We quote from the Washington Chronicle, early in the year 1873, what is there ascribed to General O. O. Howard, who is often called theChristian Soldier. He, as commissioner from the American government, had, unarmed and with but two attendants, penetrated the fastnesses of the mountains, made his way to the home of the Appache Indians and to the presence of their fierce chief, Cochise. After council with the Appaches, “they had,” as General Howard writes, “an Appache prayer-meeting, ... one Indian after another would pray or speak.... Cochise’s talks were apparently the most authoritative;... I could hear him name Stagalito, meaning RedBeard. I knew from this that our whole case was being considered in their wayin the Divine Presenceeither of the God of the earth, or of His spirits; and surely these were solemn moments, ... fortunately the spirits were on our side.” These words indicate very clearly the nature of that devil whom modern Indian powows worship: they make him on one occasion neither more nor less than the ascended chief Stagalito, associated with other spirits of the same nature. Can there be a doubt that Hutchinson misrepresented the fact, if he meant to call the Indian communings with spirits a worshiping of that monstrous being whom the word “Devil,” uttered through clerical lips, or recorded by intelligent pens, in early colonial times, was intended and understood to describe? We think not. There was neither truth nor justice in the supposition that the red men were devil-worshipers at the times when they were consulting departed spirits; nor in the presumption that their mediums—their powows—were wizards. False epithets do not convert any sincere worship, performed even by the rudest of the rude, into a bad act. Those Indians of two centuries ago, as judged by us now, had truer conceptions and better knowledge of spirit intercourse with mortals, and of the fit methods of obtaining useful incentives and help from spirit realms, than had their Christian neighbors, who misunderstood and blindly maligned the devotions offered to the Great Spirit by his children in the forests. The Indians, to the best of their ability, worshiped Him who is the common Father of all men of every hue and condition. They sought access to the Great Spirit, our God as well as theirs, through communings with their ancestral and other spirits. But the supposition that they worshiped such a being as the devil of Christendom, is obviously incorrect.
Cotton Mather said that “the Indians generally acknowledged and worshipedmanyGODS; therefore greatly esteemed and reveres theirpriests, powows or wizards, who were esteemed as having immediate converse with the gods.” Rev. Mr. Higginson, of Salem, said the Indians in that vicinity “do worship two gods—a good and an evil.” Mather and Higginson are better authority on this point than Hutchinson. Those denizens of the impressive forests were nature-taught spiritualists communing with their ancestral spirits, and through them were lured and helped on to worship the Great Spirit of Nature—the Omnipresent God.
Footnote:
[1]The Autobiography of Satan, edited by John R. Beard, D. D., London, 1872.