Ten Tribes

“ To the Courteous Reader P. 6, l. 21. “Others to the Ten Tribes.” There is a very voluminous literature of the Ten Tribes, a bibliography of which has long been promised by Mr. Joseph Jacobs. Bancroft in his “Native Races of the Pacific States of North America” discusses the theory of the Hebrew origin of the Americans (vol. v. pp. 77–95) . Santiago Perez Junquera in his Spanish reprint of “Esperanza de Israel” gives a bibliography of Spanish writers who have dealt with the problem of the Ten Tribes. ”

“ The Departure of the Ten Tribes for the North—They [the ten tribes] determined to go to a country "where never man dwelt," that they might be free from all contaminating influences. That country could only be found in the north. Asia was already the seat of a comparatively ancient civilizations; Egypt flourished in northern Africa; and southern Europe was rapidly filling with the future rulers of the world. ”

“ Hitherto we have shewed that the ten Tribes are in divers places, as in the West-Indies, in Sina; in the confines of Tartary, beyond the river Sabbathion, and Euphrates, in Media, in the Kingdome of the Habyssins; of all which the Prophet Isaiah is to be understood, in Isa. 11.11. It shall come to passe in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia, from Elam, from Sinear, from Hamath, and from the Islands of the Sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the lost ten Tribes of Israel may be found in London, is a discovery which any person may suppose he has made, when he walks for the first time from the city to Wapping. That the tribes of Judah and Benjamin flourish there is known to all mankind ”

“ They numbered fourteen thousand souls, comprised in ten powerful tribes, viz., Nez Perces, Cuyuses, Umatillas, Walla Wallas, Yakimas, Spokanes, Cœur d’Alenes, Flatheads, Pend Oreilles, and Kootenais. [2] They were a manly, athletic race, still uncontaminated by the vices and diseases which so often result from contact with the whites, and far superior in courage and enterprise, as well as in form and feature, to the canoe Indians of the Sound and coast. ”

“ In 1607 15 Fray Gregorio Garcia published a book, The Origin of the Indians of the New World, in which appeared these words:
The Indians proceed neither from one nation or people, nor have they come from one part alone of the Old World, or by the same road, or at the same time, in the same way, or for the same reasons; some have probably descended from the Carthaginians, others from the Ten Lost Tribes and other Israelites, others from the lost Atlantis, from the Greeks, and Phoenicians, and still others from the Chinese, Tartars, and other groups. ”

“ It is not supposable, however, that the ten lost tribes of Israel emigrated from the land of their captivity in one body, and proceeding direct to the eastern shores of Asia, crossed over to America (by some means which, through changes and convulsions in nature, have become extinct and unknown to the present age) there to resume the rites of their religion, practise the Mosaic laws, and isolated from the rest of mankind, perpetuated in their primitive purity their language and beliefs. ”

“ They think to drive the Indians from the land their fathers left them. I have heard of great tribes in the east, by the big water, who have been driven out and have perished one by one, until they have no longer a name or a place among the people. ”

“ They still afford a rich field in which much information may be gathered. Our knowledge, which is now general, should be made minute and comparative. The Indian tribes in the Lower and in the Middle Status of barbarism represent two of the great stages of progress from savagery to civilization. Our own remote forefathers passed through the same conditions, one after the other, and possessed, there can scarcely be a doubt, the same, or very similar institutions, with many of the same usages and customs. ”

“ It is difficult to describe an Indian tribe by the affirmative elements of its composition. Nevertheless it is clearly marked, and is the ultimate organization of the great body of the American aborigines. The large number of independent tribes into which they had fallen by the natural process of segmentation is the striking characteristic of their condition. Each tribe was individualized by a name, by a separate dialect, by a supreme government, and by the possession of a territory which it occupied and defended as its own. ”

“ At present it is quite impossible to calculate closely the wild Indians of miserable, debased tribes found in the mountains, whose numbers are variously stated by travellers and writers at 100,000, and 300,000. ”

“ But despairing of success in war against these intruders on the graves of their 120 fathers, all those tribes, which have been more or less encircled and hemmed in by the white settlements, have not only lost their original wildness, and intrepidity of character, but such, as have not become debased by intemperance, have been greatly softened;—and not a few of them exhibit the most exemplary specimens of civilized manners—and some are even highly cultivated and refined. ”

“ They are the aborigines of our own continent! Their place, their language, their traditions, amount
to all that has been hinted. These evidences are not all found among any one tribe of Indians. Nor may all the Indians in any tribe, where various of these evidences are found, be able to exhibit them. It is enough, if what they call their beloved aged men, in one tribe, have clearly exhibited some of them; and others exhibited others of them; and if among their various tribes, the whole have been, by various of their beloved or wise men, exhibited. ”

“ In the electric moonlight the blue mountains, more mysterious than ever, stand out in bold relief. What restless tribes of savages are wandering now through the trackless forests, sleeping in lofty trees, or in some scanty shelter amid the tangled underbrush! The light that flickers in the distant gorge, perchance illumines some religious orgy—some impassioned dance of primitive and pagan men. ”

“ As we gaze on in mute admiration, we behold the race of the red man receding westward before that same power pictured in this wonderful face: now the Indian tribes pass the Rocky mountains, they come within the roar of the Pacific, and, growing less and less, they at last vanish away into the uncertain mists of the ocean—a lost people, who have served the purpose for which they were created, and disappeared from our continent to make room for a nobler humanity. ”

“ Such are the six principal tribes who form the nucleus, or, to use a military phrase, the right wing of the expatriated aboriginal population, as the bands are arranged in their order from south to north, in the trans-Ozark or Indian territory. ”

“ There is not only abundant evidence in the collective architecture of the Indian tribes of the gradual development of this great faculty or aptitude of the human mind among them, through three ethnical periods, but the structures themselves, or a knowledge of them, remain for comparison with each other. ”

“ The different tribes at first, however, lived together amicably enough, in a primitive state; and increased and multiplied, leading happy lives under their bright and morning star, precursor of the yet unseen sun. They had as yet no worship save the breathing of the instinct of their soul, as yet no altars to the gods ”

“ At the same time, these tribes set a far higher value on the life of one of their warriors than we white men do, and they often told me that we pale-faces grew out of the ground like mushrooms, while it took them eighteen years to produce a warrior. The tribes are not large; they consist of only one hundred and fifty to three hundred men; they have their chief and are quite independent of the other clans, although belonging to the same nations. ”

“ It has not hitherto been explained how it happened that this tribe who, as far as is known, have always lived in this region, placed in the centre of the continent, should possess a language which is absolutely different from that of any other race of North American Indians, and that they should have been, for a long period of time, surrounded by powerful tribes with whom they could never have held any spoken communications. ”

“ It is true that a great many tribes have disappeared, while others that were once numerous and powerful have dwindled to a few hundreds; but on the other hand, tribes that were hardly known a century ago now include thousands. ”

“ Half clad in skins, or entirely naked, they roamed from place to place, passing their lives, alternately, in stupid idleness, and the fiercest excitements of war and the chase. Ignorant of the past, and improvident of the future, most of these tribes were sunk in the lowest depths of human degradation. ”

“ That this evidence, as now briefly sketched, is favorable, and indeed highly favorable, to the general condition and prosperity of the removed tribes, is, we apprehend, clearly manifest. Not only have they been placed beyond the wasting influence of causes which oppressed them, within the circle of the State communities; but they have received in exchange for their eastern lands, a territory which, as a whole, is highly fertile and salubrious. It is a territory which has required little comparative labor to cultivate, made up as it is of mixed forests and prairies. ”

“ Some of the “hordes,” or tribes, are purely pastoral in their mode of life, and of mild and hospital dispositions, exceedingly fond of strangers, and kind to such as come among them. Others again are averse to all intercourse with others, than those of their own race and religion, and are shy, if not inhospitable, when visited by strangers. But there is a class of a still less creditable character,—a large number of tribes that are not only inhospitable, and hostile to strangers, but as ferocious and bloodthirsty as any savages in Africa, America, or the South-Sea Islands. ”

“ Those tribes who, since an immemorial age, have roved and fought and won their way through alertness of eye and limb, must have acquired physical and mental variations, even if once they were evolved from the same stock as the Indian of fixed dwellings and sedentary habits. ”

“ They start on their journey again, refreshed and with new life and energy. Nearly all the wandering races and tribes have acquired this knowledge. It seems to have been intuitively acquired by the American Indian, the Arab, the savage tribes of Africa, and, in fact, races in all parts of the world. ”

“ I need not inform you that the aborigines, who inhabit the valley of the Amazon, are all of the so-called Indian race—though there are so many distinct tribes of them that almost every river of any considerable magnitude has a tribe of its own. ”

“ Admitting that there are certain physiological attributes common to nearly all the Indian tribes, sufficiently decided and clear to enable them to be classed together as one branch of the human family, yet an intimate study of all the tribes of North America will develop physical diversities sufficiently ample to justify the belief that the various tribes may have sprung from different nationalities. We find them, although generally of a copper color, presenting all shades of complexion from a deep black to a shade of white. Some tribes are of powerful stature, others are dwarfed. ”

“ All these tribes would fight well for us at first if there were to be a rising outside, but after a bit they would join their own kind, as they both feel and say that white and black blood can never mingle because we despise them. ”

“ Protect the inhabitants of the frontiers, gradually push the Indians south, and at no distant day, the necessary, unavoidable and melancholy consummation must arrive, viz., the expulsion of the last tribe of red men from the soil over which they once roamed the sole lords and possessors. ”

“ It is significant, that, in every case in which careful and patient research or inquiry have been brought into intelligent use in estimating the number of one or more Indian tribes, and of the whole Indian population, previous calculations, guessings, and inferences on the subject have been found to be exaggerations. The only associated groups of tribes with which our acquaintance and knowledge have been continuous from the beginning is the Iroquois, who have been in intimate intercourse with the Dutch, the French, and the English for more than two hundred and fifty years. ”

“ They are divided into small tribes, each of which has its lord or governor, and the laws or customs of the several tribes differ much from each other. Farther to the southwest, however, the manners are more civilized in proportion to the increasing mildness of the climate; and there the people are not without some degree of knowledge, making use of gold and silver, and having cities and temples dedicated to idols, in which they offer up human sacrifices. ”

“ Their intrigues among the different tribes are carried on openly and with the utmost activity, and as no expense is spared, it may reasonably be supposed that they do not fail of success. Divisions are thus uninterruptedly sowed among our Indian friends, and the minds of many altogether estranged from our interests. ”