Red race

“ The retrospect of the fortunes of the red race, which has been yielding and fading before this persistent and lion-hearted endeavor, is prevailingly melancholy, as it presents imbecility and incapacity succumbing to the potency of skill and energy. ”

“ Atoyac observed, "the red race is accursed. The day will come when it will be sought in vain on the immense plains where it was formerly more numerous than the brilliant stars which stud the vault of heaven; for it is fatally condemned to disappear from the surface of the world. ”

“ Two types of the human race, more fully and completely antagonistical, in all respects, never came in contact on the globe. They were the alpha and omega of the ethnological chain. If, therefore, the Red Race declined, and the white increased, it was because civilisation had more of the principles of endurance and progress than barbarism; because Christianity was superior to paganism; industry to idleness; agriculture to hunting ”

“ The red man has no powerful friends (such as the enslaved negro can boast) , to rightly represent his miserable, sorrowing condition, his many wrongs, his wants and wishes. In fact, so feebly is the voice of philanthropy raised in his favor, that his existence appears to be hardly known to a large portion of the American people, or his condition and character has been so misrepresented that it has failed to secure the sympathy and help which he really deserves. We do not fully understand the nature and character of the Red Race. ”

“ The savages roaming near the passes and plains of the Rocky Mountains are identical in barbarousness with those once near our seaboard, and those once on the borders of the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley. The red race is unchanged in its specimen examples and in its staple, save as to the adoption by some of them of the white man's weapons and goods. In the mean time the characteristics, the habits, the feelings and sentiments of the white race have been modified even as regards the attitude assumed towards the Indians. ”

“ But, through any and all future time, — when, if it should be so, the red race has vanished, — two very different pleas in relief or vindication of the white man will be offered. We can anticipate those pleas, for they can be no other than are spoken earnestly and urgently in our own present time. ”

“ HERE is an untold tale of the Red Man, as spoken by Dewy Beard, an Oglalla Sioux, who sits alone to-day, bullet-scarred and sad, while in the drifting blue from his tepee fire come images of that glory which has departed from his race. It is true, though running counter to the lore of the white man, the reason whereof lies hid beneath army influence. ”

“ As a matter of fact, few books have been published in England which furnish more than the scantiest details concerning the Red Race, and these are in general scarce, and, when obtained, of doubtful scientific value. ”

“ The superiority of this foreign race, which has so firmly established itself upon his former patrimony, is evident to the red man. He sees their magnificent cities, their thousands of vessels upon the once silent rivers, their successful agriculture; he knows that even his own rude wants, the blanket with which he covers himself, the weapon with which he slays his game, the ardent spirits he has learned to love so well, can be supplied only by the stranger. The last feeble hope to see his native soil delivered from the presence of the conqueror's race, has long since vanished from his breast ”

“ Military officers now in service, and frontiersmen on our border lines, testify that the war-spirit, with all its attendant savage characteristics, has not been mollified or subdued in some of the tribes, but has rather been exasperated by the experience of the white man's potency, and by the dark forebodings of destiny for the red race. ”

“ It must be borne in mind that there exists but a single character common to these American races, that is the colour of the skin, the ground of which is yellow. This appears to conflict with the current opinion that the Americans [Pg 517] are a red race, and yet it is the statement of a fact. None of the tribes of the New World have a red-coloured skin, unless they are painted, which often is the case. ”

“ The elevation, if not the security from extinction, of the race of red men depends upon its furnishing masters and guides from its stock. A race that cannot itself contribute its redeemers will never be redeemed. ”

“ According to their accepted tradition the skin of the gods was red. Did there exist along the Atlantic shore of Africa a red race? Not only did it exist, but it exists still in the Basques living in the western Pyrenees and along the shore of the Bay of Biscay. In an article which I read not long ago concerning the lost Atlantis, the author makes the confident statement that the inhabitants of that continent belonged to the red race. ”

“ The nations of the southern branch of the Red Race have affinity to those of the Yellow Race. Their complexion, which is often yellowish or olive, is never so red as that of the northern Indians; their head is usually of less length and their nose not so prominent, while they frequently have oblique eyes. ”

“ The white race are to the red as sun to snow: as silently and surely the red men disappear, dissipated by the beams of civilization. Among those who came to gaze at the overpowering white race on that occasion, was an old Chinook chief, the number of whose years was one hundred. ”

“ In concluding this survey of representative myths of the Red Race of North America, the reader will probably be chiefly impressed with the circumstance that although many of these tales exhibit a striking {359} resemblance to the myths of European and Asiatic peoples they have yet an atmosphere of their own which strongly differentiates them from the folk-tales of all other races. ”

“ They were aided by their early invention of the bow and arrow, but they had unfortunately inherited much of the tendency of their ancestors to fight among themselves, and this so weakened them that the yellow tribes were able to drive them off the Asiatic continent.
About eighty-five thousand years ago the comparatively pure remnants of the red race went en masse across to North America, and shortly thereafter the Bering land isthmus ank, thus isolating them. No red man ever returned to Asia. ”

“ The remnants of the victorious green men were subsequently absorbed by the indigo race, the last of the colored peoples to develop and emigrate from the original Sangik center of race dispersion.
5. The blue man. The blue men were a great people. They early invented the spear and subsequently worked out the rudiments of many of the arts of modern civilization. The blue man had the brain power of the red man associated with the soul and sentiment of the yellow man. The Adamic descendants preferred them to all of the later persisting colored races. ”

“ Language, pursuits, habits, geographical position, and those subtle mental traits which make up the characteristics of races and nations, all tend to deflect from a given standard the religious life of the individual and the mass. It is essential to give these due weight, and a necessary preface therefore to an analysis of the myths of the red race is an enumeration of its peculiarities, and of its chief families as they were located when first known to the historian. ”

“ There, too, the Black man and the Red, whose destinies seemed to separate them wide as the world’s hemispheres, have been brought together to try whether the African is more enduring than the indigenous American on his own soil; to try for us, also, as could no otherwise be tried, questions of amalgamation and hybridity, of development and perpetuity of varieties, of a dominant, a savage, and a servile race. ”

“ If there is a measurable difference between the inherent brain power of the white race and the black, it is practically certain that there are also measurable differences between the white and the red. ”

“ The tie which binds the mother to the child, in Indian life, is a very strong one, and it is conceived to admit of illustration in this manner. It is not alone in the war-path and the council, that the Red Man is to be studied. To appreciate his whole character, in its true light, he must be followed into his lodge, and viewed in his seasons of social leisure and retirement. If there be any thing warm and abiding in the heart or memory of the man, when thus at ease, surrounded by his family, it must come out here ”

“ Whether these tribes last made known to us are affiliated with those of our earliest acquaintance, or have been disclosed to us as reserved and original sections of the same old race of red men, independent in lineage and position, certain it is that they are the same sort of men in all their marked characteristics, — in nature, habits, traits, ways of life, method of warfare, jealousy and hatred of the whites, and steadfast dislike of civilization. ”

“ We find that among individuals of one particular race, whatever its so-called, and somewhat arbitrary, colour might be, there exist noticeable variations in shade. Red Indians have yellow or brown skins almost as frequently as a genuine red; the “white” races of Europe often have so dark a “complexion” that they are in reality brown; and the skin of a negro at times has a distinctly reddish or brownish hue. ”

“ The Indians know better than to designate between each other their natural color as red, and have been known to give the designation red man to the visiting Caucasian, whose blistered skin often better deserves the epithet, which they only apply to themselves in converse with the conquering race that insisted upon it. ”

“ The race of red men, taken as a whole, was here; and even if local tribes held one or another portion of the soil only temporarily and by conquest, liable at any time to be displaced, yet the race, as a race, certainly had some common and comprehensive right to an abiding place. ”

“ The so-called red-haired branch of the Nordic race has special characters in addition to red hair, such as a greenish cast of eye, a skin of delicate texture tending either to great clarity or to freckles and certain peculiar temperamental traits. ”

“ It might have been grimly submitted to as relieved by the suggestion — giving the comfort of companionship to misery — that they would share the terrible doom in the fellowship of their own race. And there were many reasons and occasions which strongly disposed the red man to long for a wide distance and a complete severance of associations from the white man, as well for the unknown hereafter as here on earth. ”

“ But the Colored race, although they have been transplanted in a foreign land, have clung to and grown with their oppressors, as the wild ivy entwines around the trees of the forest, nor can they be torn thence. At this moment when so much feigned hatred is manifested toward us, our blood is mixed with every tribe from Cape Horn to the Frozen Ocean. ”

“ The red men were so trained from infancy to this kind of amusement that they were experts, and held their own well against the pioneers, though it is well known that the Caucasian race, under similar surroundings and environments, surpasses all others in physical as well as mental attainments. ”

“ Not to mention the Miaou-tse in China, and other relics of Asiatic races, the same phenomenon is more impressively presented to us among the Red Men of America, where the old race is seen dying out beneath our very eyes. Year by year they are melting away. Of the millions which once peopled the vast regions on this side of the Mississippi River, all have vanished, but a few scattered families; and it is as clear as the sun at noonday, that in a few generations more, the last of the Red Men will be numbered with the dead. ”

“ A modification of the opinion that such must needs be the fate of the red man suggests to us, that the only condition which will arrest that result is such a transformation of his habits, mode of life, and even of his nature, that those who in three or four generations may represent the stock, in pure or mixed descent, will have wholly parted with the original and distinctive characteristics of the race. ”

“ The peoples belonging to the Black, Red, and Brown races are still either savages or barbarians, as were the men of prehistoric times. The Chinese and Japanese are the only representatives of the Yellow race that have been able to form civilized states. ”

“ The various races had made war upon one another for ages, and the three higher types had easily bested the green savages of the water places of the world, but now that the receding seas necessitated constant abandonment of their fortified cities and forced upon them a more or less nomadic life in which they became separated into smaller communities they soon fell prey to the fierce hordes of green men. The result was a partial amalgamation of the blacks, whites and yellows, the result of which is shown in the present splendid race of red men. ”

“ But throughout Siberia, China, central Asia, India, and Europe they left behind much of their stock blended with the other colored races.
When the red man crossed over into America, he brought along much of the teachings and traditions of his early origin. His immediate ancestors had been in touch with the later activities of the world headquarters of the Planetary Prince. But in a short time after reaching the Americas, the red men began to lose sight of these teachings, and there occurred a great decline in intellectual and spiritual culture. ”