The North-Americans of yesterday

WHEN those rapacious enthusiasts, the Spaniards of the sixteenth century, had unfolded some of the mysteries of the great half-world that the resolution and daring of Columbus had opened to them, they found it everywhere already peopled, though often sparsely, by a race strange to the other half, with totally different ideas and customs, existing in various degrees of sylvan felicity, or in the budding promise of a civilisation. They also found imposing ruins that told of the long previous departure of some of the occupants of this land into the vaster unknown, and indeed evidences of still earlier hosts that had travelled the dim pathway through the outer darkness. These new lands were believed to be some part of India, and because of this first error the inappropriate title of “Indians” was bestowed on the natives, and this name continued to cling after the mistake was discovered, growing more and more confusing as intercourse increased with the real Indians, till now in our day it is exceedingly troublesome, and we are compelled to differentiate, when accuracy is desirable, by saying “East Indian,” “Red Indian,” or “American Indian,” etc. To add further to this confusion, many persons persist in considering the Algonquin and Iroquois as the type specimens of “Indians,” and exclude all who do not accord with this limited and erroneous standard. The natives of the Western Hemisphere appear all to have been of one race, for there are only minor differences, which will be shown in following pages, and there is therefore a necessity for a broad designation for all these people. When these words were first written I had determined to adopt the term “Redskin” for use in this book, but learning that Amerind, compounded of the first syllables of American and Indian, had been suggested by the Anthropological Society of Washington, I gave it the preference over Redskin, and on full examination was convinced that it is a satisfactory and useful substitute for “Indian,” and, in order to avoid the latter, have used it exclusively in these pages, except where another writer is quoted.

This Amerind people were indeed more remarkable than has been popularly appreciated.[4] They possessed, as a rule, strong personality, great physical vigour, quick intelligence, and dauntless courage. Their brain power was of a high order and the cerebral quality extremely fine; capable through the processes of time of a development second to none. They had their trials, their wars, their sicknesses, and their various tribulations before the Europeans fell down upon them; but had the cargo of misery, disease, and death for them which freighted the bold caravels of Columbus possessed tangible weight in proportion to its magnitude, those vessels would have plunged to the depths of the unknown sea. But Destiny had traced another course for events, and thus the gay banners, glowing on one side with Hope for one race and black on the reverse with Despair for another, flaunted at length their ominous folds in the sunshine of the Amerind continent. Great good fortune it was for the Europeans, especially for the Spaniards, but the latter failed to read their star aright. Upon the conquered tribes, an easy prey before the superior weapons of the invaders, they lavished a cruelty which eclipsed that of savages, and settled like a blight over the country, to finally stifle by just retribution the haughty power of Spain herself, and wrench forever from her the last foot of the domain which the unfaltering courage of the Adelantados had bequeathed to her. To attempt to gloss over the oppression of the Spanish rule of the Amerind people would be fruitless. There is no excuse for it. Fresh from the methods of the Inquisition, the Spaniards themselves perhaps were not wholly aware of the horror of their acts. Unfortunately, they do not stand alone as sinners in this respect, and the contemplation of the early intercourse of Europeans and Amerinds is not likely to give a candid person an agreeable sensation, as it is frequently difficult, if not impossible, to decide which race is the one to whom rightfully belongs the description, “treacherous, bloodthirsty, and savage.” Certain it is that the Amerinds from the very beginning had numerous vivid lessons from the whites in murder, treachery, and kindred crimes.[5] They were frequently slain without cause or mercy; they were enslaved when possible; their records were destroyed; and, most terrible of all, they were burned alive at the stake. But this latter diversion had been practised in Europe, where St. Ferdinand with his own hands heaped the fagots on the blazing pile. The Conquistadores of the sixteenth century were versed in as much cruelty as the Amerinds had ever dreamed of; yet in the midst of it all there were men like Las Casas and Viceroy Mendoza, who had no sympathy with the barbarities practised, and whose characters bring relief in the broad and hideous blackness. Ship-loads of slaves were carried off each year, and the system of repartimientos placed every Amerind in bondage.

Opposition was punished in the most terrible ways possible to devise. In one instance the offenders, seventeen or eighteen caciques, were strangled and mangled by dogs kept for the purpose, the execution taking place in the public square, so that the struggles of the unfortunates might make a spectacle. Again the Spaniards invited some chiefs to a conference, as told by Brinton, in a large wooden building, which was then burned up with the chiefs in it. But it is not necessary to go back so far for examples of the treacherous brutality with which the whites have treated the Amerinds. Were it so, the cruelty and injustice might perhaps be regarded as merely circumstances of the period, but Beckwourth, in his Narrative,[6] relates an incident, also referred to by Washington Irving, quite as horrible as any that occurred in the sixteenth century. Beckwourth came upon some white trappers who had captured two Amerinds from a party of Arikarees who had stolen their horses. The Arikarees offered to return some, but not all, of the horses in exchange for the prisoners, but the trappers declared they would burn their captives alive if all the horses were not returned. The threat was disregarded. Thereupon the logs on the top of a huge fire were separated, the two helpless, chain-bound prisoners were dropped into the red furnace, and the flaming logs replaced. “There was a terrible struggle for a moment,” says Beckwourth, “then all was still.” And thus was another lesson of the mercy and justice of the White rendered unto the Red.

Nearer to us than this we have an incident even more diabolical, because without the provocation the trappers had. Horse stealing down to recent times in the West has always been liable to punishment by death, so the trappers might be somewhat excused on that ground in the minds of some, but in the year 1898, in the Indian Territory, two Amerinds were burned alive at the stake by a mob of whites. The accusation, too, was a mere suspicion, and it was later established that the Amerinds were perfectly innocent. After such deeds we may well pause when our inclination is to vaunt the superiority of the white men over the red.

Notwithstanding the popular idea that the Amerinds were devils incarnate, many tribes when first encountered were kindly, and trusted the newcomers till the moment came, as it soon did, when they were basely deceived. That all tribes were trusting is not claimed, but it is well known that many explorers found the Amerinds ready to receive them fairly and honestly. Neither Cartier nor Roberval met with hostility from natives, and the success of the straightforwardness of Penn in his dealings with them is unquestioned.[7] It has been stated that the European is no more than a whitewashed savage, and his intercourse with the Amerind people bears out this description. There was often provocation on both sides, augmented by the complete ignorance of each other’s ways and customs. Actions which were correct according to the manners of the Amerinds were offensive to the whites, and vice versa, and, to add to the ever-increasing hostility, the whites resented upon all Amerinds the crime or indiscretion of one or a few members of a particular tribe. If an Amerind committed a crime, the next one met with suffered for it. When Walker, in 1833, treacherously abandoned the line of work Bonneville had laid out for him and struck down the Humboldt for California, one of the men had his traps carried off by some of the Shoshokoes. He swore to kill the first one he should meet, and so their trail was one of blood. At one place they murdered no less than twenty-five unsuspecting red people without provocation. This was the manner in which these pioneers exhibited their superiority. There have always, too, been certain whites, more or less outlawed, like one Rose, who have struck up a friendship with the worst tribes for the purpose of inciting them against the whites to advance their own profit.

Previous to the European invasion the Amerind was not always at war, though many seem to think that he was. His territorial lines were generally well defined, and, as a rule, he stayed within them. Their villages, for the Amerind was always a village dweller, were far apart north of Mexico, and as long as there was no contention over property or water rights, things went smoothly, and even during hostilities intercourse was not always entirely broken off. So that there was frequently a large measure of security and periods of uninterrupted peace. He worked at hunting, fishing, and, in all the tribes east of the Mississippi, in Mexico, and many tribes west, at agriculture. The arrival and the westward movement of the Europeans crowded back the tribes across boundaries and upon lands they had no right to, and frequent wars were the inevitable result. Finally the acquisition of the horse gave facility of movement never before possessed, and made quick journeys and night attacks feasible, while the desire to secure as many of the valuable animals as possible added a new and great incentive to theft and consequent warfare. The Amerind began to change, in fact, the moment he acquired the horse and the gun, adapting both to his needs and using them with consummate skill. The whites did not try to understand him, nor were they superior to him in the matter of patience or forgiveness. One thing was well understood by the whites, however, and continues to this day, and that was that an Amerind has no rights that a white man is bound to respect, or even to consider. The natives north of the Aztec country were regarded as vagabonds and vagrants who had no right to anything, while those of Mexico, whom the Spaniards had meanwhile reduced everywhere to abject slaves, were believed to be a different race, with former qualities that were greatly exaggerated by the Europeans. And then, later, in the effort to counteract the extravagant notions entertained of the Aztecs, their remarkable growth, and that of the Mayas, was by some writers reduced to the level of that of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico and Arizona, which is undoubtedly a serious error in the other direction. Montezuma was probably not a king nor an emperor as those terms are understood by us, but it is difficult to accept him as little more than a Moki war-chief, especially as one can readily see that a few steps farther, even in the line of Moki development, might have produced a form of government partaking of the monarchical, but different from anything that we know about.[8] Ever since I saw one of our Arizona Pai Ute guides, a chief of his band, command a follower to take off his shoes as he reclined by the fire, I have suspected the existence among the Amerinds of a latent germ of aristocracy.

In the first flush of the discovery of America, Europe was wild with the romance of it, and mystery was the order of the day. More wonderful things still were expected. Fables that had done good service for centuries were transported to the new lands, and there blazed up with the mysterious uncertainty of the ignis fatuus, luring and deceiving, till the gold-thirsting Europeans struggled in the pursuit of such phantoms as the “Seven Cities.” The most extraordinary tales appeared tame in that atmosphere of dazzling imagination. Exaggeration of one kind or another has ever since been the inheritance of the Amerind people, and it is only within a comparatively few years that these “Americans of Yesterday” have been scientifically studied and their real character and attainments given proper places. The whole matter of American ethnology and archæology is new; so new that it is impossible to speak with decision on a great many points. In the United States we have usually regarded the Amerind as the incarnation of evil; a treacherous demon with a bloody knife in one hand and a scalp-lock in the other, and we have generally refused to consider the finer traits of his character. So callous have we become to his good points that Cooper is ridiculed for his delineation of Amerinds that have instincts or principles above the brute, and yet Cooper’s chief models were the Iroquois who established a remarkable political organisation.

It is not necessary to be what has been scornfully called “an Indian lover” to be interested in this extraordinarily homogeneous race that was scattered from Alaska to Patagonia. Such interest should be a matter apart from sentiment. We are interested in the primitive man of Europe; few would have been pleased to live with him. So the question whether we “like” the Amerind people and would enjoy social intercourse with them is not to the point. It is a matter of education; a matter, in fact, of the study of ourselves as others saw us some thousands of years ago, for the Amerind people were passing through phases of human existence which, in all probability, our remote ancestors also passed through; so that by examining this kind of life we are holding up the mirror to ourselves. Till recently the apathy shown on this subject was surprising. People generally were not aware that there were differences in “Indians,” or that they spoke different languages. The idea that there was any profit in studying them was popularly considered ridiculous. He was a “good-for-nothing,” and that was all that there was about it. But we can no more find fault with the Amerind for not being a European than we can with a stage-coach for not being a locomotive. We must accept him as he was, and as he is, and wherever possible study him and write him down so minutely that generations of ethnologists to come will shower blessings on our heads. We must constantly remember that the Amerind point of view is different from ours, and that we too are only in a transitional stage.

The Amerind people, like ourselves, represent merely a stage of human progress. Our stage is in advance of theirs, but it is by no means perfection. We do not scalp, but the revolver is quite as active as their scalping-knife, and we require a great number of policemen to keep us civilised. As for war, the European race has certainly not been backward in that respect. In Europe to-day vast bodies of men are withdrawn from every other service and trained for war with a completeness that the Amerind never dreamed of; and in the United States we have probably already killed more men in wars than ever at one time peopled it in aboriginal days. For in those days the various groups of Amerinds were separated by tracts of unoccupied territory; unoccupied except as the hunters roamed over it in search of their food, and the population outside of the Aztec country and Central America was generally sparse. Nor was the distribution of this population always the same as it was revealed to us by the Discovery. Tribes developed, rose to power, declined and passed away, leaving little, where their art development was slight, to indicate their former presence, no matter what may have been the degrees of their political attainments. Had not our own history come in to rescue the confederacy of the Iroquois, their remains, assuming them to have declined without further art development, would have conveyed no suspicion of their political organisation.

Back and forth the Amerind race moved, up and down, across the face of the American continent through the forgotten ages in ever shifting waves impelled, in the main, by climatic conditions and food quest, some leaving behind no record, others bequeathing to the future monuments and edifices that astonished the world and gave birth to elaborate and far-fetched theories to account for a development that seems to have required no more than time and the circumstances which existed. All the remains on this continent appear to be palpably American; the work of the Amerinds in their various degrees of progress. Whether they came from one source or several, they have been long enough here to become homogeneous from one end of the hemisphere to the other, and this, it is evident, would require a great stretch of time.[9] They clearly separated from the other inhabitants of the world, in any case, at a period before those inhabitants had developed present characteristics. From the time the human race was born, whether as an ape or as it now stands, there was differentiation of habits, customs, and knowledge which has never ceased and which never will cease. But as light, air, and natural conditions are similar or the same the world round, and as cerebral matter seems to be practically the same in all peoples, humanity has passed everywhere through about the same stages of development, and each stock or tribe in time has arrived at about the same place on the road of progress because they could not help it. Conditions might force one people ahead while other conditions might be retarding another, but whatever progression there has ever been was made on practically the same lines. The same race, however, does not throughout always develop evenly. Sir John Lubbock has said that “different races in similar stages of development often present more features of resemblance to one another than the same race does to itself in different stages of its history,” and to-day in Arizona there exist near to each other two branches of the widespread Shoshonean[10] stock, the Pai Utes and the Mokis, who exhibit the most marked differences of customs, the latter living in substantial houses of stone while the former occupy the rudest kind of brush wikiups.

The Amerind people were living in various stages of progress at the time of the Discovery. The Mexicans, according to Lewis Morgan, were “one stage higher than the Mohawks and one stage lower than the warriors of the Iliad.” Accepting this as correct, we would be able to trace human development back of the Greeks through the Amerinds of North America. Morgan suggested the classification of mankind in three broad ethnic stages: Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilisation,[11] the first ending with the acquisition of the bow and arrow, represented here by the Pai Utes; the second ending with the smelting of iron ore, represented by the early Greeks; and the third beginning with a phonetic alphabet, and represented by ourselves. In this scheme the Mexicans would fall in the middle period of Barbarism. This is a fairly good working basis, but, like all generalisations, it is only general. It must not be rigidly adhered to. The conditions on this continent were quite different from those in Europe, and consequently the line of development could not be precisely the same. There seems to be no good argument yet advanced and no archæological data yet exhibited that compel us to seek an outside derivation for the Amerind race; and this being so, it is about as reasonable to search this continent for the original home of the yellow race as to go to Asia for that of the red. That they may have come from there is possible, and so also it is possible that they came from Europe. Nor should we at present exclude even the lost Atlantis,[12] for the geography of the world was not always as it is now, and the elevation and subsidence of lands are still in progress. This, of course, is admitted, as also that there was a land connection across the Atlantic before man appeared in the world; but man may have appeared earlier than we suspect, and this lost land may have been in sunshine later than we believe.[13]

The Amerinds of North America were practically a people of stone culture, because while some had developed an ability to employ copper to a limited extent, they used stone tools for most of their work; their highest government appears to have been the confederacy, with in some cases perhaps a monarchical tendency; they were without domestic animals; without beasts of burden; without fireplaces or chimneys; without inside stairs; and without wheeled vehicles. There was no mystery about them. They ranged the continent, as has been noted, impelled by food quest and climate. They lived bravely and they died without fear. The following chapters will tell some of the things they did, with the hope that readers may arrive at a better understanding of the people that so long had a half-world to themselves.