Hill tribe

“ The Mala Arayans are described, in the Travancore Census Report, 1901, as "a class of hill tribes, who are a little more civilized than the Mannāns, and have fixed abodes on the slopes of high mountain ranges. Their villages are fine-looking, with trees and palms all round. They are superior in appearance to most other hill tribes, but are generally short in stature. ”

“ So out of the years they met, as the breeze so sweet from over the wild-flowers and trees of the valley, and the wind that carried strength from the sides of the mountain.
"Can you marvel that they call me the great medicine man among the tribes? Thou art a great brother. Thy fire-water is good. The white men honor thee. Thou keepest the sod that is wet with tears from being turned over. They call thee the very great man of thy tribe." ”

“ These various tribes may be classified as the wild hunting tribes and the sedentary, partially civilized tribes. To this last division belong the Mound Builders. We have seen how the partially civilized tribes in the valley of the San Juan were gradually driven south by the pressure of wild tribes. We need not doubt but such was the case in the Mississippi Valley. But we need not picture to ourselves any imposing movement of tribes. In one location a mound-building tribe may have been forced to abandon its territory, which would be occupied by bands of hunting tribes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some must have escaped, and an ark or a high mountain are the natural means.
A traditional migration from north, south, east, or west may point to the local journeying of a family [139] or tribe, either in search of better hunting-grounds, or as a result of adverse fortune in war; in a few cases a general migration of many tribes constituting a great nation may be referred to; and finally, it is not quite impossible that a faint memory of an Old World origin may have survived through hundreds of generations. ”

“ Now and then, but rarely, we found a pilferer, but not oftener than among the frontier white people. The Indians of all tribes are disposed to give you something to eat. It is a fact that we never found an Indian of any tribe disposed to treat us with that degree of inhospitality that we experienced in crossing the Alleghany Mountains, in the State of Pennsylvania.
The Black-foot tribe are the tallest and stoutest men of any we have seen, nearly or quite six feet in stature, and of a lighter complexion than the rest.
The Indian warriors carry muskets, bows, and arrows, the last in a quiver. ”

“ They say that the land in that valley is being measured off with strange instruments and by white men who are going to bring their own tribes and build their own camps there. You can’t blame Painted Feathers, mother, for his tribe settled here first. ”

“ The tribe consists of four bands, which have their nestling-places in fertile, well-wooded valleys, lying among the Rocky Mountains, and watered by the Big Horse River and its tributary streams; but, though these are properly their homes, where they shelter their old people, their wives, and their children, the men of the tribe are almost continually on the foray and the scamper. They are, in fact, notorious marauders and horse-stealers; crossing and re-crossing the mountains, robbing on the one side, and conveying their spoils to the other. ”

“ The tribes in the hills are the most extraordinary thing in the world: they know no law, and obey no master but the chief of their tribe. Every man is armed with a rifle, and a modern one at that. Their villages are in such places that only a goat can get at them, so they can laugh at the whole world 313 in general. ”

“ Many of these Indian tribes were composed of a few families under the domination of a chief who went out from his kindred as Abraham did, and planted his tents where fancy led him, and moved at his whim or with his game. Every one of the Indian tribes that had been driven by the white man from the east and the south chose his camping and hunting grounds in the region of the O-hi-o, often driving away a weaker tribe. ”

“ Elsewhere the whole country was inhabited by tribes of a nomadic character, rarely collected in villages except at particular seasons, or for specific objects, though here and there were found more sedentary tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more civilized tribe in a state of decadence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Occupying the region between these dwellers of the extreme southern portion of the desert and the tribe first described are the Mojave Indians and the Yumas. The Indians of these [Pg 76] tribes are of good stature, but they are dull, coarse, and unprogressive. They live in rude huts, curiously constructed of twigs, stones, and mud. The occupation of the men consists in an occasional visit to the fertile country in search of game, or to the mountains in search of turquoise, a gem much prized by nearly all the Indian tribes. ”

“ All over the prairie the men and women of the white tribe are building their lodges. The buffalo have fled before their presence, disease and death have spread desolation among our camps. The land of our fathers has been taken from us, the Indian race is doomed to depart before the feet of the white stranger and we dwell in the land of an enemy. ”

“ The same processes of the absorption or extinction of tribal names, which began among the aborigines on the sea-coast, have followed the extension of invasions and settlements through the whole breadth of the continent. One tribe has adopted the remnant of one or more other tribes, giving to them its own name, or appropriating a new one. ”

“ An immense belt of rocky mountains and volcanic plains, several hundred miles in width, must ever remain an irreclaimable wilderness, intervening between the abodes of civilization, and affording a last refuge to the Indian. Here roving tribes of hunters, living in tents or lodges, and following the migrations of the game, may lead a life of savage independence, where there is nothing to tempt the cupidity of the white man. ”

“ As far as we can learn, the remoter tribes, which speak an entirely different language, do not flatten the head. This absurd custom declines, also, in receding from the shores of the Pacific; few traces of it are to be found among the tribes of the Rocky Mountains, and after crossing the mountains it disappears altogether. Those Indians, therefore, about the head waters of the Columbia, and in the solitary mountain regions, who are often called Flatheads, must not be supposed to be characterized by this deformity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The confederate tribes, consisting of the fanatics, the men of the Mahabun, of Bonair, Swat, Bajour, and of other distant secluded valleys, joined also by a sprinkling of men from our own border villages, were now in such numbers that the hill sides literally swarmed with them ”

“ Individuals belonging to the same tribe are usually on the best of terms, but the different tribes are each other’s mortal enemies. Woe therefore to the stranger who dares trespass on the land of another tribe! He is pursued like a wild beast and slain and eaten. ”

“ Being a small tribe, and unable to contend on the wide prairies with the Sioux and other roaming tribes, who are ten times more numerous, they have very judiciously located themselves in a permanent village, which is strongly fortified, and ensures their preservation. By this means they have advanced further in the arts of manufacture, and have supplied their lodges more abundantly with the comforts and even luxuries of life than any Indian nation I know of. ”

“ Over these fertile and verdant wastes still roam the elk, the buffalo, and the wild horse, in all their native freedom. These, in fact, are the hunting grounds of the various tribes of the Far West. Hither repair the Osage, the Creek, the Delaware and other tribes that have linked themselves with civilization, and live within the vicinity of the white settlements. Here resort also, the Pawnees, the Comanches, and other fierce, and as yet independent tribes, the nomads of the prairies, or the inhabitants of the skirts of the Rocky Mountains. ”

“ In the days when Northern Europe was a wilderness and savage people hunted in the forests; in the days when the undaunted Norsemen braved the stormy ocean in their daring craft,—here, in these woods, the petty chiefs and head men held their courts of justice after the traditions of their tribes, just as they do to-day. Here they have set their traps—the arrows loosened from a bamboo spring—and while they waited, they have left the offering of eggs and rice for the good deity. ”

“ The Sheep Eaters were a tribe of Indians that became extinct about fifty years ago, and what remaining history there is of this tribe is inscribed upon granite walls of rock in Wyoming and Montana, and in a few defiles and canyons, together with a few arrows and tepees remaining near Black Canyon, whose stream empties into the Big Horn River. Bald Mountain still holds the great shrine wheel, where the twenty-eight tribes came semi-annually to worship the sun, and in the most inaccessible places may still be found the remains of a happy people. ”

“ The Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, taken collectively, are the most advanced in civilisation, (these and the Stony Creek tribe were the most ferocious and predatory of all the natives) , and the western tribes, who occupied a country far remote from any settlement, and, therefore, could not have acquired any previous knowledge of rural pursuits, were equally as ready at reaping as the others. Indeed, their aptitude to acquire knowledge can scarcely be credited. ”

“ This is one of the most numerous and powerful tribes at present existing on the continent, numbering, undoubtedly, some 40,000, occupying a vast tract of country on the upper waters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and extending quite to the base of the Rocky Mountains. They live in skin lodges, and move them about the prairies, without any permanent residence. This tribe lost about 8000 by smallpox a few years since. ”

“ Every moment a new tribe arrived, of whom we had scarce heard, to make friendship with us and receive presents. Something must be given them, else we ran a risk that they would take it out on our cattle, or fire the prairie when a violent wind was blowing, or take some other revenge which would do more injury than the value of the presents. They no longer ventured on open hostilities within range of our settlements; to such only the more distant squatters were exposed, who lived nearer to the desert. ”

“ On this score they had little that worried them, situated as they were in a valley affording a more than ample expanse of prairie and woodland, well distributed, and in a climate free from extremes, and that made the soil, with little cultivation, yield bountifully. The only hostile tribes of natives that much needed to be feared lived beyond the mountains to the south and to the east. ”

“ To the right and east of their route, beyond Cherry Creek, ran the intangible line of the White Mountain Indian Reservation where savage tribes brooded and bided their time for outbreaks, always sternly put down but ever foremost in the minds of the savages both as amusement and revenge against the white man, who had narrowed their hunting grounds and circumscribed their pleasures. ”

“ Such is the prairie—hill follows hill, and hollow succeeds hollow, with the same regularity as the sweeping billows of the ocean. Occasionally a high broken bluff rears its solitary head in the midst, like some lonely sentinel overlooking the country. Upon the tops of these we frequently saw an Indian, standing in bold relief against the sky, or seated upon some pleasant spot on its summit, and basking in the sunshine, with that air of lazy enjoyment which characterises the race. ”

“ In the tangled and impenetrable forests of the Great Montaña two tribes of Indians may reside for years within less than a league’s distance of each other, without either being aware of the other’s existence! Scarcely any intercourse is carried on, or excursions made, except by the rivers—for they are the only roads—and where two of these run parallel, although they may be only at a short distance from each other, people residing on one may never think of crossing to the other. ”

“ There is most frequently a head man to each village, and sometimes a chief of the whole tribe, but in reality each head of a family governs his own domestic circle as he thinks best. As in certain republics, when powerful applicants become multiplied—new offices are created, as salmon-chief, elk-chief, and the like. In one or two coast tribes the office is hereditary, as with the Patawats on Mad River, and that mysterious tribe at Trinidad Bay, mentioned by Mr Meyer, the Allequas. ”