How strange the life of these savages. Of their past history how little is known; and there is an utter destitution of any reliable data upon which to conjecture even concerning it. By some they are considered the descendants of a people who were refined and enlightened. That a period of civilization, and of some progress in the arts, preceded the discovery of this continent by Columbus, there can be but little doubt. The evidences of this are to be seen in the relics of buried cities and towns, that have been found deep under ground in numerous places.
But whether the people of whom we have these traces extended to the Pacific slope, and to the southwest, we know not. This much we do know: there are large tracts of country now occupied by large and numerous tribes of the red race, living in all the filth and degradation of an unmitigated heathenism, and without any settled system of laws or social regulations.
If they have any system of government, it is that of an absolute monarchy. The chief of each tribe is the sole head and sovereign in all matters that affectthe wellbeing of the same, even to the life and death of its members.
They are human, but live like brutes. They seem totally destitute of all those noble and generous traits of life which distinguish and honor civilized people. In indolence and supineness they seem content to pass their days, without ambition, save of war and conquest; they live the mere creatures of passion, blind and callous to all those ennobling aims and purposes that are the true and pleasing inspiration of rational existence. In their social state, the more they are studied the more do they become an object of disgust and loathing.
They manifest but little affection for one another, only when death has separated them, and then they show the deep inhumanity and abject heathenism to which they have sunk by the horrid rites that prevail in the disposing of their infirm kindred and their dead. They burn the one and the other with equal impunity and satisfaction.
The marriage relation among them is not honored, scarcely observed. The least affront justifies the husband in casting off his chosen wife, and even in taking her life. Rapine and lust prey upon them at home; and war is fast wasting them abroad. They regard the whites as enemies from all antiquity, and any real injury they can do them is considered a virtue, while the taking of their lives (especially of males) is an act which is sure tocrown the name of the perpetrator with eternal honors.
With all their boasting and professed contempt for the whites, and with all their bright traditions and prophecies, according to which their day of triumph and power is near at hand, yet they are not without premonitions of a sad and fatal destiny. They are generally dejected and cast down; the tone of their every-day life, as well as sometimes actual sayings, indicating a pressing fear and harassing foreboding.
Some of the females would, after hours of conversation with Olive, upon the character, customs, and prosperity of the whites, plainly, but with injunctions of secrecy, tell her that they lived in constant fear; and it was not unfrequent that some disaffected member of the tribe would threaten to leave his mountain home and go to live with the whites. It is not to be understood that this was the prevailing state of feeling among them.
Most of them are sunk in an ignorance that forbids any aspiration or ambition to reach or fire their natures; an ignorance that knows no higher mode of life than theirs, and that looks with jealousy upon every nation and people, save the burrowing tribes that skulk and crawl among these mountains and ravines.
But fate seems descending upon them, if not in “sudden,” yet in certain night. They are waning.Remnants of them will no doubt long survive; but the masses of them seem fated to a speedy decay. Since this narrative was first written, a very severe battle, lasting several weeks, has taken place between the allied Mohaves and Yumas on the one side, and the Cochopas on the other. The former lost over three hundred warriors; the latter but few, less than threescore. Among the slain was the noble Francisco. It is rumored at Fort Yuma, that during the engagement the allied tribes were informed by their oracles that their ill-success was owing to Francisco; that he must be slain for his friendship to the whites; then victory would crown their struggles; and that, in obedience to this superstition, he was slain by the hands of his own tribe.
Had Olive been among them during this unsuccessful war, her life would have been offered up on the return of the defeated warriors; and no doubt there were then many among them who attributed their defeat to the conciliation on their part by which she was surrendered to her own people. Such is the Indian of the South and Southwest.
We have tried to give the reader a correct, though brief history of the singular and strange fate of that unfortunate family. If there is one who shall be disposed to regard the reality as overdrawn, we have only to say that every fact has been dictated by word of mouth from the surviving members of that once happy family, who have, by a mysteriousProvidence, after suffering a prolonged and unrelieved woe of five years, been rescued and again restored to the blessings of a civilized and sympathizing society.
Most of the preceding pages have been written in the first person. This method was adopted for the sake of brevity, as also to give, as near as language may do it, a faithful record of thefeelingsandspiritwith which the distresses and cruel treatment of the few years over which these pages run, was met, braved, endured, and triumphed over. The record of the five years of captivity entered upon by a timid, inexperienced girl of fourteen years, and during which, associated with naught but savage life, she grew up to womanhood, presents one of heroism, self-possession, and patience, that might do honor to one of maturity and years. Much of that dreadful period is unwritten, and will remain forever unwritten.
We have confidence that every reader will share with us the feelings of gratitude to Almighty God for the blessings of civilization, and a superior social life, with which we cease to pen this record of the degradation, the barbarity, the superstition, the squalidness, that curse the uncounted thousands who people the caverns and wilds that divide the Eastern from the Western inheritance of our mother republic.
But the unpierced heathenism that thus stretchesits wing of night upon these swarming mountains and vales, is not long to have a dominion so wild, nor possess victims so numerous. Its territory is already begirt with the light of a higher life; and now the foot-fall of the pioneering, brave Anglo-Saxon is heard upon the heel of the savage, and breaks the silence along his winding trail. Already the song and shout of civilization wakes echoes long and prophetic upon those mountain rocks, that have for centuries hemmed in an unvisited savageness.
Until his death Francisco, by whose vigilance the place of Olive’s captivity and suffering was ascertained, and who dared to bargain for her release and restoration ere he had changed a word with her captors about it, was hunted by his own and other tribes for guiding the white man to the hiding-places of those whose ignorance will not suffer them to let go their filth and superstition, and who regard the whole transaction as the opening of the door to the greedy, aggressive, white race. The cry of gold, like that which formed and matured a state upon this far-off coast in a few years, is heard along ravines that have been so long exclusively theirs, and companies of gold hunters, led on by faint but unerring “prospects,” are confidently seeking rich leads of the precious ore near their long isolated wigwams.
The march of American civilization, if unhamperedby the weakness and corruption of its own happy subjects, will yet, and soon, break upon the barbarity of these numerous tribes, and either elevate them to the unappreciated blessings of a superior state, or wipe them into oblivion, and give their long-undeveloped territory to another.
Perhaps when the intricate and complicated events that mark and pave the way to this state of things, shall be pondered by the curious and retrospective eye of those who shall rejoice in its possession, these comparatively insignificant ones spread out for the reader upon these pages, will be found to form a part. May Heaven guide the anxious-freighted future to the greatest good of the abject heathen, and save those into whose hands are committed such openings and privileges for beneficent doing, from the perversion of their blessings and mission.
“Honor to whom honor is due.” With all the degradation in which these untamed hordes are steeped, there are—strange as it may seem—some traits and phases in their conduct which, on comparison with those of some who call themselves civilized, ought to crimson their cheeks with a blush. While feuds have been kindled, and lives have been lost—innocent lives—by the intrusion of the white man upon the domestic relations of Indian families; while decency and chastity have been outraged, and the Indian female, in some instances, stolen from her spouse and husband that she reallyloved; let it be written, written if possible so as to be read when an inscrutable but unerring Providence shall exact “to the uttermost farthing” for every deed of cruelty and lust perpetrated by a superior race upon an inferior one;writtento stand out before those whose duty and position it shall be, within a few years, in the American Council of State, to deliberate and legislate upon the best method to dispose of these fast waning tribes; thatone of our own race, in tender years, committed wholly to their power, passed a five-years’ captivity among these savages without falling under those baser propensities which rave, and rage, and consume, with the fury and fatality of a pestilence, among themselves.
It is true that their uncultivated and untempered traditional superstitions allow them to mark in the white man an enemy that has preyed upon their rights from antiquity, and to exact of him, when thrown into their power, cruelties that kindle just horror in the breast of the refined and the civilized. It is true that the more intelligent, and the large majority, deplore the poor representation of our people that has been given to these wild men by certain “lewd fellows of the baser sort,” who are undistinguished by them from our race as a whole. But they are set down to our account in a more infallible record than any of mere human writ; and delicate and terrible is the responsibility with whichthey have clothed the action of the American race amid the startling and important exigences that must roll upon its pathway for the next few years.
Who that looks at the superstition, the mangled, fragmentary, and distorted traditions that form the only tribunal of appeal for the littlewreck of moral sensethey have left them—superstitions that hold them as with the grasp of omnipotence; who that looks upon the self-consuming workings of the corruptions that breed in the hotbed of ignorance, can be so hardened that his heart has nosigh to heave, no groan to utterover a social, moral, and political desolation that ought to appeal to our commiseration rather than put a torch to our slumbering vengeance.
It is true that this coast and the Eastern states have now their scores of lonely wanderers, mournful and sorrow-stricken mourners, over whose sky has been cast a mantle of gloom that will stretch to their tombs for the loss of those of their kindred who sleep in the dust, or bleach upon the sand-plots trodden by these roaming heathen; kindred who have in their innocence fallen by cruelty. But there is a voice coming up from these scattered, unmonumented resting-places of their dead; and it pleads, pleads with the potency and unerringness of those pleadings from “under the ground” of ancient date, and of the fact and effect of which we have a guiding record.
Who that casts his eye over the vast territory that lies between the Columbia River and Acapulco, withthe Rocky Range for its eastern bulwark, a territory abounding with rich verdure-clad vales and pasturage hill-sides, and looks to the time, not distant, when over it all shall be spread the wing of the eagle, when the music of civilization, of the arts, of the sciences, of the mechanism, of the religion of our favored race, shall roll along its winding rivers and over its beautiful slopes, but has one prayer to offer to the God of his fathers, that the same wisdom craved and received by them to plant his civil light-house on a wilderness shore, may still guide us on to a glorious, a happy, and a useful destiny.
The following lines were written by some person, unknown to the author, residing in Marysville, California. They were first published in a daily paper, soon after the first edition was issued. They are here inserted as expressing, not whatonemerely, but whatmanyfelt who read this narrative in that state, and who have become personally acquainted with Miss Oatman. Many have been the assurances of sympathy and affection that, by letter and in person, have been in kindred and equally fervent strains poured upon the ear and heart of the once suffering subject of this narrative.
STANZAS TO OLIVE OATMAN.Fair Olive! thy historian’s pen declinesPortraying what thy feelings once have been,Because the language of the world confinesExpression, giving only half we mean;No reaching from what we have felt or seen:And it is well. How useless ’tis to gildRefined gold, or paint the lily’s sheen!But we can weep when all the heart is fill’dAnd feel in thought, beyond where pen or words are skill’d.In moonlight we can fancy that one grave,Resting amid the mountains bleak and bare,Although no willow’s swinging pendants waveAbove the little captive sleeping there,With thee beside her wrapp’d in voiceless prayer;We guess thy anguish, feel thy heart’s deep woe,And list for moans upon the midnight air,As tears of sympathy in silence flowFor her whose unmark’d head is lying calm and low.For in the bosom of the wildernessImagination paints a fearful wildWith two young children bow’d in deep distress,A simple maiden and a little child,Begirt with savages in circles fill’d,Who round them shout in triumph o’er the deedThat laid their kindred on the desert piledAn undistinguished mass, in death to bleed,And left them without hope in their despairing need.In captive chains whole races have been led,But never yet upon one heart did fallMisfortune’s hand so heavy. Thy young headHas born a nation’s griefs, its woes, and allThe serried sorrows which earth’s histories callThe hand of God. Then, Olive, bend thy knee,Morning and night, until the funeral pallHides thy fair face to Him who watches thee,Whose power once made thee bond, whose power once set thee free.Montbar.Marysville,April 27, 1857.
STANZAS TO OLIVE OATMAN.Fair Olive! thy historian’s pen declinesPortraying what thy feelings once have been,Because the language of the world confinesExpression, giving only half we mean;No reaching from what we have felt or seen:And it is well. How useless ’tis to gildRefined gold, or paint the lily’s sheen!But we can weep when all the heart is fill’dAnd feel in thought, beyond where pen or words are skill’d.In moonlight we can fancy that one grave,Resting amid the mountains bleak and bare,Although no willow’s swinging pendants waveAbove the little captive sleeping there,With thee beside her wrapp’d in voiceless prayer;We guess thy anguish, feel thy heart’s deep woe,And list for moans upon the midnight air,As tears of sympathy in silence flowFor her whose unmark’d head is lying calm and low.For in the bosom of the wildernessImagination paints a fearful wildWith two young children bow’d in deep distress,A simple maiden and a little child,Begirt with savages in circles fill’d,Who round them shout in triumph o’er the deedThat laid their kindred on the desert piledAn undistinguished mass, in death to bleed,And left them without hope in their despairing need.In captive chains whole races have been led,But never yet upon one heart did fallMisfortune’s hand so heavy. Thy young headHas born a nation’s griefs, its woes, and allThe serried sorrows which earth’s histories callThe hand of God. Then, Olive, bend thy knee,Morning and night, until the funeral pallHides thy fair face to Him who watches thee,Whose power once made thee bond, whose power once set thee free.Montbar.Marysville,April 27, 1857.
Fair Olive! thy historian’s pen declinesPortraying what thy feelings once have been,Because the language of the world confinesExpression, giving only half we mean;No reaching from what we have felt or seen:And it is well. How useless ’tis to gildRefined gold, or paint the lily’s sheen!But we can weep when all the heart is fill’dAnd feel in thought, beyond where pen or words are skill’d.
Fair Olive! thy historian’s pen declines
Portraying what thy feelings once have been,
Because the language of the world confines
Expression, giving only half we mean;
No reaching from what we have felt or seen:
And it is well. How useless ’tis to gild
Refined gold, or paint the lily’s sheen!
But we can weep when all the heart is fill’d
And feel in thought, beyond where pen or words are skill’d.
In moonlight we can fancy that one grave,Resting amid the mountains bleak and bare,Although no willow’s swinging pendants waveAbove the little captive sleeping there,With thee beside her wrapp’d in voiceless prayer;We guess thy anguish, feel thy heart’s deep woe,And list for moans upon the midnight air,As tears of sympathy in silence flowFor her whose unmark’d head is lying calm and low.
In moonlight we can fancy that one grave,
Resting amid the mountains bleak and bare,
Although no willow’s swinging pendants wave
Above the little captive sleeping there,
With thee beside her wrapp’d in voiceless prayer;
We guess thy anguish, feel thy heart’s deep woe,
And list for moans upon the midnight air,
As tears of sympathy in silence flow
For her whose unmark’d head is lying calm and low.
For in the bosom of the wildernessImagination paints a fearful wildWith two young children bow’d in deep distress,A simple maiden and a little child,Begirt with savages in circles fill’d,Who round them shout in triumph o’er the deedThat laid their kindred on the desert piledAn undistinguished mass, in death to bleed,And left them without hope in their despairing need.
For in the bosom of the wilderness
Imagination paints a fearful wild
With two young children bow’d in deep distress,
A simple maiden and a little child,
Begirt with savages in circles fill’d,
Who round them shout in triumph o’er the deed
That laid their kindred on the desert piled
An undistinguished mass, in death to bleed,
And left them without hope in their despairing need.
In captive chains whole races have been led,But never yet upon one heart did fallMisfortune’s hand so heavy. Thy young headHas born a nation’s griefs, its woes, and allThe serried sorrows which earth’s histories callThe hand of God. Then, Olive, bend thy knee,Morning and night, until the funeral pallHides thy fair face to Him who watches thee,Whose power once made thee bond, whose power once set thee free.
In captive chains whole races have been led,
But never yet upon one heart did fall
Misfortune’s hand so heavy. Thy young head
Has born a nation’s griefs, its woes, and all
The serried sorrows which earth’s histories call
The hand of God. Then, Olive, bend thy knee,
Morning and night, until the funeral pall
Hides thy fair face to Him who watches thee,
Whose power once made thee bond, whose power once set thee free.
Montbar.
Marysville,April 27, 1857.
THE END.
FOOTNOTE:[1]I have several of these ground-nuts now in my possession.
FOOTNOTE:
[1]I have several of these ground-nuts now in my possession.
[1]I have several of these ground-nuts now in my possession.