beak and plumage of a raven, decorated their locks; the skin of a rattlesnake was worn round the arm of their chiefs; the skin of the polecat, bound round the leg, was their order of the garter—emblem of noble daring.
A warrior's dress was often a history of his deeds.
His skin was also tattooed with figures of animals, of leaves, of flowers, and painted with lively and shining colors.
Some had the nose tipped with blue, the eyebrows, eyes, and cheeks, tinged with black, and the rest of the face red; others had black, red, and blue stripes drawn from the ears to the mouth; others had a broad, black band, like a ribbon, drawn from ear to ear across the
Relation 1632, p. 18. 1633, p. 27. |
eyes, with smaller bands on the cheeks.
When they
made visits, and when they assembled in council, they painted themselves gloriously, delighting especially in vermilion.
There can be no society without government; but
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among the Indian tribes on the soil of our republic,
there was not only no written law,—there was no traditionary expression of law; government rested on opinion and usage, and the motives to the usage were never imbodied in language; they gained utterance only in the fact, and power only from opinion.
No ancient legislator believed that human society could be maintained with so little artifice.
Unconscious of political principles, they remained under the influence of instincts.
Their forms of government grew out of their passions and their wants, and were therefore every where nearly the same.
Without a code of laws, without a distinct recognition of succession in the magistracy by inheritance or election, government was conducted harmoniously by the influence of native genius, virtue, and experience.
Prohibitory laws were hardly sanctioned by savage opinion.
The wild man hates restraint, and loves to do what is right in his own eyes.
‘The Illinois,’ writes Marest, ‘are absolute masters of themselves, subject to no law.’
The Delawares, it was said, “are, in general, wholly unacquainted with civil laws
and proceedings, nor have any kind of notion of civil judicatures, of persons being arraigned and tried, condemned or acquitted.”
As there was no commerce, no coin, no promissory notes, no employment of others for hire, there were no contracts.
Exchanges were out a reciprocity of presents, and mutual gifts were the only traffic.
Arrests and prisons, lawyers and sheriffs, were unknown.
Each man was his own protector, and, as there was no public justice, each man issued to himself his letter of reprisals, and became his own avenger.
In case of death by violence, the departed shade could not rest till appeased by a retaliation.
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His kindred would ‘go a thousand miles, for the pur-
pose of revenge, over hills and mountains; through large cane swamps, full of grape vines and briers; over broad lakes, rapid rivers, and deep creeks; and all the way endangered by poisonous snakes, exposed to the extremities of heat and cold, to hunger and thirst.’
And blood being once shed, the reciprocity of attacks involved family in the mortal strife against family, tribe against tribe, often continuing from generation to generation.
Yet mercy could make itself heard even among barbarians; and peace was restored by atoning presents, if they were enough to cover up the graves of the dead.
The acceptance of the gifts pacified the families of those who were at variance.
In savage life, which admits no division of labor, and has but the same pursuit for all, the bonds of relationship are widely extended.
Families remain undivided, having a common emblem, which designates all their members as effectually as with us the name.
The limit of the family is the limit of the interdicted degrees of consanguinity for marriage.
They hold the bonds of brotherhood so dear, that a brother commonly pays the debt of a deceased brother, and assumes his revenge and his perils.
There are no beggars among them, no fatherless children unprovided for. The families that dwell together, hunt together, roam together, fight together, constitute a tribe.
Danger from neighbors, favoring union, leads to alliances and confederacies, just as pride, which is a pervading element in Indian character, and shelters
itself in every lodge, leads to subdivisions.
Of national affinity, as springing from a common language, the Algonqum, the
Wyandot, the Dahcota, the Mobilian, each was ignorant.
They did not themselves know their
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respective common lineage, and neither of them had a
name embracing all its branches.
As the tribe was but a union of families, government was a consequence of family relations, and the head of the family was its chief.
The succession depended on birth, and was inherited through the female line.
Even among the Narragansetts, the colleague of Canonicus was his nephew.
This rule of descent, which sprung from the general licentiousness, and was known throughout various families of tribes, was widely observed, but most of all among the Natchez.
Elsewhere, the hereditary right was modified by opinion.
Opinion could crowd a civil chief into retirement, and could dictate his successor.
Nor was assassination unknown.
The organization of the savage communities was like that which with us takes place at the call of a spontaneous public meeting, where opinion in advance designates the principal actors; or, as with us, at the death of the head of a large family, opinion within the family selects the best fitted of its surviving members to settle its affairs.
Doubtless the succession appeared sometimes to depend on the will of the surviving matron; sometimes to have been consequent on birth; sometimes to have been the result of the free election of the wild democracy, and of silent opinion.
There have even been chiefs who could not tell when, where, or how, they obtained power.
In like manner, the different accounts of the power of the chief are contradictory only in appearance.
The limit of his authority would be found in his personal character.
The humiliating subordination of one will to another was every where unknown.
The Indian chief has no crown, or sceptre, or guards; no outward symbols of supremacy, or means of giving validity
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to his decrees.
The bounds of his authority float
with the current of opinion in the tribe; he is not so much obeyed as followed with the alacrity of free volition; and therefore the extent of his power depends on his personal character.
There have been chiefs whose commanding genius could so overawe and sway the common mind, as to gain, for a season, an almost
absolute rule,—while others had little authority, and
Marest in Lett Ed. IV. 197 |
if they used menaces, were abandoned.
Each village governed itself as if independent, and each after the same analogies, without variety.
If the observer had regard to the sachems, the government seemed monarchical; but as, of measures that concerned all, ‘they would not conclude aught unto which the people were averse,’ and every man of due age was admitted to council, it might also be described as a democracy.
In council, the people were guided by the eloquent, were carried away by the brave; and this influence, which was recognized, and regular in its action, appeared to constitute an oligarchy.
The governments of the aborigines scarcely differed from each other, except as accident gave a predominance to one or the other of these elements.
It is of the Natchez that the most wonderful tales of despotism and aristocratic distinctions have been promulgated.
Their chiefs, who, like those of the Hurons, were esteemed descendants of the sun, had greater power than could have been established in the colder regions of the north, where the severities of nature compel the savage to rely on himself and to be free; yet as the Natchez, in exterior, resembled the tribes by which they were surrounded, so their customs and institutions were but more marked developments of the same characteristics.
Every where at the north, there was
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the same distribution into families, and the same order
in each separate town.
The affairs relating to the whole nation were transacted in general council, and with such equality, and such zeal for the common good, that, while any one might have dissented with inpunity, the voice of the tribe would yet be unanimous in its decisions.
Their delight was in assembling together, and listening to messengers from abroad.
Seated in a semicircle on the ground, in double or triple rows, with the knees almost meeting the face,—the painted and tattooed chiefs adorned with skins and plumes, with the beaks of the red-bird or the claws of the bear,—each listener perhaps with a pipe in his mouth, and preserving deep silence,—they would give solemn attention to the speaker, who, with great action and energy of language, delivered his message; and, if his eloquence pleased, they esteemed him as a god.
Decorum was never broken; there were never two speakers struggling to anticipate each other; they did not express their spleen by blows; they restrained passionate invective; the debate was never disturbed by an uproar; questions of order were unknown.
The record of their treaties was kept by strings of wampum; these were their annals.
When the envoys of nations met in solemn council, gift replied to gift, and belt to belt; by these the memory of the speaker was refreshed: or he would hold in his hand a bundle of little sticks, and for each of them deliver a message.
To do this well required capacity and experience.
Each tribe had, therefore, its heralds or envoys, selected with reference only to their personal merit, and because they could speak well; and often an orator, without the aid of rank as a chief, by the brilliancy of his eloquence, swayed the minds of a
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confederacy.
That the words of friendship might be
transmitted safely through the wilderness, the red men revered the peace-pipe.
The person of him that travelled with it was sacred; he could disarm the young warrior as by a spell, and secure himself a fearless welcome in every cabin.
Each village also had its calumet, which was adorned by the chief with eagles' feathers, and consecrated in the general assembly of the nation.
The envoys from those desiring peace or an alliance, would come within a short distance of the town, and, uttering a cry, seat themselves on the ground.
The great chief, bearing the peace-pipe of his tribe, with its mouth pointing to the skies, goes forth to meet them, accompanied by a long procession of his clansmen, chanting the hymn of peace.
The strangers rise to receive them, singing also a song, to put away all wars, and to bury all revenge.
As they meet, each party smokes the pipe of the other, and peace is ratified.
The strangers are then conducted to the village; the herald goes out into the street that divides the wigwams, and makes repeated proclamation that the guests are friends; and the glory of the tribe is advanced by the profusion of beards meat, and flesh of dogs, and hominy, which give magnificence to the banquets in honor of the embassy.
But, if councils were their recreation, war alone was the avenue to glory.
All other employment seemed unworthy of human dignity; in warfare against the brute creation, but still more against man, they sought liberty, happiness, and renown; thus was gained an honorable appellation, while the mean and the obscure among
them had not even a name.
Hence to ask an Indian his name was an offence: a chief would push the question aside with scorn; for it implied that his deeds and the titles conferred by them, were unknown.
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The code of war of the red men attests the freedom
of their life.
No war-chief was appointed on account— of birth, but was, in every case, elected by opinion; and every war party was but a band of volunteers, enlisted for one special expedition, and for no more.
Any one who, on chanting the war-song, could obtain volunteer followers, became a war-chief.
This was true of the Algonquins, and true of the
Natchez.
Solemn fasts and religious rites precede the departure of the warriors; the war-dance must be danced, and the war-song sung.
They express in their melodies a contempt of death, a passion for glory; and the chief boasts that ‘the spirits on high shall repeat his name.’
A belt painted red, or a bundle of bloody sticks, sent to the enemy, is a declaration of defiance.
As the war party leave the village, they address the women in a farewell hymn:—‘Do not weep for me, loved woman, should I die; weep for yourself alone.
I go to revenge our relations fallen and slain: our foes
shall lie like them; I go to lay them low.’
And, with the pride which ever marks the barbarian, each one adds, ‘If any man thinks himself a great warrior, I
think myself the same.’
The wars of the red men were terrible, not from their numbers; for, on any one expedition, they rarely
Marest, in Lett.
Ed. IV. 221. |
exceeded forty men: it was the parties of six or seven which were the most to be dreaded.
Skill consisted in surprising the enemy.
They follow his trail, to kill him when he sleeps; or they lie in ambush near a village, and watch for an opportunity of suddenly surprising an individual, or, it may be, a woman and her children; and, with three strokes to each, the scalps of the victims being suddenly taken off, the brave flies back with his companions, to hang the trophies in his
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cabin, to go from village to village in exulting proces-
sion, to hear orators recount his deeds to the elders and the chief people, and, by the number of scalps taken with his own hand, to gain the high war titles of honor.
Nay, war parties of but two or three were not uncommon.
Clad in skins, with a supply of red paint, a bow and quiver full of arrows, they would roam through the wide forest as a bark would over the ocean; for days and weeks, they would hang on the skirts of their enemy, waiting the moment for striking a blow.
From the heart of the Five Nations, two young warriors would thread the wilderness of the south; would go through the glades of
Pennsylvania, the valleys of
Western Virginia, and steal within the mountain fastnesses of the Cherokees.
There they would hide themselves in the clefts of rocks, and change their places of concealment, till, provided with scalps enough to astonish their village, they would bound over the ledges, and hurry home.
It was the danger of such inroads, that, in time of war, made every English family on the frontier insecure.
The Romans, in their triumphal processions, exhibited captives to the gaze of the Roman people; the Indian conqueror compels them to run the gantlet through the children and women of his tribe.
To inflict blows that cannot be returned, is proof of full success, and the entire humiliation of the enemy; it is, moreover, an experiment of courage and patience.
Those who show fortitude are applauded; the coward becomes an object of scorn.
Fugitives and suppliants were often incorporated into a victorious tribe, which had waged an unrelenting warfare against their nation.
The Creek confederacy was recruited by emigrants from friends and foes,
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the Iroquois welcomed the defeated Hurons.
Some-
times a captive was saved, to be adopted in place of a warrior who had fallen.
In that event the allegiance, and, as it were, the identity, of the captive, the current of his affections and his duties, became changed.
The children and the wife whom he had left at home, are to be blotted from his memory: he is to be the departed chieftain, resuscitated and brought back from the dwelling-place of shadows, to cherish those whom he cherished; to hate those whom he hated; to rekindle his passions; to retaliate his wrongs; to hunt for his cabin; to fight for his clan.
And the foreigner thus adopted is esteemed to stand in the same relations of consanguinity, and to be bound by the same restraints in regard to marriage.
More commonly, it was the captive's lot to endure torments and death, in the forms which Brebeuf has described.
On the way to the cabins of his conquerors, the hands of an Iroquois prisoner were crushed between stones, his fingers torn off or mutilated, the joints of his arms scorched and gashed, while he himself preserved his tranquillity, and sang the songs of his nation.
Arriving at the homes of his conquerors, all the cabins regaled him, and a young girl was bestowed on him, to be the wife of his captivity and the companion of his last loves.
At one village after another, he was present at festivals which were given in his name, and at which he was obliged to sing.
The old chief, who might have adopted him in place of a fallen nephew, chose rather to gratify revenge, and pronounced the doom of death.
‘That is well,’ was his reply.
The sister of the fallen warrior, into whose place it had been proposed to receive him, still treated him with tenderness as a brother, offering him
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food, and serving him with interest and regard; her
father caressed him as though he had become his kinsman, gave him a pipe, and wiped the thick drops of sweat from his face.
His last entertainment, made at the charge of the bereaved chief, began at noon. To the crowd of his guests he declared,—‘My brothers, I am going to die; make merry around me with good heart: I am a man; I fear neither death nor your torments:’ and he sang aloud.
The feast being ended, he was conducted to the cabin of blood.
They place him on a mat, and bind his hands; he rises, and dances round the cabin, chanting his death-song.
At eight in the evening, eleven fires had been kindled, and these are hedged in by files of spectators.
The young men selected to be the actors are exhorted to do well, for their deeds would be grateful to Areskoui, the powerful war-god.
A war-chief strips the prisoner, shows him naked to the people, and assigns their office to the tormentors.
Then ensued a scene the most horrible: torments lasted till after sunrise, when the wretched victim, bruised, gashed, mutilated, half-roasted, and scalped, was carried out of the village, and hacked in pieces.
A festival upon his flesh completed the sacrifice.
Such were the customs that Europeans have displaced.
The solemn execution of the captive seems to have been, in part at least, an act of faith, and a religious sacrifice.
The dweller in the wilderness is conscious of his dependence; he feels the existence of relations with the universe by which he is surrounded and an invisible world; he recognizes a nature higher than his own. His language, which gave him no separate word for causation, could give him no expression for a first cause; and, since he had no idea of existence except in connection with space and time, he could have no
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idea of an Infinite and Eternal Being.
But, as the
ideas of existence and causation were blended with words expressing action or quality, so the idea of divinity was blended with nature, and yet not wholly merged in the external world.
So complete was this union, many travellers denied that they had any religion.
‘As to the knowledge of God,’ says
Joutel of the south-west, ‘it did not seem to us that they had any definite notion about it. True, we found upon our route some who, as far as we could judge, believed that there was something exalted, which is above all, but they have neither temples, nor ceremonies, nor prayers, marking a divine worship.
That they have no religion, can be said of all whom we saw.’
‘The
northern nations,’ writes Le Caron, ‘recognize no divinity from motives of religion; they have neither
sacrifice, nor temple, nor priest, nor ceremony of worship.’
Le Jeune also affirms, ‘There is among
them very little superstition; they think only of living and of revenge; they are not attached to the worship of any divinity.’
And yet they believed that some
St. Mary of the Incarnation, lettre LXXXVI. p. 652. |
powerful genius had created the world; that unknown agencies had made the heavens above them and the earth on which they dwelt.
The god of the savage
was what the metaphysician endeavors to express by the word
substance. The red man, unaccustomed to generalization, obtained no conception of an absolute substance, of a self-existent being, but saw a divinity in every power.
Wherever there was being, motion,
or action, there to him was a spirit; and, in a special manner, wherever there appeared singular excellence among beasts or birds, or in the creation, there to him was the presence of a divinity.
When he feels his pulse throb, or his heart beat, he knows that it is a
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spirit. A god resides in the flint, to give forth the
kindling, cheering fire; in the mountain cliff; in the cool recesses of the grottoes which nature has adorned; in each ‘little grass’ that springs miraculously from the earth.
‘The woods, the wilds, and the waters, respond to savage intelligence; the stars and the mountains live; the river, and the lake, and the waves, have a spirit.’
Every hidden agency, every mysterious influence, is personified.
A god dwells in the sun, and in the moon, and in the firmament; the spirit of
the morning reddens in the eastern sky; a deity is present in the ocean and in the fire; the crag that overhangs the river has its genius; there is a spirit to the waterfall; a household god makes its abode in the
Indian's wigwam, and consecrates his home; spirits climb upon the forehead, to weigh down the eyelids in sleep.
Not the heavenly bodies only, the sky is filled with spirits that minister to man. To the savage,
Von Reck's Kurze Nachricht, in Urlsper ger's Ausfuhrliche Nachricht, i. 192. |
Reek's divinity, broken, as it were, into an infinite number of fragments, fills all place and all being.
The idea of unity in the creation may have existed contemporanebut it existed only in the germ, or as a vague belief derived from the harmony of the universe.
Yet faith in the Great Spirit, when once presented, faith in the Great Spirit, when once presented, was promptly seized and appropriated, and so infused itself into the heart of remotest tribes, that it came to be often considered as a portion of their original faith.
Their shadowy aspirations and creeds assumed, through the reports of missionaries, a more complete development; and a religious system was elicited from the pregnant but rude materials.
It is not fear which generates this faith in the existence of higher powers.
The faith attaches to every thing, but most of all to that which is excellent; it is
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the undefined consciousness of the existence of mex-
plicable relations towards powers of which the savage cannot solve the origin or analyze the nature.
His gods are not the offspring of terror; universal nature seems to him instinct with divinity.
The Indian venerates what excites his amazement or interests his imagination.
‘The
Illinois,’ writes the
Jesuit Marest, ‘adore a sort of genius, which they call
manitou: to
them it is the master of life, the spirit that rules all things.
A bird, a buffalo, a bear, a feather, a skin—that is their manitou.’
No tribe worshipped its prophets, or deified its heroes; no Indian adored his fellow-man, or paid homage to the dead.
He turns from himself to the animal world,
which he believes also to be animated by spirits.
The
Benjamin Constant, De la Religion i. 159. |
bird, that mysteriously cleaves the air, into which he cannot soar; the fish, that hides itself in the depths Religion of the clear, cool lakes, which he cannot fathom; the beasts of the forest, whose unerring instincts, more sure than his own intelligence, seem like revelations; —these enshrine the deity whom he adores.
On the
Ohio, Mermet questioned a medicine man, who venerated the buffalo as his manitou.
He confessed that he did not worship the buffalo, but the invisible spirit which is the type of all buffaloes.
‘Is there such a manitou to the bear?’—‘Yes.’—‘To man?’— ‘Nothing more certain; man is superior to all.’— ‘Why do you not, then, invoke the manitou of man?’
And the juggler knew not what to answer.
It has
been said by speculative philosophy, that no Indian ever chose the manitou of a man for his object of adoration, because he adored only the unknown, and man is the being most intimately known to him. It seems, also, that the very instinct which prompted the savage
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to adore, was an instinct which prompted him to rec-
ognize his closer connection with the world.
To have worshipped the manitou of a man, would have been to put himself only in nearer relations with his own kind; the gulf between him and the universe would have remained as wide as ever.
The instincts towards man led to marriage, society, and political institutions.
The sentiment of devotion sought to pass beyond the region of humanity, and enter into intimate communion with nature and the beings to whom imagination intrusted its control,—with the sun and moon, the forests, the rivers, the lakes, the fishes, the birds,—all which has an existence independent of man, and manifests a power which he can neither create nor destroy.
Nor did the savage distrust his imaginations.
Something within him affirmed with authority, that there was more in them than fancies which his mind had called into being.
Infidelity never clouded his mind; the shadows of skepticism never darkened his faith.
The piety of the savage was not merely a sentiment of passive resignation-he sought to propitiate the unknown, to avert their wrath, to secure their favor.
If, at first, no traces of religious feeling were dis-
cerned, closer observation showed that, every where
among the red men, even among the roving tribes of the north, they had some kind of sacrifice and of prayer.
If the harvest was abundant, if the chase was successful, they saw in their success the influence of a manitou; and they would ascribe even an ordinary accident to the wrath of the god. ‘O manitou!’
exclaimed an Indian, at daybreak, with his family
about him, lamenting the loss of a child, ‘thou art angry with me; turn thine anger from me, and spare the rest of my children.’
Canonicus, the great sachem of the Narragansetts, when bent with age, having
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buried his son, ‘burned his own dwelling, and all his
goods in it, in part as a humble expiation to the god who, as they believe, had taken his sonne from him.’
At their feasts, they were careful not to profane the
Le Caron in Le Clerea i. 2<*>8. |
bones of the elk, the beaver, and of other game, lest the spirits of these animals should pass by and behold the indignity; and then the living of the same species instructed of the outrage, would ever after be careful to escape the toils and the arrows of the hunter.
There were also occasions on which nothing of the flesh was carried forth out of the wigwam, though a part might be burned as food for the dead, and when, of the beasts which were consumed, it was the sacred rule that not a bone should be broken.
On their expeditions, they keep no watch during the night, but pray earnestly to their fetiches; and the band of warriors sleep securely under the safeguard of the sentinels whom they have invoked.
They throw tobacco into the fire, on the lake or the rapids, into the crevices in the rocks, on the war-path, to propitiate the genius of the place The evil that is in the world they also ascribe to spirits, that are the dreaded authors of their woes.
The evil demon of war was to be propitiated only by acts of cruelty; yet they never sacrificed their own children or their own friends.
The
Iroquois, when
Jogues was among them, sacrificed an Algonquin woman in honor of Areskoui, their war-god, exclaiming, ‘Areskoui, to
thee we burn this victim; feast on her flesh, and grant us new victories;’ and her flesh was eaten as a religious rite.
Hennepin found a beaver robe hung on an oak, as an oblation to the spirit that dwells in the
Falls of St Anthony.
The guides of
Joutel in the south-
west, on killing a buffalo, offered several slices of the meat as a sacrifice to the unknown spirit of that wil
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derness.
As they passed the
Ohio, its beautiful stream
was propitiated by gifts of tobacco and dried meat; and worship was paid to the rock just above the
Missouri.
Even now, in the remote west, evidence may be found of the same homage to the higher natures, which the savage divines, but cannot fathom.
Nor did he seek to win their favor by gifts alone; he made a sacrifice of his pleasures; he chastened his passions.
To calm the rising wind, when the morning sky was red, he would repress his activity, and give up the business of the day. To secure success in the chase, by appeasing the tutelary spirits of the animals to be pursued, severe fasts were kept; and happy was he to
whom they appeared in his dreams, for it was a sure augury of abundant returns.
The warrior, preparing for an expedition, often sought the favor of the god of battle by separating himself from woman, and mortifying the body by continued penance.
The security of
female captives was, in part, the consequence of the vows of chastity, by which the warrior was bound till after his return.
The
Indian, detesting restraint, was perpetually imposing upon himself extreme hardships, that by penance and suffering he might atone for his offences, and by acts of self-denial might win for himself the powerful favor of the invisible world.
Nor is the Indian satisfied with paying homage to the several powers whose aid he may invoke in war, in the chase, or on the river; he seeks a special genius to be his companion and tutelary angel through life.
On approaching maturity, the young Chippewa, anx-
ious to behold God, blackens his face with charcoal,
and, building a lodge of cedar-boughs, it may be on the summit of a hill, there begins his fast in solitude
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The fast endures, perhaps, ten days, sometimes even
without water, till, excited by the severest irritation of thirst, watchfulness, and famine, he beholds a vision of God, and knows it to be his guardian spirit.
That spirit may assume fantastic forms, as a skin or a feather, as a smooth pebble or a shell; but the fetich, when obtained, and carried by the warrior in his pouch, is not the guardian angel himself, but rather the token of his favor, and the pledge of his presence in time of need.
A similar probation was appointed for the warriors of
Virginia, and traces of it are discerned beyond the
Mississippi.
That man should take up the cross, that sin should be atoned for, are ideas that dwell in human nature; they were so diffused among the savages, that Le Clercq believed some of the apostles must have reached the
American continent.
The gifts to the deities were made by the chiefs, or by any Indian for himself.
In this sense, each Indian was his own priest; the right of offering sacrifices was not reserved to a class; any one could do it for himself, whether the sacrifice consisted in oblations or acts of self-denial.
But the Indian had a consciousness of man's superiority to the powers of nature, and sorcerers sprung up in every part of the wilderness.
They
were prophets whose prayers would be heard.
‘They are no other,’ said the
Virginian Whitaker, ‘but such as our English witches:’ and, as their agency was most active in healing disease, they are now usually called
medicine men.
Here, too, the liberty of the desert appears.
As the war-chief was elected by opinion, and served voluntarily, so the medicine men were self-appointed.
They professed an insight into the laws of nature, and power over those laws; but belief was free; there was no
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monopoly of science, no close priesthood.
He who
could inspire confidence might come forward as a medicine man: The savage puts his faith in auguries; he casts lots, and believes nature will be obedient to the decision, he puts his trust in the sagacity of the sorcerer, who comes forth from a heated, pent-up lodge, and, with all the convulsions of enthusiasm, utters a confused medley of sounds as oracles.
The medicine man boasts of his power over the ele-
merits; he can call water from above, and beneath,
and around; he can foretell a drought, or bring rain,
or guide the lightning; by his spells he can give at-
Relation 1638, 1639, p. 162. |
traction and good fortune to the arrow or the net; he conjures the fish, that dwell in the lakes or haunt the rivers, to suffer themselves to be caught; he can pronounce spells which will infallibly give success in the chase, which will compel the beaver to rise up from beneath the water, and overcome the shyness and cun ning of the moose; he can, by his incantations, draw the heart of woman; he can give to the warrior vigilance like the rising sun, and power to walk over the earth and through the sky victoriously.
If an evil spirit has introduced disease into the frame of a victim, the medicine man can put it to flight; and, should his remedies chance to heal, he exclaims, ‘Who can resist
my spirit?
Is he not, indeed, the master of life?’
Or disease, it was believed, might spring from a want of harmony with the outward world.
If some innate desire has failed to be gratified, life can be saved only by the discovery and gratification of that secret longing of the soul; and the medicine man reveals the momentous secret.
Were he to assert that the manitou orders the sick man to wallow naked in the snow, or
to scorch himself with fire, he would do it. But let
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not the wisdom of civilization wholly deride the sav-
age: the same superstition long lingered in the citiesand palaces of
Europe; and, in the century after the
Huron missions began, the
English moralist
Johnson was carried, in his infancy, to the
British monarch, to be cured of scrofula by the great medicine of her touch.
Little reverence was attached to time or place.
It could not be perceived that the savages had any set
holidays; only in times of triumph, at burials, at harvests, the nation assembled for solemn rites.
Each
Chocta town had a house in which the bones of the dead were deposited for a season previous to their final burial.
The
Natchez, like their kindred the Taensas, kept a perpetual fire in a rude cabin, in which the bones of their great chiefs were said to be preserved.
The honest
Charlevoix, who entered it, writes, ‘I saw no
ornaments, absolutely nothing, which could make me know that I was in a temple;’ and, referring to the minute relations which others had fabricated of an altar, and a dome, of cones wrapped in skins, and the circle of the bodies of departed chiefs, he adds, ‘I saw nothing of all that: if things were so formerly, they must have changed greatly.’
And
Adair confidently insinuates, that the Koran does not more widely differ
from the Gospels, than the romances respecting the
Natchez from the truth.
The building was probably a charnel-house, not a place of worship.
No tribes whatever, east of the
Mississippi, or certainly none except those of the
Natchez family, had a consecrated spot, or a temple, where there was believed to be a nearer communication between this world and that which is unseen.
Dreams are to the wild man the avenue to the invisible
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world; he reveres them as divine revelations,
and believes he shall die unless they are carried into effect.
The capricious visions in a feverish sleep are obeyed by the village or the tribe; the whole nation would contribute its harvest, its costly furs, its belts of beads, the produce of its chase, rather than fail in their fulfilment; the dream must be obeyed, even if it required the surrender of women to a public embrace.
Relation 1638, 1639, p. 125. |
The faith in the spiritual world, as revealed by dreams, was universal.
On
Lake Superior, the nephew of a Chippewa squaw having dreamed that he saw a French dog, the woman travelled four hundred leagues,
Relation 1655, 1656, p. 97. |
in midwinter, over ice and though snows, to obtain it. Life itself was hazarded, rather than fail to listen
to the message conveyed through sleep; and, if it could not be fulfilled, at least some semblance would be made.
Happy was the hunter who, as he went forth to the chase, obtained a vision of the great spirit of the animal which he was to pursue; the sight was a warrant of success.
But if the dream should be threaten ing, the savage would rise in the night, or prevent the dawn with prayer; or he would call around him his friends and neighbors, and himself keep waking and
fasting, with invocations, for many days and nights.
The Indian invoked the friendship of spirits, and sought the mediation of medicine men; but he never would confess his fear of death.
To him, also, intelligence was something more than a transitory accident; and he was unable to conceive of a cessation of life His faith in immortality was like that of the child, who weeps over the dead body of its mother, and believes that she yet lives.
At the bottom of a grave, the melting snows had left a little water; and the sight
of it chilled and saddened his imagination.
‘You
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have had no compassion for my poor brother’—such
was the reproach of an Algonquin;—‘the air is pleasant, and the sun so cheering, and yet you do not re-
move the snow from his grave to warm him a little;’ and he knew no contentment till this was done.
The same motive prompted them to bury with the warrior his pipe and his manitou, his tomahawk, quiver, and bow ready bent for action, and his most splendid apparel; to place by his side his bowl, his maize, and his venison, for the long journey to the country of his ancestors.
Festivals in honor of the dead were also frequent, when a part of the food was
given to the flames, that so it might serve to nourish the departed.
The traveller would find in the forests a dead body placed on a scaffold erected upon piles, carefully wrapped in bark for its shroud, and attired in
warmest furs.
If a mother lost her babe, she would
cover it with bark, and envelop it anxiously in the softest beaver-skins; at the burial-place, she would put by its side its cradle, its beads, and its rattles; and, as a last service of maternal love, would draw milk from her bosom in a cup of bark, and burn it in the fire, that her infant might still find nourishment on its solitary journey to the land of shades.
Yet the new-born babe would be buried, not, as usual, on a scaffold, but by the wayside, that so its spirit might
secretly steal into the bosom of some passing matron, and be born again under happier auspices.
On bury-
ing her daughter, the
Chippewa mother adds, not snow-shoes, and beads, and moccasons, only, but (sad emblem of woman's lot in the wilderness!) the carrying-belt and the paddle.
‘I know my daughter will be restored to me,’ she once said, as she clipped a lock of hair as a memorial; ‘by this lock of hair I shall discover
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her, for I shall take it with me,’—alluding to
the day when she, too, with her carrying-belt and paddle, and the little relic of her child, should pass through the grave to the dwelling-place of her ancestors.
It was believed, even, that living men had visited the remote region where the shadows have their home; and that once, like Orpheus of old, a brother, wander-
ing in search of a cherished sister, but for untimely curiosity, would have drawn her from the society of the dead, and restored her to the cabin of her fathers.
In the flashes of the northern lights, men believed they saw the dance of the dead.
But the south-west is the
great subject of traditions.
There is the court of the
Great God; there is the paradise where beans and maize grow spontaneously; there are the shades of
the forefathers of the red men.
This form of faith in immortality had also its crimes.
It is related that the chief within whose
Portuguese Relation c. XXX. |
Relation territory
De Soto died, selected two young and wellproportioned Indians to be put to death, saying the usage of the country was, when any lord died, to kill Indians to wait on him and serve him by the way. Traces of an analogous superstition may be found among Algonquin tribes, and among the
Sioux; the
Tales of the Northwest, 282. |
Winnebagoes are said to have observed the usage within the memory of persons now living; it is af-
firmed, also, of the
Natchez, and doubtless with truth, though the details of the sacrifice are described with wild exaggeration.
Even now, the Dahcotas will slay horses on the grave of a warrior: news has come from the Great Spirit, that the departed chief is still borne by them in the land of shades; and the spirits of the mighty dead have sometimes been seen, as they ride, in the night-time, through the sky.
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The savage believed that to every man there is an
appointed time to die; to anticipate that period by suicide, was detested as the meanest cowardice.
For the dead he abounds in his lamentations, mingling them with words of comfort to the living: to him death is the king of terrors.
He never names the name of the departed; to do so is an offence justifying revenge.
To speak generally of brothers to one who has lost her own, would be an injury, for it would make her weep because her brothers are no more; and the missionary could not speak of the
Father of man to orphans, without kindling indignation.
And yet they summon energy to speak of their own approaching death with tranqlillity ‘Full happy am I,’ sings the warrior, ‘full
happy am I to be slain within the limits of the land of the enemy!’
While yet alive, the dying chief sometimes arrayed himself in the garments in which he was to be buried, and, giving a farewell festival, calmly chanted his last song, or made a last harangue, glorying in the remembrance of his deeds, and commending to
his friends the care of those whom he loved; and when he had given up the ghost, he was placed by his wigwam in a sitting posture, as if to show that, though life was spent, the principle of being was not gone; and in that posture he was buried.
Every where in
America this posture was adopted at burials.
From
Canada to
Patagonia, it was the usage of every Nation—an evidence that some common sympathy pervaded the continent, and struck a chord which vibrated through the heart of a race.
The narrow house, within which the warrior sat, was often hedged round with a light palisade; and, for six months, the women would repair to it thrice a day to weep.
He that should de spoil the dead was accursed.
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The faith, as well as the sympathies, of the savage de-
scended also to inferior beings.
Of each kind of animal they say there exists one, the source and origin of all, of a vast size, the type and original of the whole class.
From the immense invisible beaver come all the beavers, by whatever run of water they are found; the same is true of the elk and buffalo, of the eagle and the rob in, of the meanest quadruped of the forest, of the smallest insect that buzzes in the air. There lives for each class of animals this invisible, vast type, or elder brother.
Thus the savage established his right to be classed by philosophers in the rank of realists; and his chief effort at generalization was a reverent exercise of the religious sentiment.
Where these elder brothers dwell they do not exactly know; yet it may be that the giant manitous, which are brothers to beasts, are hid beneath the waters, and that those of the birds make their homes in the blue sky. But the
Indian believes also, of each individual animal, that it possesses the mysterious, the indestructible principle of life: there is not a breathing thing but has its shade, which never can perish.
Regarding himself, in comparison with other animals, but as the first among coordinate existences, he respects the brute creation, and assigns to it, as to himself, a perpetuity of being.
‘The ancients of
Compare los. Le Caron, in Le Clereq. <*> 273. |
these lands’ believed that the warrior, when released from life, renews the passions and activity of this world; is seated once more among his friends; shares again the joyous feast; walks through shadowy forests, that are alive with the spirits of birds; and there, in his paradise,
By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues—
The hunter and the deer a shade.
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To the Indian the prospect of his own paradise was
dear.
‘We raise not our thoughts,’ they would say to the missionaries, ‘to your heaven; we desire only the paradise of our ancestors.’
To the doctrine of a
Relation 1655, 1656, p. 95 |
future life they listened readily.
The idea of retribution, as far as it has found its way among them, was derived from Europeans.
The future life was to the
Indian, like the present, a free gift; some, it was indeed believed, from feebleness or age, did not reach the paradise of shades; but no red man was so proud as to believe that its portals were opened to him by his own good deeds.
Their notion of immortality was, as we have seen, a faith in the continuance of life; they did not expect a general resurrection; nor could they be induced, in any way, to believe that the body will be raised up Yet no nations paid greater regard to the remains of their ancestors.
Every where among the Choctas and the Wyandots, Cherokees and Algonquins, they were carefully wrapped in choicest furs, and preserved with affectionate veneration.
Once every few years, the Hurons collected from their scattered cemeteries the bones of their dead, and, in the midst of great solemnities, cleansed them from every remainder of flesh, and deposited them in one common grave: these are their holy relics.
Other nations possess, in letters and the arts, enduring monuments of their ancestors; the savage red men, who can point to no obelisk or column, whose rude implements of agriculture could not even raise a furrow on the surface of the earth, excel all races in veneration for the dead.
The grave is their only monument,—the bones of their fathers the only pledges of their history.
A deeper interest belongs to the question of the
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natural relation of the aborigines of America to those
before whom they have fled.
‘We are men,’ said the
Illinois to
Marquette.
After illustrating the weaknesses of the Wyandots,
Brebeuf adds, ‘They are men.’
The natives of
America were men and women of like endowments with their more cultivated conquerors; they have the same affections, and the same powers; are chilled with an ague, and burn with a fever.
We may call them savage, just as we call fruits wild; natural right governs them.
They revere unseen powers; they respect the nuptial ties; they are careful of their dead: their religion, their marriages, and their burials, show them possessed of the habits of humanity, and bound by a federative compact to the race.
They had the moral faculty which can recognize the distinction between right and wrong; nor did their judgments of relations bend to their habits and passions more decidedly than those of the nations whose laws justified, whose statesmen applauded, whose sovereigns personally shared, the invasion of a continent to steal its sons.
If they readily yielded to the impetuosity of selfishness, they never made their own personality the centre of the universe.
They were faithless treaty-breakers; but, at least, they did not exalt falsehood into the dignity of a political science, or scoff at the supremacy of justice as the delusive hope of fools; and, if they made every thing yield to self-preservation, they never avowed their interest to be the first law of international policy.
They had never risen to the conceptions of a spiritual religion, out as between the
French and the natives, the latter —such is the assertion of St. Mary of the Incarnation— had even a greater tendency to devotion.
Under the instructions of the Jesuits, they learned to swing censers,
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and to chant aves.
Gathering round
Eliot, in
Massachusetts, the tawny choir sang the psalms of David, in Indian, ‘to one of the ordinary English
tunes, melodiously;’ and in the school of
Brainerd, thirty Lennape boys could answer to all the questions
in the Westminster Assembly's Catechism.
There were instances of the submission of warriors to the penance imposed by the Roman church; and the sanctity of a Mohawk maiden,—the
American Geneveva,— who preserved her vows of chastity, is celebrated in the early histories of New France.
They recognized the connection between the principles of
Christian morals; there were examples among them of men who, under the guidance of missionaries, became anxious for their salvation, having faith enough for despair,
if not for conversion; and even in the doctrine of the divine unity, they seemed to find not so much a novel-
ty as the revival of a slumbering reminiscence.
They were not good arithmeticians; their tales of the number of their years, or of the warriors in their clans, are little to be relied on; and yet every where they counted like
Leibnitz and La Place, and, from the influence of some law that pervades humanity, they began to repeat at ten.
They could not dance like those trained to attitudes of grace; they could not sketch light ornaments like Raphael; yet, under every sky, they delighted in a rhythmic repetition of forms and sounds,— would move in cadence to wild melodies,—and, with great elegance and imitative power, they would tattoo their skins with harmonious arabesques.
We call them cruel; yet they never invented the thumb-screw, or the boot, or the rack, or broke on the wheel, or exiled bands of their nations for opinion's sake; and never protected the monopoly of a medicine man by the gallows,
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or the block, or by fire.
There is not a quality
belonging to the white man, which did not also belong to the
American savage; there is not among the aborigines a rule of language, a custom, or an institution, which, when considered in its principle, has not a counterpart among their conquerors.
The unity of the human race is established by the exact correspondence between their respective powers; the
Indian has not one more, has not one less, than the white man; the map of the faculties is for both identical.
When, from the general characteristics of humanity, we come to the comparison of powers, the existence of degrees immediately appears.
The red man has aptitude at imitation rather than invention; he learns easily; his natural logic is correct and discriminating, and he seizes on the nicest distinctions in comparing objects.
But he is deficient in the power of imagination to combine and bring unity into his floating fancies, and in the faculty of abstraction to lift himself out of the dominion of his immediate experience.
He is nearly destitute of abstract moral truth,—of general principles; and, as a consequence, equalling the white man in the sagacity of the senses, and in judgments resting on them, he is inferior in reason and the moral qualities.
Nor is this inferiority simply attached to the individual; it is connected with organization, and is the characteristic of the race.
This is the inference from history.
Benevolence has, every where in our land, exerted itself to amelio rate the condition of the Indian,—above all, to educate the young.
Jesuit, Franciscan, and Puritan, the Church of England, the Moravian, the benevolent founders of schools, academies, and colleges, all have endeavored to change the habits of the rising generation among
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the Indians; and the results, in every instance, vary-
ing in the degree of influence exerted by the missionaary, have varied in little else.
Woman, too, with her gentleness, and the winning enthusiasm of her selfsacrificing benevolence, has attempted their instruction, and has attempted it in vain.
St. Mary of the Incarnation succeeded as little as
Jonathan Edwards or
Brainerd.
The Jesuit
Stephen de Carheil, revered for his genius, as well as for his zeal, was for more than sixty years, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a missionary among the
Huron-Iroquois tribes; he spoke their dialects with as much facility and elegance as though they had been his mother-tongue; yet the fruits of his diligence were inconsiderable.
Neither
John Eliot nor
Roger Williams was able to change essentially the habits and character of the
New England tribes.
The
Quakers came among the Delawares in the spirit of peace and brotherly love, and with sincerest wishes to benefit the
Indian; but the Quakers succeeded no better than the Puritans—not nearly as well as the Jesuits.
Brainerd awakened in the Delawares a perception of the unity of Christian morals; and yet his account of them is gloomy and desponding: ‘They are unspeakably indolent and slothful; they discover little gratitude; they seem to have no sentiments of generosity, benevolence, or goodness.’
The
Moravian Loskiel could not change their character; and, like other tribes, its fragments at last migrated to the west.
The condition of the little Indian communities, that are enclosed within the
European settlements in
Canada, in
Massachusetts, in Carolina, is hardly cheering to the philanthropist.
In
New Hampshire, and elsewhere, schools for Indian children were established; but, as they became fledged, they
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all escaped, refusing to be caged.
Harvard College
enrolls the name of an Algonquin youth among her pupils; but the college parchment could not close the gulf between the
Indian character and the Anglo-American.
The copper-colored men are characterized by a moral inflexibility, a rigidity of attachment to their hereditary customs and manners.
The birds and the brooks, as they chime forth their unwearied canticles, chime them ever to the same ancient melodies, and the
Indian child, as it grows up, displays a propensity to the habits of its ancestors.
This determinateness of moral character is marked, also, in the organization of the American savage.
He has little flexibility of features or transparency of skin; and therefore, if he depicts his passions, it is by strong contortions, or the kindling of the eye, that seems ready to burst from its socket.
He cannot blush; the movement of his blood does not visibly represent the movement of his affections: for him the domain of animated beauty is circumscribed; he cannot paint to the eye the emotions of moral sensibility.
This effect is heightened by a uniformity of intellectual culture and activity.
Youth and manhood to all have but one character; and where villages were scattered only at widest distances in the wilderness,— where marriage, interdicted, indeed, between members of the same family badge, was yet usually limited to people of the same tribe,—ties of blood united the nation, and the purity of the race increased the uniformity of organization.
Each individual was marked, not so much by personal peculiarities, as by the physiognomy of his tribe.
Thus Nature in the wilderness is true to her type, and deformity is almost unknown.
How rare is it to
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find the red man squint-eyed, or with a diseased spine,
halt or blind, or with any deficiency or excess in the organs!
It is not merely that, in the savage state of equality, deformity would never perpetuate itself, by winning through the aid of fortune what it cannot win from love; it is not merely that, among barbarians, the feeble and the misshaped perish from neglect or fatigue; the most refined nation is most liable to produce varieties, and to degenerate; when the habits of uncivilized simplicity have been fixed for thousands of years, the hereditary organization is safe against monstrous deviations.
This inflexibility of organization will not even yield to climate: there is the same general resemblance of feature among all the aboriginal inhabitants, from the Terra del Fuego to the St. Lawrence; all have some shade of the same dull vermilion, or cinnamon, or reddish brown, or copper color, carefully to be distinguished from the olive,—the same dark and glossy hair, coarse, and never curling.
They have beards, but generally of feeble growth; their eye is elongated, having an orbit inclining to a quadrangular shape; the cheek-bones are prominent; the nose is broad; the jaws project the lips are large and thick, giving to the mouth an expression of indolent insensibility; the forehead, as compared with Europeans, is narrow.
The facial angle of the European is assumed to be eighty-seven; that of the American, by induction from many admeasurements, is declared to be seventy-five.
The
mean internal capacity of the skull of the former is eighty-seven cubic inches; of the barbarous tribes of the latter, it is found to be, at least, eighty-two.
And yet the inflexibility of organization is not so absolute as to forbid hope.
The color of the tribes
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differs in its hue; and some are of so fair a complex
ion, that the blood can be seen as it mantles to the cheek: the stature and form vary, so that not only are some nations tall and slender, but in the same nation there are contrasts.
Improvement, too, has pervaded every clan in North America.
The Indian of to-day excels his ancestors in skill, in power over nature, and in knowledge; tile gun, the knife, and the horse, of themselves made a revolution in his condition and the current of his ideas: that the wife of the white man is cherished as his equal, has already been dimly noised about in the huts of the Comanches; the idea of the Great Spirit, who is the master of life, has reached the remote prairies.
How slowly did the condition of the common people of Europe make advances!
For how many centuries did the knowledge of letters remain unknown to the peasant of Germany or France!
How languidly did civilization pervade the valleys of the Pyrenees!
How far is intellectual culture from having reached the peasantry of Hungary!
Within the century and a half during which the Cherokees have been acquainted with Europeans, they have learned the use of the plough and the axe, of herds and flocks, of the printing-press and water-mills; they have gained a mastery over the fields, and have taught the streams to run for their benefit.
And finally, in proof of progress, that nation, like the Choctas, the Creeks, the Chippewas, the Winnebagoes, and other tribes, has increased, not in intelligence only, but in numbers.
‘Whence was America peopled?’
was the anxious inquiry that followed its discovery.
‘Whence came its trees and its grasses?’
was asked, by way of excuse for indifference.
But we keep the record of the Introduction
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of many trees and grasses; and, though this
continent was peopled before it became known to history, it is yet reasonable to search after traces of connection between the nations of
America and those of the Old World.
To aid this inquiry, the country east of the Mississippi has no monuments.
The numerous mounds which have been discovered in the alluvial valleys of the west, have by some been regarded as the works of an earlier and more cultivated race of men, whose cities have been laid waste, whose language and institutions have been destroyed or driven away; but the study of the structure of the earth strips this imposing
theory of its marvels.
Where imagination fashions relics of artificial walls, geology sees but crumbs of decaying sandstone, clinging like the remains of mortar to blocks of greenstone that rested on it; it discovers in parallel intrenchments a trough, that subsiding waters have ploughed through the centre of a ridge; it explains the tessellated pavement to be but a layer of pebbles aptly joined by water; and, on examining the mounds, and finding them composed of different strata of earth, arranged horizontally to their very edge, it ascribes their creation to the Power that shaped the globe into vales and hillocks.
When the waters had gently deposited their alluvial burden on the bosom of the earth, it is not strange that, of the fantastic forms shaped by the eddies, some should resemble the ruins of a fortress; that the channel of a torrent should seem even like walls that connected a town with its harbor; that natural cones should be esteemed monuments of inexplicable toil.
But the elements, as they crumble the mountain, and scatter the decomposed rocks, do not measure their action as men measure the labor of
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their hands.
The hunters of old, as more recently the
monks of La Trappe, may have selected a mound as the site of their dwellings, the aid to their rude fortifications, their watchtower for gaining a vision of God.
or, more frequently than all, as their burial-places.
Most of the northern tribes, perhaps all, preserved the bones of their fathers; and the festival of the dead was the greatest ceremony of western faith.
When Nature has taken to herself her share in the construction of the symmetrical hillocks, nothing will remain to warrant the inference of a high civilization, that has left its abodes or died away,—of an earlier acquaintance with the arts of the Old World.
That there have been successive irruptions of rude tribes, may be inferred from the insulated fragments of nations, which are clearly distinguished by their language.
The mounds in the
valley of the Mississippi have also been used—the smaller ones, perhaps, have been constructed—as burial-places of a race, of which the peculiar
organization, as seen in the broader forehead, the larger facial angle, the less angular figure of the orbits of the eye, the more narrow nose, the less evident projection of the jaws, the smaller dimensions of the palatine fossa, the flattened occiput, bears a surprisingly exact resemblance to that of the race of nobles who sleep in the ancient tombs of
Peru.
Retaining the general characteristics of the red race, they differ obviously from the present tribes of Miamis and Wyandots.
These mouldering bones, from hillocks which are crowned by trees that have defied the storms of many centuries, raise bewildering visions of migrations, of which no tangible traditions exist; but the graves of earth from which they are dug, and the feeble fortifications that are sometimes found in their vicinity,
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afford no special evidence of early connection with
other continents.
‘Among the more ancient works,’ says a careful observer, who is not disposed to under-
Drake's Picture of Cmcinnati, p. 201. Compare At water, in Trans.
of Am Antiq.
Soc. i |
value the significancy of these silent monuments, near which he dwells, and which he has carefully explored, ‘there is not a single edifice, nor any ruins which prove the existence, in former ages, of a building composed of imperishable materials.
No fragment of a column, nor a brick, nor a single hewn stone large enough to have been incorporated into a wall, has been discovered.
The only relics which remain to inflame curiosity, are composed of earth.’
Some of the tribes had vessels made of clay; near
Natchez, an image was found, of a substance not harder than clay dried in the sun. These few memorials of other days may indicate revolutions among the barbarous hordes of the
Americans themselves; they cannot solve for the inquirer the problem of their origin.
Nor is it safe to place implicit reliance on tradition.
The ideas of uncultivated nations are vaguely connected; and pressing want compels the mind to be indifferent to the past, not less than careless of the future.
Time obliterates facts, or introduces confusion of memory, or buries one tradition beneath another.
Yet the tradition of the Delawares may be repeated in this connection,—that tribes of the Algonquin and Wyan-
dot families expelled from the basin of the
Ohio its ancient tenants, and that the fugitives descended the
Mississippi to renew their villages under a warmer sun. Vague indeed as must be the shadows that glimmer across the silent darkness of intervening centuries, physiologists have yet convinced themselves that they can trace, in the bones which time has not wholly crumbled, evidence of the extent of the Toltecan family
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from the heart of
North America to the Andes
The inference has no natural improbability.
We know the wide range of the
Indian brave; the kindred of the Athapasca race spread from the
Kinaizian Gulf to Hudson's Bay; the Algonquin was spoken from the Missinipi to
Cape Fear; the Dahcotas extend from the Saskatchawan beyond the basin of the
Arkansas.
It would not be strange if, in the thousands of years from which no echo is to reach us, men of one American family had bowed to the sun in the southern valley of the Mississippi and within the tropics.
The Chiti-
mechas of
Louisiana, improperly confounded with the
Natchez, were on the same low stage of civilization with the Chechemecas, who are described as having
entered
Mexico from the north.
But comparative anatomy, as it has questioned the graves, and compared its deductions with the traditions and present customs of the tribes, has not even led to safe inferences respecting the relations of the red nations among themselves; far less has it succeeded in tracing their wanderings from continent to continent.
Neither do the few resemblances that have been discovered between the roots of words in American languages, on the one hand, and those of Asia or Eu rope, on the other, afford historical evidence of any connection.
The human voice articulates hardly twenty distinct, primitive sounds or letters: would it not be strange, then, were there no accidental resemblances?
Of all European languages, the Greek is the most flexible; and it is that which most easily furnishes roots analogous to those of America.
Not one clear coincidence has been traced beyond accident.
Hard by Pamlico Sound dwelt, and apparently had dwelt for centuries, branches of the Algonquin, the
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Huron-Iroquois, and the Catawba families.
But though
these nations were in the same state of civilization, were mingled by wars and captures, by embassies and alliances; though they had a common character in the organization of their language, as well as in their customs, government, and pursuits; yet each was found employing a language of its own. If resemblances cannot be traced between two families that have dwelt side by side apparently for centuries, who will hope to recover the traces of the mother tongue in
Siberia or
China?
The results of comparison have thus far rebuked, rather than satisfied, curiosity.
It is still more evident, that similarity of customs furnishes no basis for satisfactory conclusions.
The same kinds of knowledge may have been repeatedly reached; the same customs are naturally formed under similar circumstances.
The manifest repetition of artificial peculiarities would prove a connection among nations; but all the customs consequent on the regular wants and infirmities of the human system, would be likely of themselves to be repeated; and, as for inventions and arts, they only offer new sources for measuring the capacity of human invention in its barbarous or semi-civilized state.
It is chiefly on supposed analogies of customs and of language, that the lost tribes of Israel, ‘who took
II.
Esdras, c XIII.
v. 40-45 |
counsel to go forth into a farther country, where never mankind dwelt,’ have been discovered, now in the
bark cabins of
North America, now in the secluded
valleys of the
Tennessee, and again, as the authors of
Aglio's Antiquities of Mexico, vol.
VI. |
culture, on the plains of the Cordilleras.
We cannot tell the origin of the Goths and Celts; proud as we are of our lineage, we cannot trace our own descent; and we strive to identify, in the most western part of
Asia,
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the very hills and valleys among which the ancestors of
our red men had their dwellings!
Humanity has a common character.
The ingenious scholar may find analogies in language, customs, institutions, and religion, between the aborigines of
America and any nation whatever of the Old World: the pious curiosity of Christendom, and not a peculiar coincidence, has created a special disposition to discover a connection between them and the Hebrews.
Inquirers into
Jewish history, observing faint resemblances between their own religious faith and that of the
American, have sought to trace the origin of common ideas to tradition from the same nation and the same sacred books,—when they should not have rested in their pursuit of a common source, till they had reached the Fountain of all knowledge and the Author of all being.
The Egyptians used hieroglyphics; so did the Mexicans, and the Pawnees, and the Five Nations.
Among the Algonquins now, a man is represented by a rude figure of a body, surmounted by the head of the animal which gives a badge to his family; on the Egyptian pictures, men are found designated in the same way. But did North America, therefore, send its envoys to the court of Sesostris?
The Carthaginians, of all ancient nations, cultivated the art of navigation with highest success.
If they rivalled Vasco de Gama, why may they not have anticipated Columbus?
And men have seen on rocks in America Phoenician inscriptions and proofs of Phoenician presence; but these disappear before an honest skepticism.
Besides, the Carthaginians were historians also; and a Latin poet has preserved for us the
Festi Avient Ora Maritima, v. 380-384. |
express testimony of
Himilco, ‘that the abyss beyond the Columns of
Hercules was to them interminable,
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that no mariner of theirs had ever guided a keel into
that boundless deep.’
On a rock by the side of a small New England stream, where, even by the aid of the tides, small vessels can hardly pass, a rude inscription has been made in a natural block of gray granite.
By unwarranted interpolations and bold distortions, in defiance of count less improbabilities, the plastic power of fancy transformed the rude etching into a Runic monument; a still more recent theory insists on the analogy of its
forms with the inscriptions of Fezzan and the
Atlas.
Calm observers, in the vicinity of the sculptured rock, see nothing in the design beyond the capacity of the
red men of
New England; and to one intimately acquainted with the skill and manners of the barbarians,
the character of the drawing suggests its Algonquin origin.
Scandinavians may have reached the shores of
Labrador; the soil of the
United States has not one vestige of their presence.
An ingenious writer on the maritime history of the
Chinese, finds traces of their voyages to
America in the fifth century, and thus opens an avenue for Asiatic science to pass into the kingdom of
Anahuac; but the theory refutes itself.
If
Chinese traders or emigrants came so recently to
America, there would be customs and language to give evidence of it. Nothing is so indelible as speech: sounds that, in ages of unknown antiquity, were spoken among the nations of Hindostan, still live in their significancy in the language which we daily utter.
The winged word cleaves its way through time, as well as through space.
If
Chinese came to civilize, and came so recently, the shreds of Asiatic civilization would be still clinging visibly to all their works.
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314]
Nor does the condition of astronomical science in
aboriginal America prove a connection with
Asia.
The red men could not but observe the pole-star; and even their children could give the names and trace the motions of the more brilliant groups of stars, of which the return marked the seasons; but they did not divide the heavens, nor even a belt in the heavens, into constellations.
It is a curious coincidence, that among
the Algonquins of the
Atlantic and of the
Mississippi, alike among the Narragansetts and the
Illinois, the north star was called the
bear. This accidental agreement with the widely-spread usage of the Old World, is far more observable than the imaginary resemblance between the signs of the Mexicans for their days and the signs on the zodiac for the month in Thibet.
The American nation had no zodiac, and could not, therefore, for the names of its days, have borrowed from
Central Asia the symbols that marked the path of the sun through the year.
Nor had the Mexicans either weeks or lunar months; but, after the manner of barbarous nations, they divided the days in the year into eighteen scores, leaving the few remaining days to be set apart by themselves.
This division may have sprung directly from their system of enumeration; it need not have been imported.
It is a greater marvel, that the indigenous inhabitants of
Mexico had a nearly exact knowledge of the length of the year, and, at the end of one hundred and four years, made their Interca-
lation more accurately than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Egyptians.
The length of their tropical year was almost identical with the result obtained by the
astronomers of the caliph
Almamon; but let no one derive this coincidence from intercourse, unless he is prepared to believe that, in the ninth century of our
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315]
era, there was commerce between
Mexico and
Bagdad.
The agreement favors clearly the belief that
Mexico did not learn of
Asia; for, at so late a period, intercourse between the continents would have left its indisputable traces.
No inference is warranted, except that, in the clear atmosphere of the table lands of
Central America, the observers may have watched successfully the progress of the seasons; that the sun ran his career as faithfully over the heights of the Cordilleras as over the plains of Mesopotamia.
When to this is added, that, alone of mankind, the American nations universally were ignorant of the pastoral state; that they kept neither sheep nor kine; that they knew not the use of the milk of animals for food; that they had neither wax nor oil; that they had no iron;—it becomes nearly certain that the imperfect civilization of America is its own.
Yet the original character of American culture does not insulate the American race.
It would not be safe to reject the possibility of an early communication be-
Lang's View of the Poly nesian Nation |
tween
South America and the Polynesian world.
Nor can we know what changes time may have wrought on the surface of the globe, what islands may have been submerged, what continents divided.
But, without resorting to the conjectures or the fancies which geologists may suggest, every where around us there are signs of migrations, of which the boundaries cannot be set; and the movement seems to have been towards the east and south.
The number of primitive languages increases near the Gulf of Mexico; and, as if one nation had crowded upon another, in the cane-brakes of the state of Louisiana there are more independent languages than are found from the Arkansas to the pole.
In like man
[316]
ner, they abounded on the plateau of Mexico, the nat-
ural highway of wanderers.
On the western shore of
America, also, there are more languages than on the east; on the
Atlantic coast, as if to indicate that it had never been a thoroughfare, one extended from
Cape Fear to the Esquimaux; on the west, between the latitude of forty degrees and the Esquimaux, there were at least four or five.
The
Californians derived
Ribas, <*> i. c. VI and l. III c. III. |
their ancestors from the north; the Aztecks preserve a narrative of their northern origin, which their choice of residence in a mountain region confirmed.
At the north, the continents of Asia and America nearly meet.
In the latitude of sixty-five degrees fifty minutes, a line across Behring's Straits, from Cape Prince of Wales to Cape Tschowkotskoy, would meas-
Beechey's Voyage to Behring's Straits. |
ure a fraction less than forty-four geographical miles; and three small islands divide the distance.
But within the latitude of fifty-five degrees, the Aleutian Isles stretch from the great promontory of Alaska so far to the west, that the last of the archipelago is but three hundred and sixty geographical miles from the east of Kamschatka; and that distance is so divided by the Mednoi Island and the group of Behring, that, were boats to pass from islet to islet from Kamschatka to Alaska, the longest navigation in the open sea would not exceed two hundred geographical miles, and at no moment need the mariner be more
than forty leagues distant from land: and a chain of thickly-set isles extends from the south of Kamschatka to
Corea.
Now, the Micmac on the north-east of our continent would, in his frail boat, venture thirty or forty leagues out at sea: a Micmac savage, then, steering from isle to isle, might in his birch-bark canoe have made the voyage from North-West America to
China.
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317]
Water, ever a favorite highway, is especially the
highway of uncivilized man: to those who have no axes the thick jungle is impervious; emigration by water suits the genius of savage life; canoes are older than wagons, and ships than chariots; a gulf, a strait, the sea intervening between islands, divide less than the matted forest.
Even civilized man emigrates by sea and by rivers, and has ascended two thousand miles above the mouth of the
Missouri, while interior tracts in New York and
Ohio are still a wilderness.
To the uncivilized man, no path is free but the sea, the lake, and the river.
The American and the Mongolian races of men, on the two sides of the Pacific, have a near resemblance.
Both are alike strongly and definitely marked by the more capacious palatine fossa, of which the dimensions are so much larger, that a careful observer could, out of a heap of skulls, readily separate the Mongolian and American from the Caucasian, but could not distinguish them from each other.
Both have the orbit of the eye quadrangular, rather than oval; both, especially the American, have comparatively a narrowness of the forehead; the facial angle in both, but especially in the American, is comparatively small; in both, the bones of the nose are flatter and broader than in the Caucasian,—and in so equal a degree, and with apertures so similar, that, on indiscriminate selections of specimens from the two, an observer could not, from this feature, discriminate which of them belonged to the old continent; both, but especially the Americans, are characterized by a prominence of the jaws.
The elongated occiput is common to the American and the Asiatic; and there is to each very nearly the same ob-!iquity of the face.
Between the Mongolian of Southern
[318]
Asia and of Northern Asia there is a greater differ
ence than between the
Mongolian Tatar and the
North American.
The
Iroquois is more unlike the Peruvian than he is unlike the wanderer on the steppes of
Siberia.
Physiology has not succeeded in defining the qualities which belong to every well-formed Mongolian, and which never belong to an indigenous American; still less can geographical science draw a boundary line between the races.
The
Athapascas cannot be distinguished from Algonquin Knisteneaux, on the one side, or from Mongolian Esquimaux, on the other.
The dwellers on the
Aleutian Isles melt into resem blances with the inhabitants of each continent; and, at points of remotest distance, the difference is still so inconsiderable, that the daring
Ledyard, whose ardent curiosity filled him with the passion to circumnavigate the globe and cross its continents, as he stood in
Siberia, with men of the Mongolian race before him, and compared them with the Indians who had been his old play-fellows and school-mates at
Dartmouth, writes
deliberately, that, ‘universally and circumstantially, they resemble the aborigines of
America.’
On the
Connecticut and the Oby, he saw but one race.
He that describes the Tungusians of Asia seems also
to describe the
North American.
That the Tschukchi
North-Eastern Asia and the Esquimaux of
America are of the same origin, is proved by the affinity of their languages,—thus establishing a connection between the continents previous to the discovery of
America by Europeans.
The indigenous populatior of
America offers no new obstacle to faith in the unity of the human race.
