FOOTNOTES:[227]Three millions of fertile acres were to be resumed; several thousand Indians were persuaded to relinquish them, and migrate to a large island (Manitoulin) on Lake Huron. "The greatest kindness," says Sir F. Head, "which we can perform to these intelligent and simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites."—Returns, 1839, p. 145. These are nearly the same arguments which have uniformly been urged in the United States, and would justify incessant acts of arbitrary removal, such as would render all improvement impossible.
[227]Three millions of fertile acres were to be resumed; several thousand Indians were persuaded to relinquish them, and migrate to a large island (Manitoulin) on Lake Huron. "The greatest kindness," says Sir F. Head, "which we can perform to these intelligent and simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites."—Returns, 1839, p. 145. These are nearly the same arguments which have uniformly been urged in the United States, and would justify incessant acts of arbitrary removal, such as would render all improvement impossible.
[227]Three millions of fertile acres were to be resumed; several thousand Indians were persuaded to relinquish them, and migrate to a large island (Manitoulin) on Lake Huron. "The greatest kindness," says Sir F. Head, "which we can perform to these intelligent and simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites."—Returns, 1839, p. 145. These are nearly the same arguments which have uniformly been urged in the United States, and would justify incessant acts of arbitrary removal, such as would render all improvement impossible.
No. XLII.
"The small-pox proves almost always fatal to the Red Indian, his hardened skin preventing the appearance of the eruption. In Abyssinia, where this dreadful disease is supposed to have originated, when any person is seized with it, the neighbors surround the house and set it on fire, consuming it with its miserable inhabitants. The American Indians regard the contagion with almost as much horror. The Mahas had been a powerful and warlike tribe till now, when they saw their strength wasted by a malady which they could neither resist nor prevent; they became frantic; they set fire to their village, and many of them killed their wives and children, to spare them the sufferings of disease, and that they might all go together to the land of souls."—Lewis and Clarke'sTravels to the Source of the Missouri.
Lambert says, "Many nations have been totally exterminated by the small-pox. When I was in Canada in the spring of 1808, a village of Mississagas, residing near Kingston, was nearly depopulated by the small-pox; not more than twenty escaped of five hundred."
"Repeated efforts have been made, and so far, generally, as the tribes have ever had the disease (or, at all events, within the recollection of those who are now living in the tribes), the government agents (of the United States) have succeeded in introducing vaccination as a protection; but among the tribes in their wild state, who have not yet suffered from the disease, very little success has been met with in the attempt to protect them, on account of their superstitions, which have generally resisted all attempts to introduce vaccination. While I was on the Upper Missouri, several surgeons were sent into the country with the Indian agents, where I several times saw the attempt made without success. They have perfect confidence in the skill of their own physicians, until the disease has made one slaughter in their tribe, and then, having seen white men among them protected by it, they are disposed to receive it, before which they can not believe that so minute a puncture in the arm is going to protect them from so fatal a disease; and as they see white men so earnestly urging it, they decide that it must be some new trick of the pale faces, by which they are to gain some new advantage over them, and they stubbornly and successfully resist it."—Catlin, vol. ii., p. 258.
From the accounts brought to New York in the fall of 1838 by Messrs. M'Kenzie, Mitchell, and others, from the Upper Missouri, and with whom I conversed on the subject, it seems that in the summer of that year the small-pox was accidentally introduced among the Mandans by the fur traders, and that in the course of two months they all perished except some thirty or forty, who were taken as slaves by the Riccarees, an enemy living two hundred miles below them, and who worked up and took possession of their village soon after their calamity, taking up their residence in it, it being a better built village than their own; and from the lips of one of the traders who had more recently arrived from there, I had the following account of the remaining few, in whose destruction was the final termination of this interesting and once numerous tribe:
"'The Riccarees,' he said, 'had taken possession of the village after the disease had subsided, and, after living some months in it, were attacked by a large party of their enemies, the Sioux, and while fighting desperately in resistance, in which the Mandan prisoners had taken an active part, the latter had concerted a plan for their own destruction, which was effected by their simultaneously running through the pickets on to the prairie, calling out to the Sioux (both men and women) to kill them, "that they were Riccaree dogs, that their friends were all dead, and they did not wish to live;" that they here wielded their weapons as desperately as they could, to excite the fury of their enemy, and that they were thus cut to pieces and destroyed.'
"The accounts given by two or three white men, who were among the Mandans during the ravages of this frightful disease, are most appalling, and actually too heart-rending and disgusting to be recorded. The disease was introduced into the country by the Fur Company's steamer from St. Louis, which had two of their crew sick with the disease when it approached the Upper Missouri, and imprudently stopped to trade at the Mandan village, which was on the bank of the river, where the chiefs and others were allowed to come on board, by which means the disease got ashore.
"I am constrained to believe that the gentlemen in charge of the steamer did not believe it to be the small-pox; for if they had known it to be such, I can not conceive of such imprudence as regarded their own interests in the country, as well as the fate of these poor people, by allowing their boat to advance into the country under such circumstances.
"It seems that the Mandans were surrounded by several war parties of their more powerful enemies, the Sioux, at that unlucky time, and they could not, therefore, disperse upon the plains, by which many of them could have been saved; and they were necessarily inclosed within the pickets of the village, where the disease in a few days became so very malignant, that death ensued in a few hours after its attacks; and so slight were their hopes when they were attacked, that nearly half of them destroyed themselves with their knives, with their guns, and by dashing their brains out by leaping head foremost from a thirty-foot ledge of rocks in front of their village. The first symptom of the disease was a rapid swelling of the body, and so very virulent had it become, that very many died in two or three hours after their attack, and that in many cases without the appearance of the disease upon the skin. Utter dismay seemed to possess all classes and all ages, and they gave themselves up in despair as entirely lost. There was but one continual crying and howling, and praying to the Great Spirit for his protection, during the nights and days; and there being but few living, and those in too appalling despair, nobody thought of burying the dead, whose bodies, whole families together, were left in horrid and loathsome piles in their own wigwams, with a few buffalo robes, &c., thrown over them, there to decay, and be devoured by their own dogs. That such a proportion of their community as that above mentioned should have perished in so short a time, seems yet to the reader an unaccountable thing; but, in addition to the causes just mentioned, it must be borne in mind that this frightful disease is every where far more fatal among the native than in civilized population, which may be owing to some extraordinary susceptibility, or, I think, more probably, to the exposed lives they live, leading more directly to fatal consequences. In this, as in most of their diseases, they ignorantly and imprudently plunge into the coldest water while in the highest state of fever, and often die before they have the power to get out.
"Some have attributed the unexampled fatality of this disease among the Indians to the fact of their living entirely on animal food; but so important a subject for investigation I must leave for sounder judgments than mine to decide. They are a people whose constitutions and habits of life enable them most certainly to meet most of its ills with less dread, and with decidedly greater success, than they are met in civilized communities; and I would not dare to decide that their simple meat diet was the cause of their fatal exposure to one frightful disease, when I am decidedly of opinion that it has been the cause of their exemption and protection from another, almost equally destructive, and, like the former, of civilized introduction.
"During the season of the ravages of the Asiatic cholera, which swept over the greater part of the Western country and the Indian frontier, I was a traveler through those regions, and was able to witness its effects; and I learned from what I saw, as well as from what I have heard in other parts since that time, that it traveled to and over the frontiers, carrying dismay and death among the tribes on the borders in many cases, so far as they had adopted the civilized modes of life, with its dissipations, using vegetable food and salt; but wherever it came to the tribes living exclusively on meat, and that without the use of salt, its progress was suddenly stopped. I mention this as a subject which I looked upon as important to science, and therefore one on which I made careful inquiries; and, so far as I have learned, along that part of the frontier over which I have since passed, I have, to my satisfaction, ascertained that such became the utmost limits of this fatal disease in its travel to the west, unless where it might have followed some of the routes of the fur traders, who, of course, have introduced the modes of civilized life.
"From the trader who was present at the destruction of the Mandans I had many most wonderful incidents of this dreadful scene, but I dread to recite them. Among them, however, there is one that I must briefly describe, relative to the death of that noblegentleman, of whom I have already said so much, and to whom I became so much attached,Mah-to-to-pa, or 'the Four Bears.' This fine fellow sat in his wigwam and watched every one of his family die about him, his wives and his little children, after he had recovered from the disease himself, when he walked out round the village, and wept over the final destruction of his tribe; his braves and warriors, whose sinewy arms alone he could depend on for a continuance of their existence, all laid low; when he came back to his lodge, where he carried his whole family in a pile, with a number of robes, and wrapping another around himself, went out upon a hill at a little distance, where he laid several days, despite all the solicitations of the traders, resolved tostarvehimself to death. He remained there till the sixth day, when he had just strength enough to creep back to the village, when he entered the horrid gloom of his own wigwam, and, laying his body alongside of the group of his family, drew his robe over him, and died on the ninth day of his fatal abstinence.
"So have perished the friendly and hospitable Mandans, from the best accounts I could get; and although it may bepossiblethat some few individuals may yet be remaining, I think it is not probable; and one thing is certain, even if such be the case, that, as a nation, the Mandans are extinct, having no longer an existence.
"There is yet a melancholy part of the tale to be told, relating to the ravages of this frightful disease in that country on the same occasion, as it spread to other contiguous tribes, to the Minatarrees, the Knisteneaux, the Blackfeet, the Chayennes, and Crows, among whom 25,000 perished in the course of four or five months, which most appalling facts I got from Major Pilcher, now Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, from Mr. M'Kenzie, and others."—Catlin'sAmerican Indians, vol. ii., p. 257.
No. XLIII.
"In man the coloring matter seems to be deposited in the dermoidal system by the roots or the bulbs of the hair,[228]and all sound observations prove that the skin varies in color from the action of external stimuli on individuals, and is not hereditary in the whole race. The Eskimoes of Greenland, and the Laplanders, are tanned by the influence of the air, but their children are born white. We will not decide on the changes which Nature may produce in a space of time, exceeding all historical traditions. Reason stops short in these matters when no longer under the guidance of experience and analogy. The nations that have a white skin begin their cosmogony by white men; according to them, the negroes and all tawny people have been blackened or embrowned by the excessive heat of the sun. This theory, adopted by the Greeks, though not without contradiction (Onesicritus apud Strabon, lib. xv., p. 983), has been propagated even to our own times. Buffon has repeated, in prose, what Theodectes had expressed in verse two thousand years before, 'that the nations wear the livery of the climate they inhabit.' If history had been written by black nations, they would have maintained what even Europeans have recently advanced (Prichard'sResearches into the Physical History of Man, 1813), p. 233, 239, that man was originally black, or of a very tawny color, and that he has whitened in some races from the effect of civilization and progressive debilitation, as animals in a state of domestication pass from dark to lighter colors. I shall here cite the authority of Ulloa. This learned man has seen the Indians of Chili, of the Andes, of Peru, of the burning coasts of Panama, and those of Louisiana, situated under the northern temperate zone. He had the good fortune to live at a time when theories were less numerous, and, like me, he was struck at seeing the native under the line as much bronzed as brown, in the cold climate of the Cordilleras as in the plains. Where differences of color are observed, they depend on the race."—Humboldt'sPersonal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 298.
FOOTNOTES:[228]According to the interesting researches of Mr. Gaultier, on theOrganization of the Human Skin, p. 57. John Hunter observes, that in several animals, the coloration of the hair is independent of that of the skin.Blumenbach informs us how climate operates in modifying the color of the skin. He states that the proximate cause of the dark color of the integuments in an abundance of carbon, secreted by the skin with hydrogen, precipitated and fixed in the rete mucosum by the contact of the atmospheric oxygen.—De Variet., p. 124.If Voltaire is to be believed, no well-informed person formerly passed by Leyden without seeing a part of the black membrane (the reticulum mucosum) of a negro, dissected by the celebrated Ruysell. Their error is, however, now universally admitted. The "rete mucosum" has been discovered to be nothing but the latest layer of epidermis, the inner surface of which is being continually renewed as the exterior is worn away, just like the bark of a tree. There is no distinct coloring layer, it appears, either in the fair or the dark-skinned races, the peculiar hue of the latter depending upon the presence of coloring matter in the cells of the epidermis itself. Color, therefore, is not evenskin deep, for it does not reach the true skin, being entirely confined to the epidermis or scarf skin.
[228]According to the interesting researches of Mr. Gaultier, on theOrganization of the Human Skin, p. 57. John Hunter observes, that in several animals, the coloration of the hair is independent of that of the skin.Blumenbach informs us how climate operates in modifying the color of the skin. He states that the proximate cause of the dark color of the integuments in an abundance of carbon, secreted by the skin with hydrogen, precipitated and fixed in the rete mucosum by the contact of the atmospheric oxygen.—De Variet., p. 124.If Voltaire is to be believed, no well-informed person formerly passed by Leyden without seeing a part of the black membrane (the reticulum mucosum) of a negro, dissected by the celebrated Ruysell. Their error is, however, now universally admitted. The "rete mucosum" has been discovered to be nothing but the latest layer of epidermis, the inner surface of which is being continually renewed as the exterior is worn away, just like the bark of a tree. There is no distinct coloring layer, it appears, either in the fair or the dark-skinned races, the peculiar hue of the latter depending upon the presence of coloring matter in the cells of the epidermis itself. Color, therefore, is not evenskin deep, for it does not reach the true skin, being entirely confined to the epidermis or scarf skin.
[228]According to the interesting researches of Mr. Gaultier, on theOrganization of the Human Skin, p. 57. John Hunter observes, that in several animals, the coloration of the hair is independent of that of the skin.
Blumenbach informs us how climate operates in modifying the color of the skin. He states that the proximate cause of the dark color of the integuments in an abundance of carbon, secreted by the skin with hydrogen, precipitated and fixed in the rete mucosum by the contact of the atmospheric oxygen.—De Variet., p. 124.
If Voltaire is to be believed, no well-informed person formerly passed by Leyden without seeing a part of the black membrane (the reticulum mucosum) of a negro, dissected by the celebrated Ruysell. Their error is, however, now universally admitted. The "rete mucosum" has been discovered to be nothing but the latest layer of epidermis, the inner surface of which is being continually renewed as the exterior is worn away, just like the bark of a tree. There is no distinct coloring layer, it appears, either in the fair or the dark-skinned races, the peculiar hue of the latter depending upon the presence of coloring matter in the cells of the epidermis itself. Color, therefore, is not evenskin deep, for it does not reach the true skin, being entirely confined to the epidermis or scarf skin.
No. XLIV.
"The Indian and the negro races, both fated, as it seems, to yield the supremacy to thewhites, present in every other particular a curious contrast to each other. The red man appears to have received from nature every quality which contributes to greatness, except—I have no other word for it—tamability; he has shown in many remarkable instances intellectual capacity, talents for government, eloquence, energy, and self-command.... There is something noble and striking—something that commands respect and admiration, in the Indian character, irreconcilable though it be with advanced civilization and the operation of Christian influences. The negro, on the contrary, has precisely what the Indian wants; he is a domestic animal.... The Indian avoids his conqueror; the negro bows at his feet. The Indian loves the independence and privations of his solitude better than all the flesh-pots of Egypt; the negro, if left to himself, is helpless and miserable: he must have society and sensual pleasures; if he be allowed to eat and drink well, to dance, to sing, and to make love, he seems to have no further or higher aspirations, and to care nothing for the degradation of his race. With the single exception of Toussaint, I know no instance of a negro distinguishing himself in politics, or arms, or letters; and though I make every allowance for the difficulties and obstacles to his doing so which his situation imposes on him, I can not allow that these account for the fact that, notwithstanding the excellent education which many negroes receive, and the stimulus afforded by constant intercourse with whites, not one of them has yet, either here or in the West Indies, with the above-named exception, taken the lead among his countrymen, or made a name for himself. And this natural superiority of the Indian is, perhaps unconsciously, recognized and illustrated in a singular manner by the white man, in the different feelings which he exhibits upon the subject of amalgamation with the two races. Some of the best families in the United States areproudto trace their origin to Indian chiefs (e.g., the Randolphs of Virginia boast that they came of the lineage of Powhatan); and I have myself met with half-breeds who were considered (and most justly) in every respect equal in estimation with full-blooded whites. It is needless to observe, that with respect to the negroes, the precise converse is the case.Cæteris paribus, we seem naturally to receive the red man as our equal."—Godley'sLetters from America, vol. i., p. 153.
No. XLV.
"These islands were partly discovered by Behring in 1741, and the rest at several periods since his time. The most considerable of them amount to forty in number, and they may be justly considered as a branch of the Kamtskadale Mountains continued in the sea. The three small islands, known by the names of Attak, Shemya, and Semitshi, with a few others, were denominated by the Russians Aleutskie Ostrova, because a bold rock in the language of these parts is called 'Aleut.' In the sequel this name was extended to the whole chain, though a part of it is named the Andreanoffskoi, and the rest, lying further toward America, the Fox Islands. The survey of these islands, more anciently discovered by the Russians, and of the adjacent parts of the two continents, was made by Captain Cook in his third voyage, in 1778. If the Russians, then, can deservedly claim the priority of the discovery, no one can withhold from the adventurous and persevering Captain Cook the glory and the merit of having fixed the distance of the two continents and their respective extent, to the east for Asia, and to the west for North America."—Rees'sCyclopædia, art. Aleutian Islands.
No. XLVI.
"Almost every where in the New World we recognize a multiplicity of forms and tenses in the verb, an artificial industry to indicate before-hand, either by inflection of the personal pronouns, which form the terminations of the verb, or by an intercalatedsuffix, the nature and the relation of its object and its subject, and to distinguish whether the object be animate or inanimate, of the masculine or the feminine gender, simple, or in complex number. This multiplicity characterizes the rudest American languages. Astarloa reckons, in like manner, in the grammatical system of the Biscayan, 206 forms of the verb. Strange conformity in the structure of languages among races of men so different, and on spots so distant.
"Those languages, the principal tendency of which is inflection, excite less the curiosity of the vulgar than those which seem formed by aggregation. In the first, the elements of which words are composed, and which are generally reduced to a few letters, are no longer distinguished. These elements, when isolated, exhibit no meaning; the whole is assimilated and mixed together. The American languages, on the contrary, are like complicated machines, the wheels of which are exposed. The artifice is visible—I mean the industrious mechanism of their construction. We seem to be present at their formation, and we should state them to be of very recent origin, if we did not recollect that the human mind follows imperturbably an impulse once given; that nations enlarge, improve, and repair the grammatical edifice of their language according to a plan already determined; finally, that there are countries where the languages of all the institutions and the arts have remained stereotyped, as it were, during the lapse of ages. The highest degree of intellectual development has been hitherto found among nations which belong to the Indian and Pelasgic branch. The languages, formed principally by aggregation, seem themselves to oppose obstacles to the improvement of the mind. They are, in fact, unfurnished with that rapid movement, that interior life, to which the inflection of the root is favorable, and which gives so many charms to works of the imagination. Let us not, however, forget that a people celebrated in the remotest antiquity, from whom the Greeks themselves borrowed knowledge, had perhaps a language, the construction of which recalls involuntarily that of the language of America. What a scaffolding of little monosyllabic and dissyllabic forms is added to the verb and to the substantive in the Coptic language!"—Humboldt'sPersonal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 273.
In his "Researches," Humboldt observes: "We find in the New Continent languages, some of which, as the Greenland, the Cora, the Tamanac, the Totonac, and the Quichua (Archiv. fuer Ethnographie, b. i., s. 345; Vaters, s. 206), display a richness of grammatical forms which we trace nowhere in the Old World, except at Congo, and among the Biscayans, who were the remains of the ancient Cantabrians. But, amid these marks of civilization (referring to the Aztec nation), and this progressive perfection of language, it is remarkable that no people of America had attained that analysis of sounds which leads to the most admirable, we might almost say the most miraculous of all inventions, an alphabet. We are led to think that the progressive perfection of symbolic signs, and the facility with which objects are painted, had prevented the introduction of letters ...notthe case in Egypt."
Chateaubriand says that the Jesuits have left important works relative to the language of the Canadian savage. Father Chaumont, who had lived fifty years among the Hurons, composed a grammar of their language. To Father Rasles, who spent ten years in an Abenakis village, we are indebted for valuable documents. A French and Iroquois dictionary—a new treasure for philologists—is finished. There is also a manuscript dictionary—Iroquois and English—but, unluckily, the first volume is lost.
"Les trois langues, Huronne, Algonquine et Siou sont les langues mères du Canada. Ils ont tous les caractères des langues primitives, et il est certain qu'elles n'ont pas une origine commune. La seule prononciation suffisoit pour le pronom. Le Siou sifle en parlant, le Huron n'a point de lettre labiale, qu'il ne sçanroit prononcer, parle du gosier et aspire presque toutes les syllabes; l'Algonquin prononce avec plus de douceur, et parle plus naturellement. Je n'ai pu rien apprendre de particulier de la première de ces trois langues; mais nos anciens missionnaires ont beaucoup travaillé sur les deux autres, et sur les principales de leurs dialectes: voici ce que j'en ais oui dire aux plus habiles.
"La langue Huronne est d'une abondance, d'une énergie, et d'une noblesse, qu'on ne trouve peut-être réunies dans aucune des plus belles, que nous connoissons, et ceux, à qui elle est propre, quoiqu'ils ne soient plus qu'une poignée d'hommes, ont encore dans l'âme une élévation, qui s'accorde bien mieux avec la majesté de leur langage, qu'avec le triste état, où ils sont réduits. Quelques uns ont cru y trouver des rapports avec l'Hébreu; d'autres en plus grand nombre ont prétendu qu'elle avoit la même origine que celle des Grecs; mais rien n'est plus frivole que les preuves, qu'ils en apportent. La langue Algonquine n'a pas autant de force, que la Huronne, mais elle a plus de douceur et d'élégance. Toutes deux ont une richesse d'expressions, une variété de tones, une propriété de termes, une régularité, qui étonnent: mais ce qui surprend encore davantage, c'est que parmi des Barbares qu'on ne voit point s'étudier à bien parler, et qui n'ont jamais eu l'usage de l'écriture, il ne s'introduit point un mauvais mot, un terme impropre, une construction vicieuse, et que les enfans mêmes en conservent, jusque dans le discours familier, toute la pureté. D'ailleurs, la manière dont ils animent tout se qu'ils disent, ne laisse aucun lieu de douter qui ne comprennent toute la valeur de leur expressions, et toute la beauté de leur langue. Dans le Huron tout se conjugue; un certain artifice, que je ne vous expliquerois pas bien, y fait distinguer des verbes, les noms, les pronoms, les adverbes, &c. Les verbes simples ont une double conjugaison, l'une absoluë, l'autre réciproque. Les troisièmes personnes ont les deux genres, car il n'y en a que deux dans ces langues; à sçavoir, le genre noble, et le genre ignoble. Pour ce qui est des nombres et des tems, on y trouve les mêmes différences que dans le Grec. Par exemple, pour raconter un voyage, on s'exprime autrement si on la fait par terre, ou si on l'a fait par eau. Les verbes actifs se multiplient autant de fois, qu'il y a de choses, qui tombent sous leur action; comme le verbe, qui signifieManger, varie autant de fois, qu'il y a de choses comestibles. L'action s'exprime autrement à l'égard d'une chose inanimée: ainsivoir un homme, etvoir une pierre, ce sont deux verbes. Se servir d'une chose, qui appartient à celui qui s'en sert, ou à celui à qui on parle, ce sont autant de verbes différens.
"Il y a quelque chose de tout cela dans la langue Algonquine, mais la manière n'en est pas la même, et je ne suis nullement en état de vous en instruire. Cependant, madame, si du peu, que je viens de vous dire, il s'ensuit que la richesse et la variété de ces langues les rendent extrêmement difficiles à apprendre, la disette et la stérilité où elles sont tombées ne causent pas un moindre embarras. Car, comme les peuples, quand nous avons commencé à les fréquenter, ignoroient presque tout ce dont ils n'avoient pas l'usage, ou qui ne tomboit pas sous leurs sens, ils manquoient de termes pour les exprimer, ou les avoient laissé tomber dans l'oubli."—Charlevoix, tom. v., p. 288.
The variety of dialects proves the little communication held between the different tribes of savages, a necessary consequence of their living by the chase, and requiring extensive hunting-grounds.
"We need only," says Acosta (De Procur. Indorum Salut.), "cross a valley for hearing another jargon."
No. XLVII.
"The following are the results of the most recent researches on the lines of fortifications, and the tumuli found between the Rocky Mountains and the chain of the Alleganies. The fortifications chiefly occupy the space between the great lakes of Canada, the Mississippi and the Ohio, from the fourty-fourth to the thirty-ninth degree of latitude. Those which advance most toward the northeast are on the Black River, one of the tributary streams of Lake Ontario. The most remarkable ancient fortifications in the State of Ohio are, 1st. Newark, a very regular octagon, containing an area of 32 acres, and connected with a circular circumvallation of 16 acres; the eight great doors of the octagon are defended by eight works placed before each opening. 2d. Perryvale County, numerous walls, not in clay, but stone. 3d. Marietta, two great squares with twelve doors; the walls of earth are 21 feet high, and 42 feet at their base. 4th. Circleville, a square with eight doors, and eight small works for their defense connected with a circular fort, surrounded by two walls and a moat. 5th. Point Creek, at the confluence of the Scioto and the Ohio; the fortifications are partly irregular; one of them contains 62 acres. 6th. Portsmouth, opposite Alexandria; vast ruins, disposed on parallel lines, denote that this spot heretofore contained a numerous population. 7th. Little Miami and Cincinnati, a wall of 7 feet high and 6300 toises long. All these square forts are placed as exactly to the east as the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids; when the forts have only one opening, it is directed toward the rising sun. The walls of these lines of fortification are most frequently of earth, but two miles from Chilicothe, in the State of Ohio, we find a wall constructed in stone, from 12 to 15 feet high, and from 5 to 8 feet thick, forming an inclosure of 80 acres. It is not yet precisely known how far those works extend to the west, along the course of the Missouri and the River La Plata; but they are not found on the north of the Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan, neither do they pass the chain of the Alleganies. Some circumvallations discovered on the banks of the Chenango, near Oxford, in the State of New York, may be considered as a very remarkable exception. We must not confound these military monuments with the mounds ortumulicontaining thousands of skeletons of a stunted race of men, scarcely 5 feet high. These mounds increase in number from the north toward the south; Mr. Brackenridge thinks there are nearly 3000 tumuli, from 20 to 100 feet high, between the mouth of the Ohio, the Illinois, the Missouri, and the Rio San Francisco, and that the number of skeletons they contain indicate how considerable must have been the population heretofore of those countries. These monuments, considered as the places of sepulture of great communes, are most frequently situated at the confluence of rivers, and on the most favorable points for trade. The base of the tumuli is round, or of an oval form; they are generally of a conical form, and sometimes flattened at the summit, as if intended to serve for sacrifices, or other ceremonies to be seen by a great mass of people at once. Some of those monuments are two or three stories high, and resemble in their form the MexicanTeocallis, and the pyramids with steps of Egypt and Western Asia. Some of the tumuli are constructed of earth, and some of stones heaped together. Hatchets have been found on them, together with painted pottery, vases, and ornaments of brass, a little iron, silver in plates (near Marietta), and perhaps gold (near Chilicothe). Some of these mounds are only a few feet high, and are placed at the center or in the neighborhood of the circular circumvallations; they were either tribunes for haranguing the assembled people, or places of sacrifice, and where they are only from 20 to 25 feet high, they may be considered as observatories erected to discover the movements of a neighboring enemy. The great tumuli, from 80 to 100 feet high, are most frequently insulated, and sometimes seem to be of the same age as the fortifications to which they are linked. The latter merit particular attention: I know nowhere any thing that resembles them either in South America or the ancient continent. The regularity of the polygon and circular forms, and the small works intended to cover the doors of the building, are, above all, remarkable. We know not whether they were inclosures of property, walls of defense against enemies, or intrenched camps, as in Central Asia. The custom of separating the different quarters of a town by circumvallations is observed alike in the ancient Tenochleitian and the Peruvian town of Chimu, the ruins of which I examined, between Truxillo and the coast of the South Sea. Thetumuliare less characteristic constructions, and may have belonged to nations who had no communication with one another; they cover both Americas, the north of Asia, and the whole east of Europe, and, it is said, are still constructed by the Omawhaws of the River Plata. The skulls contained in thetumuliof the United States furnish means of recognizing, almost with certainty, to what degree the race of men by whom they were raised differ from the Indians who now inhabit the same countries. Mr. Mitchell believes that the skeletons of the caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee 'belong to the Malays, who came by the Pacific Ocean to the western coast of America, and were destroyed by the ancestors of the present Indians, and who were of Tartar race (Mongul).' With respect to the tumuli and the fortifications, the same learned writer supposes, with Mr. De Witt Clinton, that those monuments are the works of Scandinavian nations, who, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, visited the coast of Greenland, Newfoundland, or Vinland, or Drageo, and a part of the continent of North America. If this hypothesis be well founded, the skulls found in thetumuliought to belong, not to the American, Mongul, or Malay race, but to a race vulgarly called Caucasian.... Did the nations of the Mexican race, in their migrations to the south, send colonies toward the east, or do the monuments of the United States pertain to the Autochthone nations? Perhaps we must admit in North America, as in the ancient world, the simultaneous existence of several centers of civilization, of which the mutual relations are not known in history. The very civilized nations of New Spain, the Tolteques, the Azteques, and the Chichimeques, pretended to have issued successively, from the sixth to the twelfth century, from three neighboring countries situated toward the north. These nations spoke the same language, they had the same cosmogonic fables, the same propensity for the sacerdotal congregations, the same hieroglyphic paintings, the same divisions of time, the same taste (Chinese and Japanese) for noting and registering every thing. The names given by them to the towns built in the country of Analmae; were those of the towns they had abandoned in their ancient country. The civilization on the Mexican table-land was regarded by the inhabitants themselves as the copy of something which had existed elsewhere, as the reflection of the primitive civilization of Aztlan. Where, it may be asked, must be placed that parent land of the colonies of Anahuac, thatofficinum gentiumwhich, during five centuries, sends nations toward the south who understand each other without difficulty, and recognize each other for relations? Asia, north of Amour, where it is nearest America, is a barbarous country, and in supposing (which is geographically possible) a migration of southern Asiatics by Japan, Tarakay (Tchoka), the Kurile and Aleutian Isles, from southwest toward the northeast (from 40 to 55 degrees of latitude), how can it be believed that in so long a migration, on a way so easily intercepted, the remembrance of the institutions of the parent country could have been preserved with so much force and clearness? The cosmogonic fables, the pyramidal constructions, the system of the calendar, the animals of the tropics found in the catasterim of days, the convents and congregations of priests, the taste for statistic enumerations, the annals of the empire held in the most scrupulous order, lead us toward Oriental Asia, while the lively remembrances of which we have just spoken, and the peculiar physiognomy which Mexican civilization presents in so many other respects, seem to indicate the antique existence of an empire in the north of America, between the thirty-sixth and forty-second degrees of latitude. We can not reflect on the military monuments of the United States without recollecting the first country of the civilized nations of Mexico. It is in rising to more general historical considerations, in examining with more care than has been hitherto done the languages and the osteologic conformation of different tribes, in exploring the immense country bounded by the Alleganies and the coast of the Western Ocean, that means will be obtained of throwing light on a problem so worthy of exercising the sagacity of historians.... According to the traditions collected by Mr. Heckewelder, the country east of the Mississippi was heretofore inhabited by a powerful nation, of gigantic stature, called Alleghewi, and which gave its name to the Alleganian mountains. The Alleghewis were more civilized than any of the other tribes found in the northern climates by the Europeans of the sixteenth century. They inhabitated towns founded on the banks of the Mississippi, and the fortifications that now excite the astonishment of travelers were constructed by them, in order to defend themselves against the Delawares, who came from the west, and were allied at that period with the Iroquois. It may be supposed that this invasion of a barbarous people changed the political and moral state of those countries. The Alleghewis were vanquished by the Delawares after a long struggle. In their flight toward the south they gathered together the bones of their relations in separatetumuli; they descended the Mississippi, and what became of them is not known.... The lines of fortification of a prodigious length observed by Captain Lewis on the banks of the Missouri sufficiently prove that the ancient habitation of the Alleghewis, that powerful people which I am inclined to regard as being of Tolteque or Azteque race, extended far to the west of the Mississippi, toward the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Nuttall, in going up the Arkansas to Cadron, was informed of the existence of an ancient intrenchment, resembling a triangular fort. The Arkansas assert that it is the work of awhiteand civilized people, whom, when they arrived in this country, their ancestors fought and vanquished, not by force, but cunning. They attribute, also, to a more ancient and polished people than themselves, the monuments of rough stones heaped up on the summit of the hills. Other monuments, not less curious, are the commodious roads of immense length which the natives have traced from time immemorial, and which lead from the banks of the Arkansas, near Little Rock, to Saint Louis on the right, and by the settlement of Mont Prairie, as far as Natchitoches, on the left. Do the characteristic features of colossal stature andwhitecolor, attributed to nations now destroyed, owe their origin to the ideas of power and physical force in general, to the feeling of the intellectual preponderance of the Europeans, or are those features linked with the fables of white men, legislators, and priests, which we find among the Mexicans, the inhabitants of New Granada, and so many other American nations? The skeletons contained in thetumuliof the trans-Alleganian country belong, for the most part, to a stunted race of men, of lower stature than the Indians of Canada and the Missouri.
"An idol discovered at Natchez has been justly compared by M. Malte-Brun to the images of celestial spirits found by Pallas among the Mongul nations. If the tribes who inhabit the towns on the banks of the Mississippi issued from the same country of Aztlan, it must be admitted that the Tolteques, the Chichimeques, and the Azteques, from the inspection of their idols, and their essays in sculpture, were much less advanced in the arts than the Mexican tribes, who, without deviating toward the east, have followed the great path of the nations of the New World, directed from north to south, from the banks of the Gila toward the Lake of Nicaragua."—Humboldt'sPersonal Narrative, vol. vi., p. 328.
No. XLVIII.
"Dr. Morton, in his luminous and philosophical essay on the aboriginal race of America, seems to have proved that all the different tribes, except the Eskimaux, are of one race, and that this race is peculiar and distinct from all others. The physical characteristics of the Fuegians, the Indians of the tropical plains, those of the Rocky Mountains, and of the great Valley of the Mississippi, are the same, not only in regard to feature and external lineaments, but also in osteological structure. After comparing nearly 400 crania, derived from tribes inhabiting almost every region of both Americas, Dr. Morton has found the same peculiar shape pervading all; 'the square or rounded head, the flattened or vertical occiput, the high cheek bones, the ponderous maxillæ, the large quadrangular orbits, and the low, receding forehead.' The oldest skulls from the cemeteries of Peru, the tombs of Mexico, or the mounds of the Mississippi and Ohio, agree with each other, and are of the same type as the heads of the most savage existing tribes."—Lyell, vol. ii., p. 37.
No. XLIX.
"I saw no person among the Chaymas who had any natural deformity. I might say the same of thousands of Caribs, Muyseas, and Mexican and Peruvian Indians, whom we observed during the course of five years. Bodily deformities—deviations from nature—are infinitely rare among certain races of men, especially those nations who have the dermoid system highly colored. I can not believe that they depend solely on the progress of civilization, a luxurious life, or the corruption of morals. We might be tempted to think that savages all appear well made and vigorous, because feeble children die young for want of care, and that the strongest alone survive; but these causes can not act on the Indians of the missions, who have the manners of our peasants, and the Mexicans of Cholula and Tlascala, who enjoy wealth that has been transmitted to them by ancestors more civilized than themselves. If, in every state of cultivation, the copper-colored race manifest the same inflexibility, the same resistance to deviation from a primitive type, are we not forced to admit that this property belongs in great measure to hereditary organization—to that which constitutes the race? I use intentionally the phrasein great measure, not entirely to exclude the influence of civilization. Besides, with copper-colored men, as with the whites, luxury and effeminacy, by weakening the physical constitution, had heretofore rendered deformities more common at Corezco and Tenochtitlan."—Humboldt'sPersonal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 235.
No. L.
To those well read in the sad records of Indian history, the names of Powhatan, Opechancanough, Massasoit, Alexander, Philip, Canonchet, Logan, Pontiac, and the never-to-be-forgotten Tecumthè, will suggest memories fully justifying the above assertion. The name of Tecumthè signifies "a tiger crouching for his prey." He was equally great in council and in war, noble and generous in spirit as commanding in intellect. He bore the commission of Chief of the Indian Forces in the British army during the late war. He did not, however, join the ranks of the white men until the failure of several admirably contrived projects convinced his sound and enlightened judgment that opposition to the white race was vain. Pontiac was an Ottawa chieftain, who in 1763 succeeded in the next-to-impossible scheme of uniting all the scattered and often hostile Indian tribes distributed throughout the colonized districts of North America in one grand confederacy against their European invaders. Their first step was the projected extinction of all the white man's posts along a thousand miles of frontier; and he actually succeeded so far as to cut off, almost simultaneously, nine out of twelve of these military establishments. The surprise of Michillimackinac, one of these stations, is thus narrated in a public document. (It was a period of profound peace between the Europeans and Indians):
"The fort was then upon the main land, near the northern point of the peninsula. The Ottawas, to whom the assault was committed, prepared for a great game of ball, to which the officers of the garrison were invited. While engaged in play, one of the parties gradually inclined toward the fort, and the other pressed after them. The ball was once or twice thrown over the pickets, and the Indians were suffered to enter and procure it. Nearly all the garrison were present as spectators, and those on duty were alike unprepared as unsuspicious. Suddenly the ball was again thrown into the fort, and all the Indians rushed after it. The rest of the tale is soon told: the troops were butchered, and the fort destroyed." This extensive and well-laid scheme failed, from Pontiac himself being betrayed at the fort of Detroit. He has been accused of great cruelty; but, in contests waged between the red and white races, this is a word of doubtful import. His generosity and heroism are undeniable.
As a compliment, Major Rogers had sent Pontiac a bottle of brandy. His counselors advised him not to take it: "It must be poisoned," said they, "and sent with a design to kill him;" but Pontiac laughed at their suspicions. "He can not," he replied, "he can not take my life; I have saved his!"
No. LI.
But a far truer insight into the religious state of the American Indian will be obtained by observing how peculiarly and emphatically he is, in the words of the apostle, "a law unto himself." I mean, how distinctly he evinces, in the whole moral conduct of his life, that he lives under a strong and awful sense of positive obligation. It is of little matter with what doctrines that sense of obligation connects itself. It often appears to connect itself with none. The Indian can not tell why a burden is laid upon him to act in this or that manner. He obeys a law undefined, unwritten, but mysteriously binding upon his spirit. All the compulsive force which what we call the law of honor had upon the conscience of a man of the world—I had almost said which religious sanctions have upon the man of principle—is scarcely to be paralleled with that kind of moral necessity which seems in some cases to actuate his proceedings. If religion be what its name implies,id quod relligat, that which binds the will, and enforces self-denial and self-devotion (be the object or motive held out what it may), then no people taken in the mass is to be compared, in this respect, to the savages of America. "After all," says Mr. Flint, "that which has struck us, in contemplating the Indians, with the most astonishment and admiration, is the invisible but universal energy of the operation and influence of an inexplicable law, which has, where it operates, a more certain and controlling power than all the municipal and written laws of the whites united. There is despotic rule without any hereditary or elected chief. There are chiefs with great power, who can not tell when, where, or how they became such. There is perfect unanimity on a question involving the existence of a tribe, when every member belonged to the wild and fierce democracy of nature, and could dissent without giving a reason. A case occurs where it is prescribed by custom that an individual should be punished with death. Escaped from the control of his tribe, and as free as the winds, this invisible tie is about him, and he returns and surrenders himself to justice. His accounts are not settled, and he is in debt. He requests delay till he shall have finished his summer's hunt. He finishes it, pays his debt, and dies with a constancy which has always been, in all views of the Indian character, the theme of admiration."—Flint'sGeography of the Mississippi Valley, p. 125.
In the expressive words of Penn, "What good might not a good people graft, where there is so distinct a knowledge both of good and evil?"—Report on Aborigines, 1837, p. 116.
Mr. Merivale adds, "I would not insert the following high-colored expression in a work edited by Washington Irving, were it not for the remarkable agreement between all capable observers of the uncontaminated races of Indians upon this subject. 'Simply to call these people religious (some tribes of the Rocky Mountains) would convey but a faint idea of the deep hue of piety and devotion which pervades the whole of their conduct. They are more like a nation of saints than a horde of savages.'"—Adventures of Captain Bonneville.
No. LII.
Catlin gives the same account of the appropriation of the Manitou or guardian angel as Lafitau and Charlevoix. He applies to it the term of Mystery, or Medicine-bag, and thus explains the derivation of the modern term:
"The term Medicine, in its common acceptation among the Indians, means mystery, and nothing else. The origin of the term is, that in the French language a doctor is called 'Médecin;' the Indian country is full of doctors, and as they are all magicians, and profess to be skilled in many mysteries, the word 'médecin' has become habitually applied to every thing mysterious or unaccountable, and the English and American have easily and familiarly adopted the same word, with a slight alteration conveying the same meaning; and, to be a little more explicit, they have denominated these personages 'Medicine-men,' which means something more than merely a doctor or physician. The Indians do not use the word 'medicine,' however, but in each tribe they have a word of their own construction synonymous with mystery or mystery-man. Their medicine-bag then is a mystery-bag, and its meaning and importance necessary to be understood, as it may be said to be the key to Indian life and character.
"Feasts are often made, and dogs and horses sacrificed, to a man's 'medicine;' and days, and even weeks of fasting and penance of various kinds are often suffered to appease his medicine, which he fancies he has in some way offended. This curious custom has generally been done away with along the frontier, where white men laugh at the Indian for the observance of so ridiculous and useless a form; but in this country (beyond the Rocky Mountains) it is still in full force, and every male in the tribe carries this his supernatural charm or guardian, to which he looks for the preservation of his life in battle or in other danger.... During my travels thus far I have been unable to buy a medicine-bag of an Indian, though I have offered extravagant prices for them; and even on the frontier, where they have been induced to abandon the practice, though a white may induce an Indian to relinquish his medicine, yet he can not buy it of him: the Indian in such case will bury it to please a white, and save it from his sacrilegious touch, and he will linger around the spot, and at regular times visit and pay it his devotions as long as he lives."—Catlin'sNorth American Indians, vol. i., p. 36.
No. LIII.
Catlin says, "The tribes, so far as I have visited them, all distinctly believe in the existence of a Great (or Good) Spirit, an Evil (or Bad) Spirit, and also in a future existence and future accountability, according to their virtues and vices in this world. So far the North American Indians would seem to be one family, and such, an unbroken theory among them; yet, with regard to the manner and form, and time and place of that accountability—to the constructions of virtues and vices, and the modes of appeasing and propitiating the Good and Evil Spirits, they are found in all the change and variety which fortuitous circumstances, and fictions and fables have wrought upon them.... These people, living in a climate where they suffer from cold in the severity of their winters, have very naturally reversed our ideas of heaven and hell. The latter they describe to be a country very far to the north, of barren and hideous aspect, and covered with eternal snow and ice. The torments of this freezing place they describe as most excruciating, while heaven they suppose to be in a warmer and delightful latitude, where nothing is felt but the keenest enjoyment, and where the country abounds in buffaloes and other luxuries of life. The Great or Good Spirit they believe dwells in the former place, for the purpose of there meeting those who have offended him, increasing the agony of their sufferings by being himself present, administering the penalties. The Bad or Evil Spirit they suppose to be at the same time in Paradise, still tempting the happy; and those who have gone to the regions of punishment they believe to be tortured for a time proportioned to the amount of their transgression, and that they are then to be transferred to the land of the happy, where they are again liable to the temptation of the Evil Spirit, and answerable again at a future period for their new offenses."—Catlin, vol. i., p. 159.
Dr. Richardson says, "While at Carlton I took an opportunity of asking a communicative old Indian of the Blackfoot nation his opinion of a future state. He replied that they had heard from their fathers that the souls of the departed have to scramble with great labor up the sides of a steep mountain, upon attaining the summit of which they are rewarded with the prospect of an extensive plain, interspersed here and there with new tents, pitched in agreeable situations, and abounding in all sorts of game. While they are absorbed in the contemplation of this delightful scene, they are descried by the inhabitants of the happy land, who, clothed in new skins, approach and welcome, with every demonstration of kindness, those Indians who have led good lives; but the bad Indians, who have imbrued their hands in the blood of their countrymen, are told to return from whence they came, and, without more ceremony, precipitated down the steep sides of the mountain."—Franklin'sJourney, p. 77.
"C'est du côté de l'ouest, d'où les sauvages prétendent être venus, qu'il placent le pays des ancêtres, ou des âmes. C'est, disent-ils, un pays très êloigné, et où chacun est contraint de se rendre, après son trèpas, par un chemin fort long et fort pénible, dans lequel il y a beaucoup à souffrir, à cause des rivières qu'il faut passer sur des ponts tremblants, et si étroits qu'il faut être une âme pour pouvoir s'y soûtenir; encore trouve-t-il au bout du pont un chien, qui comme un antre cerbère leur dispute le passage, et en fait tomber plusieurs dans les eaux, dont la rapidité les roule de précipice en précipice. Celles qui sont assez heureuses pour franchir ce pas, trouvent en arrivant, un grand et beau pays, au milieu duquel est une grande Cabane, dontTharonhiaouagon, leur Dieu, occupe une partie, et Ataensic, son ayeule, occupe l'autre. L'appartement de cette vielle est tapissé d'une quantité infini de colliers de porcelaine, de bracelets, et d'autres meubles, dont les morts, qui sont sous sa dépendance, lui ont fait présent à leur arrivée.Ataensicest maîtresse de la Cabane, selon le style des sauvages, elle et son petit fils dominent sur les mânes, et font consister leur plaisir à les faire danser devant eux. Il y a une infinité de versions sur le pays des âmes, mais ce qui je viens d'en rapporter en est comme le fonds, où tout le reste se réduit."—Lafitau, tom. i., p. 402.
No. LIV.
"Un officier Français, qui parle la langue Huronne comme les Hurons même, et qui connoît fort bien le génie des sauvages, m'a raconté un fait, dont il a été le témoin ... Quelques sauvages intrigués, au sujet d'un parti de sept guerriers de leur village, et dont tout le monde commençoit à être en peine, prièrent une vielle sauvagesse dejonglerpour eux. Cette femme étoit en grande réputation, et on avoit vérifié plusieurs de ses prédictions, mais on avoit beaucoup de peine à la déterminer à faire ces sortes d'opérations, quoiqu'on la payât bien, parce-qu'elle souffroit beaucoup. Comme elle avoit de l'amitié pour moi, dit cet officier, je me mis de la partie avec les sauvages, ajoutant néanmoins très peu de foy à ces sortes de choses, je la priai très fortement, et je fis tant, qu'elle s'y résolut. Elle commença d'abord par préparer un espace de terrain qu'elle nettoya bien, et qu'elle couvrit de farine. Elle disposa sur cette poudre comme sur une carte géographique, quelques paquets de buchettes, qui représentaient divers villages de différentes nations, observant particulièrement leur position, et les rhumbs de vent. Elle entra ensuite dans de grandes convulsions, pendant lesquelles nous vîmes sensiblement sept bluettes de feu sortir des buchettes qui représentoient notre village; tracer un chemin sur cette farine et aller d'un village à l'autre. Après d'être éclipsées pendant un assez long tems, dans l'un de ces villages, ces bluettes reparurent au nombre de neuf, tracèrent un nouveau chemin pour le retour, jusqú'à ce qu'enfin elles s'arrêtèrent assez près du village, ou paquet de buchettes, d'où les sept premièrs étoient d'abord sorties. Alors la sauvagesse, toujours en fureur, troubla tout l'ordre des buchettes, foula aux pieds tout le terrain qu'elle avoit préparé, et où cette scène venoit de passer. Elle s'assit ensuite et après s'être donné le tems de se tranquilliser, et de reprendre ses esprits, elle raconta tout ce qui étoit arrivè aux guerriers, la route qu'ils avoient tenue, les villages par où ils avoient passé, le nombre des prisonniers qu'ils avoient fait; elle nomma l'endroit où ils étoient dans ce moment, et assura qu'ils arriveroient trois jours après au village, ce qui fut vérifié par l'arrivée des guerriers, qui confirmèrent de point en point ce qu'elle avoit dit."—Lafitau, tom. i., p. 387.
"Quoiqu' aujourd'hui les Abénaquis fassent tous profession du Christianisme, ils ne laissent pas encore d'avoir quelquefois recours à cet art qu'ils ont reçû de leurs pères (la Pyromantie, ou Divination par le feu). Ils s'en confessent néanmoins, à cause de l'horreur qu'on leur en a inspiré, mais il s'en trouve quelques uns qui cherchent à le justifier. Une sauvagesse disoit à un missionnaire, qui tâchoit de lui faire concevoir sa faute: 'Je n'ai jamais compris qu'il n'y eût à elle aucun mal, et j'ai peine à y en voir encore: écoute, Dieu a partagé différemment les hommes; à vous autres François, il a donné l'écriture, par laquelle vous apprennez lea choses qui se passent loin de vous, comme si elles vous étoient présentes; pour ce qui est de nous, il nous a donné l'art de connoître par le feu les choses absentes et eloignées; suppose donc que le feu c'est notre livre, notre écriture; tu ne verras pas qu'il y ait de différence, et plus de mal dans l'un que dans l'autre. Ma mère m'a appris ce secret pendant mon enfance, comme tes parents t'ont appris à lire et à écrire; je m'en suis servi plusieurs fois avec succès, avant d'être Chrètienne, je l'ai fait quelquefois avec le même succès depuis que je la suis; j'ai éte tenté, et j'ai succombé à la tentation, mais sans croire commettre aucune péché.'"—Lafitau, tom, i., p. 388.
Some of the Indians seem to have been acquainted with the mysteries ofclairvoyance. "Ils croyent qu'il y a des personnes que les esprits favorisent d'avantage, qui sont plus éclairées que le commun, dont l'âme sçut, non seulement ce qui les concerne personnellement, mais qui voient jusques dans le fonds de l'âme des autres, qui percent à travers le voile qui les couvre, et y apperçoit les désirs naturels et innés, qu'elle a, quoique cette âme elle même ne les ait pas aperçus; c'est ce qui leur a fait donner le nom de Iaïotkatta par les Hurons, c'est á direvoyans, parce qu'ils voyent les hommes dans leur intérieur."—Lafitau, tom. i., p. 371.
Charlevoix also relates instances of the successful exercise of magical arts.—Vol. vi., p. 92.
No. LV.
"In the neighborhood of Caughnawaga are the large tracts of land once belonging to the Johnson family, whose possessions were all confiscated at the period of the Revolution, in consequence of their adherence to the British, who gave them compensation by grants of land in Canada. The founder of this family is said to have acquired this fine tract of country by a dexterous piece of management. He traded extensively with the tribe of Mohawk Indians. Their chiefs were in the habit of applying to him frequently for tobacco and rum, which they had, they told him, dreamed that he was to give them. Johnson never failed to encourage their strong faith in dreams, humoring their foible by acceding to every request founded on them. Thus visits and dreams became frequent on the part of the Indians. Johnson never sent them away empty handed. To every request he replied, 'I will prove that you are right,' and presented them with whatever they applied for, on the footing that they had dreamed of it. At length the king had the conscience to dream that, if he were invested with Johnson's military dress of scarlet and gold, he should be as great a man as King George; and King George he soon in so far became, for no long time elapsed before Johnson had him appareled as he wished. But Johnson's turn to dream had now arrived, for he had all the while attached the same weight to dreams. He dreamed that the nation had, in consequence of his kindness to them, and in return for the hospitality he had shown them, bestowed on him part of their territory, which he had described, and which he of course took care should be sufficiently extensive and valuable—in fact, one of the finest tracts of land that it is possible to conceive. 'Have you really had such a dream?' they exclaimed, with terror and alarm depicted on their countenances. Being satisfied on this point, the chief or king convoked his tribe, who deliberated, and then announced to the dreamer that they had confirmed the dream. 'Brother Johnson,' they said, 'we give thee that tract of land, but never dream any more.' The head of this family was subsequently created a baronet, for his gallantry in the war, when the French made an incursion from Canada in 1755."—Stuart'sAmerica, vol. i., p. 71. See, also, Mrs. Grant'sLetters of an American Lady, for an account of Sir William Johnson's intercourse with the Indians.
Lafitau and Charlevoix write at great length upon the Indian faith in dreams; Lafitau gives the following curious illustration of the extent to which this superstition is carried: "Un ancien missionnaire m'a raconté qu'un sauvage ayant rêvé que le bonheur de sa vie dépendoit de son mariage avec une femme qui étoit déjà mariée à l'un des plus considérables du village où il demeuroit. Le mari et la femme vivoient dans une grande union et s'entre-aimoient beaucoup. La séparation fut rude à l'un et à l'autre, cependant ils n'osoient refuser. Ils se séparèrent donc. La femme prit un nouvel engagement, et le mari abandonné, par complaisance et pour ôter tout soupçon qu'il pensât encore à sa première épouse, se marie avec une autre. Il reprit la première cependant, après la mort de celui qui les avait désunis, laquelle arriva peu de temps après."—Lafitau, vol. i., p. 364.
No. LVI.
"C'étoit une loi générale chez certains peuples barbares de l'antiquité (Ælian,de Cois, lib. iii.; Sext. Emp.,de Tybaren.; Procop.,de Etulis., lib. ii.;de Bello Gotico; Stobæus,de Massag., Serm. 122) de faire mourir leurs viellards avant l'âge de soixante ou soixante et dix ans, soit qu'ils ne voulassent point parmis eux conserver des morte payes, qui consumassent le peu qui restoit aux autres pour vivre: soit qu'ils se persuadassent rendre service à ceux qu'ils faisoient ainsi périr, en leur épargnant par une morte prompte et courte, la tristesse et les ennuis d'un âge avancé, dont les infirmités peuvent être regardées comme une mort continuelle. Cela a été, dit-on, une loi générale parmi quelques peuples de l'Amérique, et une de nos dernières relations porte, qu'il y a une nation où il n'est pas même permis de laisser passer aux femmes l'âge de trente ans; ce qui paroitra sans doute bien rigoureux à celles qui veulent encore être jeune dans un âge plus avancé.
"Les Algonquins et les autres nations errantes sont plus sujets à cette inhumanité envers les viellards que les autres, parcequ' étant presque toujours en voyage, et plus souvent réduits à la faim, l'incommodité des viellards qu'il faut porter et nourrir, devient alors plus sensible. Ces pauvres malheureux sont souvent les premiers à dire à celui qui les porte, 'Mon petit fils, je le donne bien de la peine, je ne suis plus bon à rien, casse-moi la tête.' On ne les écoute pas toujours; mais quelquefois aussi il arrive que le jeune homme epuisé de lassitude et de faim, répond froidement, 'Tu as raison, mon grand père.' Il décharge en même tems son paquet, prend sa hache, et casse la tête au bon homme, qui sans doute est faché intérieurement d'être pris au mot."—Lafitau, tom. ii., p. 490.
In 1819, James writes thus of the same inhuman custom: "The worst trait in the Indian character is the neglect shown toward the aged and helpless, which is carried to such a degree that, when on a march or a hunting excursion, it is a common practice to leave behind their nearest relations when reduced to that state, with a little food and water, abandoning them without ceremony to their fate. When thus abandoned by all that is dear to them, their fortitude does not forsake them, and the inflexible passive courage of the Indian sustains them against despondency. They regard themselves as entirely useless; and as the custom of the nation has long led them to anticipate this mode of death, they attempt not to remonstrate against the measure, which is, in fact, frequently the result of their earnest solicitation."—James'sExpedition to the Rocky Mountains, vol. i., p. 237.
"This cruelty to living relations strongly contrasts with the extravagance and self-sacrifice of their mourning for the dead. The same people who expose a living parent because they can not carry him, are often found to convey the corpses of their departed friends to 'the festivals of the dead,' during many days of wearisome journeying."—P. de Brebœuf,Relation de la Nouvelle France; Charlevoix: Lafitau.
Catlin, one of the most partial observers, and the most zealous defender of the Indian character, relates the following scene, of which he was an eye-witness (in 1840): "We found that the Puncahs were packing up all their goods, and preparing to start for the prairies in pursuit of buffaloes, to dry meat for their winter's supplies. They took down their wigwams of skins to carry with them, and all were flat to the ground, and every thing packing up ready for the start. My attention was directed by Major Sanford, the Indian agent, to one of the most miserable and helpless-looking objects I ever had seen in my life—a very aged and emaciated man of the tribe, who, he told me, was going to beexposed. The tribe were going where hunger and dire necessity obliged them to go, and this pitiable object, who had once been a chief, and a man of distinction in his tribe, who was now too old to travel, being reduced to mere skin and bone, was to be left to starve, or meet with such death as might fall to his lot, and his bones to be picked by the wolves! I lingered around this poor old forsaken patriarch for hours before we started, to indulge the tears of sympathy which were flowing for the sake of this poor benighted and decrepit old man, whose worn-out limbs were no longer able to support him, and his body and his mind doomed to linger into the withering agony of decay, and gradual solitary death. I wept; and it was a pleasure to weep; for the painful looks and the dreary prospects of this old veteran, whose eyes were dimmed, whose venerable locks were whitened by a hundred years, whose limbs were almost naked, and trembling as he sat by a small fire which his friends had left him, with a few sticks of wood within his reach, and a buffalo's skin stretched upon some crotches over his head. Such was to be his only dwelling, and such the chances for his life, with only a few half-picked bones that were laid within his reach, and a dish of water, without means of any kind to replenish them, or move his body from that fatal locality. His friends and his children had all left him, and were preparing in a little time to be on the march. He had told them to leave him; 'he was old,' he said, 'and too feeble to march.' 'My children,' said he, 'our nation is poor, and it is necessary you should all go to the country where you can get meat. My eyes are dimmed, and my strength is no more; my days are nearly all numbered, and I am a burden to my children; I can not go, and I wish to die. Keep your hearts stout, and think not of me; I am no longer good for any thing.' In this way they had finished the ceremony ofexposinghim, and taken their final leave of him. I advanced to the old man, and was undoubtedly the last human being who held converse with him. I sat by the side of him, and though he could not distinctly see me, he shook me heartily by the hand, and smiled, evidently aware that I was a white man, and that I sympathized with his inevitable misfortune. When passing by the site of the Puncah village a few months after this in my canoe, I went ashore with my men, and found the poles and the buffalo skin standing as they were left over the old man's head. The fire-brands were lying nearly as I had left them; and I found at a few yards' distance the skull and others of his bones, which had been picked and cleaned by the wolves, which is probably all that any human being can ever know of his final and melancholy fate. This cruel custom of exposing their aged people belongs, I think, to all the tribes who roam about the prairies, making severe marches, when such decrepit persons are totally unable to go, unable to ride or to walk, when they have no means of carrying them."—Catlin'sAmerican Indians, vol. i., p. 217.
No. LVII.
"The child, in its earliest infancy, has its back lashed to a straight board, being fastened to it by bandages, which pass around it in front, and on the back of the board they are tightened to the necessary degree by lacing-strings, which hold it in a straight and healthy position, with its feet resting on a broad hoop, which passes around the foot of the cradle, and the child's position (as it rides about on its mother's back, supported by a broad strap that passes across her forehead), that of standing erect, no doubt has a tendency to produce straight limbs, sound lungs, and long life. The bandages that pass around the cradle, holding the child in, are often covered with a beautiful embroidery of porcupine quills, with ingenious figures of horses, men, &c. A broad hoop of elastic wood passes around in front of the child's face to protect it in case of a fall, from the front of which is suspended a toy of exquisite embroidery for the child to handle, and amuse itself with. The papoose (the Indian name for the cradle) seems a cruel mode of confining the child; but I am inclined to believe it is a very good one for those who use it, and well adapted to the circumstances under which they live; in support of which opinion, I offer the universality of the custom, which has been practiced for centuries among all the tribes of North America, as a legitimate and a very strong reason. Along the frontiers, where the Indians have been ridiculed for the custom, they have in many instances departed from it; but even there they will generally be seen lugging their child about in this way, when they have abandoned almost every other native custom, and are too poor to cover it with more than rags and strings, which fasten it to its cradle. The infant is carried in this manner until it is five, six, or seven months old.... If the infant dies during the time allotted for it to be carried in this cradle, it is buried, and the disconsolate mother fills the cradle with black quills and feathers, in the parts which the child's body had occupied, and in this way carries it about with her wherever she goes for a year or more; and she often lays or stands it against the side of the wigwam, where she is all day engaged in her needle-work, and chatting and talking to it as familiarly and affectionately as if it were her loved infant instead of its shell that she was talking to."—Catlin, vol. ii., p. 133.
No. LVIII.
The following is Lafitau's description of this barbarous operation: "Ils cernent pour cet effet la peau qui couvre la crâne, coupant au-dessus du front et des oreilles jusqu'au derrière de la tête. Après l'avoir arrachée, ils la préparent, et la ramollissent comme ils ont coûtume de faire a celles des bêtes qu'ils ont prises à la chasse. Ils étendent ensuite cette peau sur un cercle au ils l'attachent, ils la peignent des deux côtés de diverses couleurs, quelquefois ils tracent du côté opposé aux cheveux, le portrait de celui à qui ils l'ont enlevée at la suspendent au bout d'une perche et la portent ainsi en triomphe. Ce qu'il y a de surprenant, c'est que tous ceux à qui l'on fait cette cruelle opération de leur enlever la chevelure, n'en meurent point, non plus que du coup de casse-tête, dont on a crû les avoir assommés à n'en plus revenir. Plusieurs en sont réchappés et j'ai vu une femme dans notre mission, à qui après un semblable accident, les François avoient donnée le nom de la Tête-pelée, et qui se portoit fort bien. Elle étoit mariée à un François Iroquoisé, dont elle avoit des enfans." Lafitau does not omit to notice the striking similarity between Indian and Scythian barbarity; he cites the following passage from Herodotus as a support and illustration of his own peculiar theory: "Un Scythe boit du sang du premier prisonnier qu'il fait, et il présente au roi les têtes de tous ceux qu'il a tués dans le combat; car en portant une tête il a part au butier, auquel il n'a nul droit sans cette condition. Il coupe la tête de cette manière. Il la cerne autour les oreilles et ayant séparé le test d'avec le reste, il en arrache la peau, qu'il a soin de ramollir avec ses mains, et d'apprêter comme un apprête une peau de bœuf. Il en fait ensuite un ornement, et l'attache au harnois de son cheval en guise de trophèe. Plus un particulier a de ces sortes de dépouilles, plus il est considéré et estimé."—Lafitau, tom. ii., 258; Herodotus, lib. iv., n. 64.
"The scalping is an operation not calculated of itself to take life, as it only removes the skin, without injuring the bone of the head, and necessarily, to be a genuine scalp, must contain and show the crown and center of the head—that part of the skin which lies directly over what the phrenologists call 'self-esteem,' where the hair divides and radiates from the center, of which they all profess to be strict judges, and able to decide whether an effort has been made to produce two or more scalps from one head. Besides taking the scalp, the victor generally, if he has time to do it without endangering his own scalp, cuts off and brings home the rest of the hair, which his knife will divide into a great many small locks, and with them fringe the seams of his shirt and leggins, which also are worn as trophies and ornaments to the dress, and these are familiarly called 'scalp-locks.' ... As the scalp is taken in evidence of a death, it will easily be seen that an Indian has no business or inclination to take it from the head of the living, which I venture to say is never done in North America, unless it be, as has sometimes happened, when a man falls in the heat of battle, and the Indian, rushing over his body, snatches off his scalp, supposing him dead, who afterward rises from the field of battle, and easily recovers from this superficial wound of the knife, wearing a bald spot on his head during the remainder of his life."—Catlin, vol. i., p. 238.
No. LIX.
Charlevoix gives the following account of some of the games of chance in use among the red Indians:
"Le Jeu de Pailles.—Ces pailles sont de petits joncs de la grosseur des tuyaux de froment et de la longueur de deux doigts. On en prend un paquet, qui est ordinairement de deux cent un, et toujours en nombre impair. Après qu'on les a bien remués, en faisant mille contortions, et en invoquant les génies, on les sépare avec une espèce d'aliene, ou un os pointee, en paquets de dix; chacun prend le sien à l'aventure, et celui, à qui échoit le paquet de onze, gagne un certain nombre de points, dont on est convenu: les parties sont en soixante ou en quatre vingt.... On m'a dit qu'il y avoit autant d'addresse que de hazarde dans ce jeu, et que les sauvages y sont extremement fripons, comme dans tous les autres; qu'ils s'y acharnent souvent jusqu'à y passer les jours et les nuits.
"Le Jeu de la Crosse.—On y joue avec une bale et des bâtons, recourbés et terminés par une espèce de raquette. On dresse deux poteaux qui servent des bornes, et qui sont éloignés l'un de l'autre, à proportion du nombre des joueurs. Par exemple s'ils sont quatre vingt, il y a entre les poteaux une demie lieue de distance. Les joueurs sont partagés en deux bandes, qui ont chacune leur poteau, et il s'agit de faire aller la bale jusqu'à celui de la partie adverse, sans qu'elle tombe à terre, et sans qu'elle soit touchée avec la main; car si l'un ou l'autre arrive on perd la partie, à moins que celui qui a fait la faute ne la répare, en faisant aller la bale d'un seul trait au but, ce qui est souvent impossible. Ces sauvages sont si adroits à prendre la bale avec leurs crosses, que quelquefois ces parties durent plusieurs jours de suite.