Red Indians

“ The Indians of the New World, whencesoever they derived their origin, present to us just such a type of unprogressive life as the nomads of the Asiatic steppe. The Red-Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for development, the forests of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean-bed. ”

“ The natives early in 1835 showed a charming and humane side to their character. These children of the bush were possessed of such keen perceptive faculties as are impossible to Europeans. Immured in their lonely vastnesses, dependent for their food on their senses, and impelled by their laws to the fine exercise of them, they possessed characteristics which from time to time have proved invaluable to colonists. In the art of tracking game or enemies, and in the fine sense of sound, the Red Indians themselves were not their masters. ”

“ The Red Men or Indians.—The Indians constitute a race by themselves. Whether they are descended from some of those prehistoric inhabitants of whom we have just spoken no one can say; but they make up an American type with marks as clearly recognized as those that distinguish the Mongolians and the Malays. For long ages the red men had spread themselves over the two continents, from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn. ”

“ Most of the individuals who have figured amongst the Red Race in America, have appeared under circumstances which have precluded any thing like a full and consistent biography. There is, in truth, but little in savage life, to furnish materials for such biographies. The very scantiness of events determines this. A man suddenly appears among these tribes as a warrior, a negotiator, an orator, or a prophet, by a name that nobody ever before heard of. He excites attention for a short time, and then sinks back into the mass of Indian society, and is no more heard of. ”

“ We may say even more certainly of the Red Indians, that if they had chosen to learn agriculture from the first European settlers, they would soon have been numerous enough to bar all progress to the West. The Indians of Mexico, of Central America, and of Peru, who had attained to this level were not exterminated, though they were treated for generations with the most atrocious cruelty. At this moment pure or half-caste Indians predominate in all the Spanish colonies that lie to the north of Chili, and their predominance is becoming more marked every year. ”

“ The Indian, like all savages, is very superstitious. He loves to think over the time, hundreds of years ago, when the red men roamed over the whole continent from ocean to ocean. He dreams of those days, and believes they will again return—that the pale faces will be driven into the sea, and the vast land become the hunting ground of the Indians. ”

“ The poetry of the Indians, is the poetry of naked thought. They have neither rhyme, nor metre to adorn it.
Tales and traditions occupy the place of books, with the Red Race.—They make up a kind of oral literature, which is resorted to, on long winter evenings, for the amusement of the lodge.
The love of independence is so great with these tribes, that they have never been willing to load their political system with the forms of a regular government, for fear it might prove oppressive. ”

“ Some of these very tribes, the Red Indians,16 seem to be recovering, seem to increase again, and to be able to hold their own against the baneful influences which threatened to destroy them. The negroes also are by no means dwindling away. On the contrary, they are increasing both in Africa and in America. ”

“ But it is to be lamented that now, when we have taken up the cause of a barbarously treated people, so few should remain to reap the benefit of our plans for their civilization. The institution and its supporters will agree with me, that, after the unfortunate circumstances attending past encounters between the Europeans and the Red Indians, it is best now to employ Indians belonging to the other tribes to be the medium of beginning the intercourse we have in view ”

“ The red Indians of America have justly been famous for their myths and legends. We have never heard of a tribe that did not have a store of them. Even the hardy Eskimo in his igloo of ice is surprisingly rich in folklore stories. ”

“ In the centre of this case will be remarked a fine specimen of the Wild Turkey, from which our domestic breed is derived. On the left of this path is a group of North American Red Indians engaged in a war-dance, and surrounded by trees and shrubs indigenous to North America. The Indians of the valley of the Mississippi, and of the drainage of the Great Lakes, supply us with our current ideas of the so-called Red Man, or the Indian of the New World. In stature they are above the middle height, and exhibit great muscular force, their powers of endurance being very great ”

“ To-day the Indians form a bare sixtieth of the American population, a falling off for which the colonist has been responsible both actively and involuntarily. The history of the red man’s relations to those who ultimately were to be his rulers is a painful one; massacres and cruelties on the one side led to reprisals of a similar nature on the other. Happily the days of persecution and revolt are now ended; some few of the natives have intermarried with whites and have adapted themselves to the conditions of modern civilisation ”

“ INDIAN ARROW HEADS, &c.
By far the most numerous relics of the Red Race, now found in those parts of our country from which it has disappeared, are the small stones with which they headed their arrows. Being made of the most durable substances, they have generally remained in the soil, unaffected by time and the changes of season. They most abound in those rich meadows which border some of our rivers, and in other spots of peculiar fertility, though of less extent, where the pasture, or other attractions, collected game for the Red men. ”

“ From the first colonization a wasting raid has been made upon these animals by the whites, utterly exhausting the near supply, and compelling the Indians — for their own needs and for barter sale — to move deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Much of their land which the whites have occupied had been abandoned by the Indians, and much more has been readily sold by them as useless for their purposes. Indeed soil, forest, valley, and meadow and stream, represent quite different capacities and values to the red man and the white man. ”

“ There seems always to have been, as there is now, far more in common as regards all the resources and habits of life among American Indians, certainly in the northern parts of the continent, than there were of local and circumstantial diversities. We can indeed discern among various tribes, when compared with each other, the effects upon them of greater ease or difficulty in obtaining sustenance, of more or less of providence in storing up food, of degrees of ferocity in warfare, and evidences of skill, industry, and art spent upon their weapons and utensils. ”

“ These pages describe the adventures of men whom duty or inclination has brought into contact with the Indians of the entire American continent; and, since every day sees the red race diminishing, or abandoning the customs and mode of life once characteristic of it, such adventures must necessarily relate mainly to a bygone generation. ”

“ Travellers, tourists, hunters, explorers, scientific commissions, military officers, missionaries, traders, and those who have lived among the Indians many years, as captives taken in youth, have contributed volumes of great variety in style, contents, views, opinions, and judgments, all of them mutually illustrative, helpful, and instructive, though by no means in accord in their representations of the character and habits, condition, capacity, religion, and general development of the various tribes of the red men, at different periods and in different parts of the country. ”

“ F the red men have been benefited by their intercourse with the whites, they have also received much degradation from the same cause. Created with strong and active physical powers, united with keen sensibility, they have an innate love of excitement, of which the white man has taken advantage to work their ruin. For a few bottles of any kind of ardent spirits, which the Indians term “firewater,” keen traders have purchased the produce of weeks of hunting and toil, and even the land which contains within its bosom the bones of the red man’s ancestors. ”

“ In American ethnology, however, the red man is all-important. Primeval men of this race undoubtedly formed the original stock whence during the centuries were derived all the numerous tribes of "Indians" [Pg 73] found in either North or South America. Throughout Asia and Africa there is great diversity in type among the races that are indigenous; but as to America, to quote Humboldt:
The Indians of New Spain [i. e., Mexico] bear a general resemblance to those who inhabit Canada, Florida, Peru, and Brazil. ”

“ In the last thirty years much has been accomplished in placing the study of the American aborigines on a sounder basis. The older school of ethnologists were for the most part obsessed with the wildest ideas concerning the origin of the Indians, and many of them believed the Red Man to be the degenerate descendant of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel or of early Phoenician adventurers. ”

“ We think the supposition that the Red man is a primitive type of a family of the human race, originally planted in the Western Continent, presents the most natural solution of the problem; and that the researches of physiologists, antiquaries, philologists and philosophers in general, tend irresistibly to this conclusion.”—Norman’s Rambles in Yucatan, p. 251, New York, 1843, 8vo. “My own belief is that, whatever was the origin of the different tribes or families, the whole race of American Indians are native and indigenous to the soil. ”

“ It might be supposed that the vast numbers of half-breeds among the Indians would have some of the white man's capacity for taking care of themselves. They will, if we leave them to their own way of doing it. But in some cases they are far more troublesome than real Indians. The traits and characteristics of the red man prevail in them over those of the whites. ”

“ In large part, they are. That just strengthens the point that climate has had a lot to do with civilization, and incidentally with the differences between different tribes of Indians. I wonder if I can give his theory straight! Well, anyway, here’s the general idea. It applies quite as much to all nationalities as it does to Indians in particular.
“What is our conception of The Noble Red Man? He is observant, he has unlimited physical endurance, but he does not adapt himself to our civilization, nor does he work out new methods for himself, as we have done since America was settled. ”

“ It has been assumed that on the first occasion of contact between the red man and the white man on each portion of this continent, as successively entered upon by colonists, the Indians then and there in occupancy — after their mode of use — had the full right of ownership, as if indigenous or lawful inheritors. ”

“ The early colonists had three enemies to contend with: the original inhabitants of the land, the Spanish settlers in the South, and the French in the North and West. Its dealings with the aborigines has been one continuous series of conflicts, the red man being driven back step by step until to-day he holds but a small fraction of his once great territory. Yet the Indians are probably as numerous to-day as they were originally, and are certainly better off in their present peaceful and partly civilized condition than they were in their former savage and warlike state. ”

“ Our establishments for the management of affairs with these tribes were withdrawn, and then the red men were left to act as they pleased; and they had a long account to settle with the Americans. From the earliest period of their emigration the colonists had laid it down as a principle that the red men were to be treated like beasts of prey, and they still hunted them down on every opportune occasion. Hence, as the Indians were accurate accountants in matters of blood, and held it as a sacred part of their religion, that they were bound to avenge the death of their kindred ”

“ These figures represent ideas—whole ideas, and their juxtaposition or relation on a roll of bark, a tree, or a rock, discloses a continuity of ideas. This is the basis of the system.
Picture writing is indeed the literature of the Indians. It cannot be interpreted, however rudely, without letting one know what the Red man thinks and believes. It shadows forth the Indian intellect, it stands in the place of letters for the Unishinaba. [24] It shows the Red man in all periods of our history, both as he was, and as he is ”

“ WOLF EAR THE INDIAN
CHAPTER I.
"THE BULLET HAD PASSED STARTLINGLY NEAR HIM."
Before relating to my young friends the incidents which follow, I think a few words of explanation will help them.
Perhaps some of you share the general mistake that the American Indians are dying out. This is not the fact. There are to-day more red men in the United States than ever before. In number, they exceed a quarter of a million, and though they do not increase as fast as the whites, still they are increasing. ”

“ It is certain that the mass of Indians who have come into contact with the whites, and have not actually been killed by them, have received from them many appreciable additions to their resources and comforts. The quantities of goods, of useful and desirable articles, that the Indians have been most greedy to receive, which have been carried into their country and distributed among them, are enormous. ”

“ They owned all the land before the white man came and drove them off. But now the Indians are far away from here and they are different from the ones we read about in the history books. The Indians now are more like the poor birds people put in cages---” Her eyes gleamed and her face grew eloquent with expression as she thought of the gross injustice meted out to some of the red men in this land of the free. ”