Chapter III: On the Indian Character

Survey of Indian Character and Lands.—Our Pacific Intentions towards
the Indians.—The Whites better read than the Red Men, and the
Effects of Learning.—The Pale Complexion of their Affairs.—Wet
Blankets thrown over their other Habits.—Different Traits discovered
by School-Girls and through official Spectacles.—Meaning of Indian
Reservations.—Indian Style of Dress and its Conveniences.—Indian
Names.—Examples of their Happy Application.

No history of the United States would be complete without a survey of the character of the Indian; as no State of the Union is acceptable to its inhabitants without a survey and appropriation of his lands.

Various as are the lights in which the former may be regarded, there is but one light, that of an enlight-ened self-interest, with which the latter have been treated. The speed with which we have hurried the brick-colored races towards the sun’s setting is conclusive proof of our Pacific intentions, and of our dislike to unsettled titles. Red as is the color of the Indian, to this complexion do all his tribes come at last,—a pale conviction that the white man is better read than they.

The chapter of our discoveries on this continent opens with the Indian in the foreground; and the historian, like the earliest explorer, is brought immediately face to face with him. Unlike the explorer, however, we will pause long enough to bury the proprietor of the estate which he seized and we occupy.

Blankets, often very wet, have been thrown over the Indian; while as often he has been painted so thickly, and feathered so profusely, as to become a bird of quite another color from that of our North American vulture. Slow in learning the geography of the race that rides him down as on a pale horse evermore, he has acquired the name of but one of our streams, that of the Firewater, a river whose dry banks seem always to divide his retreating from our pursuing frontier boundaries.

Perhaps we cannot give a more variegated notion of the different aspects under which the Indian character is viewed, than by putting it in an American kaleidoscope, and there giving it a few turns, certain that these turns will not be more curious or numerous than their owners’ fortunes.

1. _The Indian character as viewed in schools and colleges._

Listen to an average specimen from the pen of Miss Jemima Letitia Youngfancy,—her most pronounced effort before the trustees and patrons of Rising Hill Seminary.

“‘Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.’
LAMENTATIONS or SHAKESPEARE.

“No subject is of greater importance to the well-being of our race than a proper estimate of the character of the red man. Injustice here is more deplorable, since it involves the historic position of a race once lords of all this continent, now fast dwindling away, not only out of physical existence, but from the realms of discriminating praise. His has been the misfortune to be despoiled, not simply of the bosky inheritance of fair fields and boundless domains, where his ancestors roamed as free as the winds that sweep over the breezy sierras of the Rocky Mountains, but of the justice which pleads before the tribunal of posterity for rights withheld and wrongs inflicted. Not content to pursue his retreating and emaciated footsteps into the tomb, where his poor body is scarcely allowed to moulder away in peace, amid the implements and trophies of the chase, the white man, as voracious as the prairie wolves, which whet their sharp fangs against the rocky bases that prop up the giant Cordilleras of our beloved land, has denied to him those monumental rights with which even savages adorn the last resting-places of their braves,—the trophied inscriptions carved in the enduring language in which Virgil sang and Tully burned, and in which Menander, prophetic of our Transatlantic greatness, babbled to the dull ears of a Roman race, which recked not of that ‘proud stoic of the woods,’ who, in life a victim of wrong, at death folds himself to his solemn sleep, in the language of the greatest of our living poets,

‘Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams,’

but who, also, in the apt words of the same rapt minstrel,

‘Like Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,—
The eternal years of God are theirs.’”

While the waves of applause which ripple around this popular and characteristic rhapsody, grow calm against the solid shores of historic truth, we turn to another American view equally characteristic.

2. _The Indian character as seen through official spectacles._ Extract from the Report of the Secretary of the Interior:—

“The beneficent policy of repression, steadily pursued by our government towards the Indian tribes still surviving, cannot fail to strike every one but themselves. While sentimental Christianity continues to dwell upon the rapid extinguishment of their tribes, the archives of this department bear gratifying witness to the more rapid extinguishment of their titles.

“There now remain in our borders—which were, it must be admitted, for the sake of argument, once theirs—but about three hundred thousand of these nomad wanderers. Our people must feel an especial gratification in the proud reflection, that it is their bounty which, now reaching forth the comforts of our abundance to these remnants of tribes, supplies at the reasonable rate of some $10.15 per caput, the wants of such as are spared by our efficient and active army corps of Indian destructives.

“This bounty is distributed by honest agents, who never fail, while dispensing it, to impress upon the recipients a proper regard for the moral suasion of our well-mounted rifles. The small commissions reserved from these treaty-stipulated funds, by these agents, is too American not to be recognized with patriotic pride; and the especial thanks of Congress are due to these self-denying distributers for the amount which they kindly leave to be disseminated among the intended beneficiaries.

“There is a natural jealousy among our people in those States and Territories where former laws injudiciously, but, as it fortunately proves, unsuccessfully located these Indian remnants, against the continuous occupation of tracts of lands called reservations, to which they have been from time to time removed. I cannot too strongly recommend that this jealousy and acquisitiveness be duly respected, and new reservations somewhere be speedily provided. Both Providence and our need of their territory plainly mark the Indians as the American Ishmaelites, against whom everybody’s hand is raised, and whose shifting tent can only be steadied up permanently against the sunset on the Pacific Ocean.”

Some people seem to think that the Indian was created to keep before us a _décolleté_ style of dress, adapted to the freedom of our institutions,—a traveller’s costume, most convenient for the administration of medical assistance, in case of such railroad divertisements and steamboat pyrotechnic displays as often enliven our journeyings.

AN INDIAN RESERVATION.
(p. 81)
]

Others look upon the preservation of these remnants as providential fields for the employment of the patience of domestic missionaries. Young ladies contemplate them as the only living representatives of mythological Loves, the sole heirs to the bow and arrow. Others still admire them as our only legendary and poetic creations; the only ghostly figures that creep weirdly through our sharp-set American quadrilles.

But while such discordant notions rasp the American ear and conscience about their predecessors, there is a mode of hushing up all these family jars; one which seems to have been adopted in all ages, from the time of Joshua the son of Nun, down to the Irish wakes of our time, namely, to drown them all in the jubilant music procured and paid for at the expense of the estate to be divided up.

A few words in regard to Indian names. An affectionate and grateful regard for the painted races, which will soon be seen only in the picture-galleries and books of colored engravings, has sought to sow a crop of Indian names over our lakes, rivers, mountains, and towns. Unfortunately we have succeeded in keeping scarcely enough for seed. But one State has borrowed the name of the Indian himself,—Indian-ah?—she spelling it, however, in an un-English way, without a h, as if she had said,

“O, _breathe_ not his name.”

The application of some of these names has been singularly felicitous, as Sing-Sing, where the State guests attempt no musical flights, but are made to hum quite another tune, if not to hush up altogether; Miss-ouri, whose ill-fated union in our Federal family has been attended with such left-handed rights,—State rights, Fanny Wrights, and, for a long time in Kansas, conflicting rights; Minnehaha, whose ringing laugh is during so long a portion of the year frozen in her soft throat; Kan-sas, suggestive of her capacity for billingsgate and free use of abusive language; Oregon, and yet inviting emigrants to her valuable mines while she laughs a cunning laugh under the protecting cap of Mount Hood; Wy-an-dot River, as if it had come to a sort of rocky comma, or interrupting ledge, over which it was pausing a moment for breath to take a hop-and-skip-and-carry-one overy leap; Pot-to-wat-o-my River, seeming like a whole family council around a skillet steaming over a fire, while the carrotty-headed mother was slightly walloping the youngest of the party for asking some improper question; Pawn-ee Fork, reminding one of those old-clothes shops kept by U. S., where the unsuspecting and improvident Indian, always in want, might be tempted to pledge his wild lands for a little ready cash, or a silver fork, or blue trinket; Man-hat-tan, as if to perpetuate the fact of the great head quality of the white man in dealing with the dusky ones for the purchase of the little island that carries as its name, a cover for the little transaction which transferred twenty-four dollars to the one, for the fourteen miles of real estate sandwiched between the North and East Rivers; Winne-bago, which sets one sneezing a coltish sneeze even at the head-waters of the Missis-sippi, and in her matronly presence; and a thousand other spicy aboriginal condiments, sprinkled, like pepper and salt over a luscious ham, over our continent, to make it more piquant and relishable in the taking.

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BOOK SECOND.

SETTLEMENTS AND COLONIES.

1607 TO 1775.

“And vaguely here,
Through the dim mists that crowd the atmosphere,
We draw the outlines of weird figures cast
In shadows on the background of the past.”
LONGFELLOW’S “_New England Tragedies_.”

“’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat
To peep at such a world.”
COWPER.