Tribesman

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have seen tribes rise from a state of barbarism to a condition in which they are as civilized in their institutions, in their religion, and in their social refinement and habits, as citizens of the United States, and all this has been done within half a century. ”

“ 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 time for us now to turn to the aboriginal tribes, to inquire what had been and were their territorial rights before and while they were being ground in the mill by rival European nationalities, all intruders. ”

“ Are they Natives?
They are. The Tribes are in constant War with each other, and those of their Prisoners whom they do not devour they make Slaves of. They do not make Slaves of any Men of their own Tribes, only those they take in War? ”

“ But we must remember that all the tribes of the forest are naturally the most vicious and degraded of the human race on the face of the earth, though in my opinion they are quite as capable of improvement as the wild Caledonian, and susceptible of{89} transformation into orderly and law-abiding peoples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If all the tribes will be as one tribe, and join with us, we will drive all the white men from our mountains. If all the tribes will go together, the white men will run from us, and leave their property behind them. The tribes who join in with my people will be the first to secure the property of the gold-diggers. ”

“ The foregoing digression is excusable, on the ground that it exposes, to some extent, the character of the American people who first made the intimate acquaintance of the Indian tribes occupying the country on the direct route of migration between the Atlantic and Pacific States, and, in a measure, accounts for their hostile advances. ”

“ And I remember how my father said that among the other white tribes were many damn cruel customs, and that no man was the equal of another, and that some starved though there was food in the camp, and, if one, who starved, took from any of his mates, he was tortured, and kept alive to be tortured, and given no meat, nor fish, nor was he allowed to look upon the sun. ”

“ There can be no doubt that this desperate forecasting of the destiny of our aboriginal tribes has, latently or in avowal, swayed the minds of a vast number in each generation here, and has by no means been confined to those violent, merciless fighters and desperadoes who have done their utmost to carry out the presumed decree of fate. ”

“ Its population was nomadic, not to say barbaric, consisting of tribes of Indians whose hunting grounds from time immemorial the region was; hunters and trappers, who had turned their backs upon civilization for the free, wild life of nature; men of doubtful or dangerous antecedents, who had found it convenient to leave their country for their country's good; and scattered about hardy pioneer communities from Eastern States, advancing waves of the great sea of emigration which is still drawing the course of empire westward. ”

“ On the buffalo-hunting inland plains I have seen aggregations of tribes driven out from their old camping-ground, in some instances a thousand miles away, and their places occupied by others; in the narrower limits of the north-western mountains I have seen numerous tribes extirpated by their neighbors, a remnant only being kept as slaves. ”

“ Some of the tribes attach themselves to chiefs of their own choice, to whom they pay a certain tribute from the produce of their labor or hunting expeditions, while others live without any government or laws whatsoever, and only elect a chief on going to war. ”

“ The few tribes and remnants of tribes who still exist on our western frontiers, truly deserve the sympathy and attention of the American people. We owe it to them as a duty, for are we not now the possessors of their former inheritance? ”

“ Now they are prevented by law from fishing or hunting outside the boundaries of their various reservations, to which they were sent by the government for different reasons. For many years meat and flour were given to some tribes as rations at certain periods of the year, when they also received money and blankets. A number of tribes have become much like the white man, and live in houses and have large numbers of horses and cattle upon the plains or on their farms in the east; other tribes, proud of their ancient customs, still try to live as nearly as possible in the way of their ancestors. ”

“ They are sad thieves though and cannot be trusted, within arms length of food. Their tribes however, have been frequently met by our gentlemen, singly in the jungle, and upon these occasions they have been invariably civil and good natured. ”

“ But, however that may be, they are, when the worst is said of them, a quaint and interesting people, and it is my earnest wish that, by the publication of this story, I may be the means of drawing to the habits of my fellow-islanders the closer attention of anthropologists. Surely, in an age when many wild tribes have been the subject of learned discourse and of missionary enterprise, it is desirable that a race which has carried into the twentieth century the primitive customs which I have described should be critically and exhaustively studied. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In rare instances the remembrance of a common origin keeps several tribes together in a kind of union under the chief of the oldest tribe, from which the others have branched off, but as a rule the tribes hold proudly aloof and are hostile to each other. They attack each other, plunder the tents, carry off the women, children, and servants, and drive away the flocks. ”

“ They have driven the tribes of the south into the mountain fastnesses, the Yakimas and Klickitats to their winter retreats, the Walla-Walla and Snakes from their country, while much of the enemy’s field is not yet approached. ”

“ North American tribes making images of their foes, whose lives they expect to shorten by piercing those images with their arrows, we remember that these barbarous folk have their representatives among us in the Devonshire peasant, who hangs in his chimney a pig’s heart stuck all over with thorn-prickles, so that the heart of his enemy may likewise be pierced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the first place, the people were as hospitable as one could wish, and far more so than one could have expected in a heathen land. I am persuaded to believe that the tribes further in the interior are much more docile and far more industrious and a finer class of people than those living on the coast. ”

“ I have had much difficulty with the small tribes in this immediate Neighbourhood—viz.—the Peankashaws, Weas & Eel river Indians, these three tribes form a body of the greatest Scoundrels in the world—they are dayly in this town in considerable numbers and are frequently intoxicated to the number of thirty or forty at once—they then commit the greatest disorders—drawing their knives and stabing every one they meet with—breaking open the Houses of the Citizens killing their Hogs and cattle and breaking down their fences. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only has it been studied less diligently, but the geographical character of the interior, the facilities with which tribes move along its extensive water-ways, and the less stable temperament of the white population have combined to obscure the relationship of the native tribes and to limit our knowledge about them. ”

“ Some of these tribes have been "put upon" by their more warlike neighbors through many generations, driven from their original hunting-grounds, and harassed even in the mountains where they have taken refuge, until their spirit has been utterly crushed, and they have become as submissive as the Southern negroes. ”

“ On the contrary, wide variations in customs, art, language, and physical characteristics separate the tribes, and their history has been marked by both intertribal alliances and animosities. See generally Smithsonian Institution, Handbook of North American Indians (1983) ; H. Driver, Indians of North America (1961) ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many of the tribes which are now quiet and orderly and self-supporting were once as savage as any that at present roam over the plains or in the mountains of the far West, and were then considered inaccessible to civilizing influences. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is every prospect of these north-western tribes remaining in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement, for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the eastern Indians have been debased and conquered by the use of them, and consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect attempt upon their life and honour. ”

“ 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 had often spoken of trying to work their way south, but had been dissuaded by their friends, who told them that the danger was too great, the tribes in that direction being fierce, and that they dare not go themselves beyond a certain limit. ”

“ Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those white intruders ”

“ These tribes are still in the hunting and fishing stage; they make no pretence of agriculture or stockraising. Except that they wear white man's clothes and are most of them nominally Roman Catholics, they live as their fathers did 100 years ago. ”

“ It is with such a feeling that many of the tribes have retired to their present abodes; and can we doubt that there is many a daring and independent soul among them, that would rejoice in the opportunity to balance the heavy reckoning which stands summed up in their minds against us? ”

“ All this is encouraging, and leads us to hope that this people may escape the general destruction which, in North America especially, has fallen upon the aboriginal tribes with the advance of the Anglo-Saxon race. ”

“ It is a sad and melancholy truth to contemplate, that all the numerous tribes who inhabited our vast Atlantic States have not “fled to the West;”—that they are not to be found here—that they have been blasted by the fire which61 has passed over them—have sunk into their graves, and everything but their names travelled into oblivion. ”