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THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS.* 
 
 BY EDWARD EGGLESTON. 
 
 FIRST ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 " Tall, handsome timbered people," is the 
 phrase by which one of the eariiest travelers in 
 New England describes the Indians, and he 
 adds that " the Indesses that are young are 
 some of them very comely — many pretty 
 brownettos and spider-fingered lasses may 
 be seen among them." He frankly adds 
 that the savages are " very fingurative or 
 thievish,'' and " importunate beggars " withal. 
 Mutur.i curiosity, followed by barter, by 
 attempts at religious conversion, and by a 
 hostility from which there seemed to be no 
 escape, are the ever-recurring phases of the 
 contact of the white and red races in all parts 
 of North America. With fresh and wondering 
 eyes the explorers sent by Ralegh saw the 
 stately Indians who came to trade on the 
 decks of their vessels, and the later comers 
 in James River looked with a similar curiosity 
 at the chief who marched to welcome them 
 at the head of a procession, while he played 
 upon a scrannel pipe of reed. It is hard for 
 us to imagine the wonder with which these 
 untraveled Englishmen regarded savages who 
 wore their hair cut short like a cock's comb 
 in the middle of the head, one side of which 
 was shaved and covered by a copper plate ; 
 who decked their painted iDodies with birds' 
 feathers ; and wore, besides other " conun- 
 drums," such ear-ring pendants as bears' or 
 hawks' claws, living snakes, or " dead rats by 
 the tail"; sometimes, also, the dried hand of a 
 human enemy dangled under a face painted 
 to produce a horrible effect. 
 
 The Indians, on their part, held supersti- 
 tious notions of the new-comers, whom they 
 regarded as in some sort matjitos, or demons, 
 on account of their apparently magical skill. 
 When the black slaves were brought, how- 
 ever, the savages at Manhattan revised their 
 theory ; these blacks were " the true breed of 
 devils," they exclaimed. The mysterious arti- 
 cles of the white man's manufacture were all 
 supernatural in Indian eyes. Thomas Harriott, 
 the great mathematician, a member of Ra- 
 legh's colony, zealously read the Bible in the 
 hamlets of the North Carolina tribes, who 
 
 thereupon paid homage to the book. Har- 
 riott's scientific instruments, the loadstones, 
 burning-glasses, fireworks, guns, fish-hooks, 
 and, yet more, a spring clock that " went of 
 itself," were also considered supernatural. 
 On the hill by New Amsterdam, the Indians 
 watched the ghostly wings of the windmill, 
 moved by a power invisible, and to them it 
 was " the world's wonder ; they durst not come 
 near his long arms and teeth biting to pieces." 
 
 But all the childish curiosity and all the 
 erroneous notions were not on the side of 
 the savages. The early travelers and settlers 
 believed with singular unanimity that Indians 
 were bom white ; even the French Jesuit 
 writers who dwelt among them would have it 
 that the color of their skins was due to their 
 nudity and to bear's-grease, while Josselyn 
 states explicitly that the Indian babes in New 
 England were dyed with hemlock bark, tanned 
 like leather, as one might say; and so late as 
 1 68 1, William Penn pronounces them black 
 as gypsies, " but by design." 
 
 The institutions of the Indians are seen 
 through English eyes by all the colonists. 
 Petty chiefs of a few hundred or, at most, 
 two or three thousand bowmen, are " kings," 
 and we read of a message sent from Pennsyl- 
 vania to the " Emperor of Canada " — some 
 Iroquois head man,, no doubt. The chief's 
 squaw was always a " queen " or an " em- 
 press," and the little naked Pocahontas was a 
 royal " princess." We grow tired of thinking 
 how great a mob of kings and emperors there 
 were in this savage wilderness, and are 
 relieved when a more modest writer speaks 
 of " one Black William, an Indian duke." In 
 like manner, the "medicine-men," or profes- 
 sional conjurors and jugglers, were regarded 
 by the earlier voyagers as the priests of a 
 regular worship of the sun or of the devil. 
 
 A favorite topic for the display of 
 learned folly in Europe and America in the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the 
 origin of the Indians. At a very early period 
 they were the cursed children of Canaan, the 
 son of Ham; then it was shrewdly guessed 
 that they came from Joktan, and their affiU- 
 ation might quite as reasonably have been 
 fixed upon almost any of the other names in 
 the biblical genealogies. However, the eminent 
 
 * Copyright, 1883, by Edward Eggleston. All rights reserved. 
 
u^^ 
 
 V3. 
 
 THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 97 
 
 Dutch scholar, Grotius — "the Oracle of Delft" 
 — discovered that the Americans could not be, 
 as various writers had maintained, Scythians, 
 Moors, Tartars, or what not, but must be of 
 Hebrew descent. This hypothesis, founded 
 on the similarity of customs among primitive 
 peoples, served to quicken the hopes of the 
 apostle Eliot, and to stimulate the liberality 
 of sentimental people in England, who were 
 pleased to find Americans in their Bibles, if 
 only by far-fetched inference. And did not 
 the Indians, like the ancient Jews, anoint 
 their heads, dance after a victory, compute 
 time by nights and moons, speak in parables, 
 and make "grievous mournings and yellings" 
 for their dead ? But there were rival theories 
 in vogue, some of them mixed up with an in- 
 comprehensible jargon about Gog and Magog. 
 Dr. Mede, a famous English theologian, pro- 
 pounded one which was regarded by some in 
 New England " as the oracle of God." It was 
 that some centuries after Christ, the devil, 
 becoming alarmed lest his worship should be 
 quite expelled from the world, induced some of 
 the heathen of the north of Europe to under- 
 take a passage to a promised land in America, 
 thus making himself " the ape of God," who 
 had led his chosen people in this way. 
 The conclusion was that, although it might 
 be found impossible to convert the devil-wor- 
 shipers, yet it would be a work " pleasing 
 to Almighty God and our Blessed Saviour to 
 affront the devil with the sound of the Gos- 
 pel where he had hoped to escape the din 
 thereof." 
 
 This theory of Dr. Mede was suitable to 
 the state of feeling in New England in the 
 time of Philip's war, and accorded with the 
 belief, prevailing so persistently, that the 
 American Indians worshiped devils, and held 
 audible and visible communication with 
 Satan through their diviners or medicine-men. 
 Champlain declares that the priests of the 
 Algonkins talk visibly with the devil; and 
 Whittaker, the " Apostle of Virginia," says 
 that the Indians are " naked slaves of the 
 devil," and that their priests are no better than 
 English witches. Strachey, secretary of the 
 Virginia colony, thinks that their " connivres " 
 are able to detect theft by the devil's help; 
 and Lawson had heard that, while the con- 
 jurations of Carolina Indians were in progress, 
 there was a significant " smell of brimstone in 
 the cabins." The pilgrims at Plymouth rec- 
 ognized the power of Indian jugglers to fetch 
 rain ; the Jesuits of Canada equally believed 
 in their magical skill; and a Dutch clergy- 
 man at Fort Orange avers that they had so 
 much witchcraft, divination, sorcery, and 
 wicked tricks, that they could not be held in 
 by any bands or locks. Josselyn says that 
 
 the medicine-men of New England were invul- 
 nerable — "shot free and stick free"; while 
 one of the earliest fur-traders of Maine de- 
 clares that the Indians were all witches. Roger 
 Williams lovingly calls the savages " wild 
 brethren and sisters," but, after having once 
 seen a medicine-dance, he " durst never be an 
 eye-witness, spectator, or looker-on," lest he 
 should have been " partaker of Sathan's inven- 
 tions and worship"; and he grants that the 
 powwows " doe most certainly by the help of 
 the Divell work great cures." An inteUigent 
 writer on New York in 1670 relates with im- 
 plicit belief that the medicine-men were wont 
 to materialize a spirit at the green-corn feast, 
 which now and then went so far as to carry 
 oiif some of the spectators while the con- 
 juror was taking the collection customary 
 on all such occasions. But this demon was, 
 after the manner of his kind, shy of irrev- 
 erent skeptics and investigators; he would 
 never appear until all the white men had been 
 put out. A hundred years after Roger Will- 
 iams, David Brainerd, missionary to the Dela- 
 wares, witnessing the same ceremony did not 
 flee like Williams, but attempted exorcism. "At 
 a distance, with my Bible in my hand," he says, 
 " I was resolved, if possible, to spoil the spirit 
 of powwowing, and prevent their receiving an 
 answer from the infernal world." One reason 
 given for the cruel attack made by the Dutch 
 director, Kieft, upon the savages of New 
 "Netherland, in 1642, was that the natives were 
 making him the subject of diabolical incanta- 
 tions ; and in the first code of laws promul- 
 gated for the government of New York after 
 its capture by the English, it is enacted that 
 no Indian shall "at any time be suffered to 
 powaw or performe outward worship of the 
 Devil in any Towne within this government." 
 Similar statutes in other colonies were aimed 
 at giving the devil discomfort. 
 
 Almost all the tribes with which the Eng- 
 lish came in contact in the first epoch of col- 
 onization were of the Algonkin stock, and 
 spoke cognate languages. This race of In- 
 dians occupied the coast from the St. Law- 
 rence to the Carolinas, and of the interior it 
 held almost all the territory north of the 
 Ohio between the Alleghanies and the Mis- 
 sissippi, and stretched away to the Saskatch- 
 ewan Valley in British America. John Smith, 
 in the waters of the Chesapeake, and the 
 Dutch at Fort Orange, where Albany now 
 stands, reached early the powerful Iroquois 
 race, who, in the Five Nations of New York, 
 — the Hurons of Canada, the Fries, and the 
 Neuter Nation of the intermediate country 
 about the lakes, and the Susquehannahs and 
 Tuscaroras of the Piedmont region of Mary- 
 land, and North Carohna, — formed an island, 
 
 <PlJf5?1S 
 
98 
 
 THE ABORIGINES AND THE COIONISTS. 
 
 CHART SHOWING THE APPROXIMATE LOCATION OF THE MORE PROMINENT INDIAN TRIBES WHEN FIRST KNOWN TO EUROPEANS. 
 
 or islands, wholly surrounded by Algonkins. 
 The southern colonies were in contact with 
 tribes of the Muscogee family, — the Creeks, 
 Choctaws, and Chickasaws. It is only by 
 language and customs that this classification 
 can be made ; the lines of alliance and hos- 
 tility among the Indians did not conform to 
 those of race and speech, and the universal 
 adoption of captives, especially of children 
 taken in war, stood in the way of any very 
 marked diversity of physical appearance or 
 mental characteristics. 
 
 LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 The Indian manner of living, learned from 
 the climate and the hard necessities of the 
 wilderness, afforded many suggestions to the 
 colonists. In Virginia, as in New England, 
 the planting of the Indians' corn saved the 
 first settlers from starvation, and the white 
 men imitated the Indian method of planting 
 and cooking it. Having no iron, the savages 
 cleared their fields awkwardly by girdling the 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 99 
 
 trees and letting them stand, if the forest was 
 not dense, or by burning down the tree, and 
 then severing the trunk into logs by means of 
 litde fires. The stone axes used in some tribes 
 were accounted precious and were handed 
 down as lieir-looms. They were provided with 
 helves by sphtting a cleft in a young tree 
 and inserting the ax; here it remained until 
 the wood had grown about it, when a section 
 of the sapling was taken out with the ax in- 
 closed. The Southern Indian twisted a hick- 
 ory withe about the ax-head for a handle. 
 Even after they had got iron tools from the 
 whites, it suited the indolent temper of the 
 race better to burn down the trees than to 
 chop them. They had hoes made of Avood, 
 of a turde-shell affixed to a stick, or of a 
 sharp stone, or a deer's shoulder-blade sim- 
 ilarly arranged. The corn was planted as our 
 farmers plant it, in hills three or four feet apart, 
 with four or five grains in a hill. Beans grew 
 about the stalk then as now, and pumpkins or 
 squashes filled the intervening space. 
 
 The very names of our dishes are wit- 
 nesses that the European-Americans learned 
 many ways of cooking from the Indians. 
 Pone, hominy, samp, succotash, and supawn 
 are words borrowed from the aboriginal 
 tongues ; and the preparations of Indian corn 
 which bear these names were served in wig- 
 wams, no doubt, for ages before white men 
 had ever seen the gay streamers and waving 
 tassels of the maize-field. On a hot stone, or 
 the bottom of an earthern vessel set before 
 the fire, the aboriginal baked what the pioneer 
 afterward baked on his hoe and called a hoe- 
 cake ; the toothsome southern " ash-cake " 
 was also first made by the squaws, who 
 shrouded it in husks before committing it to 
 the fire. The Indians knew how to hull corn 
 by applying lye. They celebrated the coming 
 of the delicious green " roasting-ears " by a 
 solemn feast. They nourished infants and in- 
 valids with maize-gruel, and they were before 
 us also with the merry pop-corn — " the corn 
 that blossomed," as the Hurons called it. 
 
 But " our wild brethren and sisters " used 
 Indian corn in ways unknown to us; it was 
 their chief food, and they " put it through all 
 its sauces." Jerusalem artichoke?, dried cur- 
 rants, powdered mulberries, — indeed, almost 
 all other sorts of fruit and flesh, — were mixed 
 with it. They cooked little doughnuts of meal 
 by dropping them into maple syrup. One of 
 their most useful preparations was probably 
 that which, in Virginia, was called rocka- 
 hominy, and in New England, nokick — sim- 
 ply parched corn pulverized, and carried in a 
 pouch in journeying; it was mixed, before 
 eating, with snow in winter and with spring 
 water in summer. They used maize for many 
 
 other things : of the meal they made poul- 
 tices; with a bowl of mush, given by the 
 bride to her new lord, some tribes celebrated 
 marriages ; by means of the grains of maize, 
 to represent a penny or stiver, the savage 
 cast up his accounts with the trader; grains 
 of corn were sent as tickets to those who 
 were bidden to a feast; and, by putting them 
 into gourds and turde-shells, rattles were 
 made. The husks they braided for mats and 
 wrought into baskets, into light balls for some 
 of their games, into salt-botdes, and even 
 shoes, long before the white man took the 
 hint and made of them chair-bottoms, floor- 
 mats, and collars for horses. Maize was wor- 
 shipped as a divinity. Children were kept in 
 the field to watch the precious grain as it 
 grew; but some of the tribes protected the 
 thievish crow, because of the legend that a 
 crow had brought them the first seed of the 
 plant which supported their life on so many 
 sides. 
 
 From the aborigines the settlers learned 
 the use of other articles of food, such as the 
 persimmon of the South, and the so-called 
 ground-nut of the North. Penn found the 
 savages eating baked beans, as white people 
 do yet in Boston. The festoons of drying 
 pumpkin in the frontierman's cabin are imi- 
 tated from the Indians. 
 
 None knew better than the red men with 
 what last resorts to sustain life in time of 
 famine. The roving Adirondacks, who planted 
 little, if at all, were called " tree-eaters " by 
 their enemies, because they were often obliged 
 to subsist on the " rock-tripe " lichen, and the 
 inner bark and buds of trees. The starving 
 condition to which many of the European pio- 
 neers were reduced obliged them to learn to 
 eat the food with which the savages supplied 
 their wants. The first Virginia settlers were 
 glad to feed on the green snake, and a hun- 
 dred years later the meat of the rattlesnake 
 was regarded as "dainty food" by some of 
 the planters. The Indians were not epicures. 
 Even their varied preparations of maize must 
 have been insipid from the lack of salt in 
 most of the tribes. But a savage appetite is 
 not fasddious. Putrid meat, whole frogs, the 
 intestines of the deer just as taken from the 
 animal, and fish-oil or bear's oil, even when 
 rancid, were not refused. Fruit was not suf- 
 fered to ripen, lest others should find it; the 
 tree was felled, and the fruit, sour and acrid 
 as it was, consumed at once. 
 
 The Indian's wigwam was too easily made 
 and too well suited to the pressing needs of 
 the settlers, not to be occasionally used. All 
 the tribes in the country east of the Allegha- 
 nies built bark-houses, though of varying de- 
 grees of excellence and stability. In a place 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 of temporary dwelling, or among the more 
 shiftless tribes, it was but a rude little shel- 
 ter, with a hole at the side by which the 
 owner entered and the smoke came out. The 
 Iroquois race, on the other hand, as well as 
 some Algonkin tribes, constructed an elabo- 
 rate compound wigwam of bark, capable of 
 holding a clan of many families, of affording 
 some rude conveniences, and of fending the 
 bitter northern cold. The Indians of Virginia 
 and the Carolina coast built houses of red 
 cedar bark, sometimes fifty or a hundred feet 
 long; while the Muscogees, and perhaps 
 others, had winter-houses of logs. But the 
 house of bark was almost universal, and was 
 so well suited to the roving life and easy 
 habits of the savage that even the apostle 
 Eliot could persuade but few of his converts 
 to accept the white man's house. The major- 
 ity thought it an advantage that they could 
 easily remove the wigwam, and thus be rid of 
 the vermin. 
 
 In Virginia, the primitive cabins of James- 
 town borrowed the bark roof and other feat- 
 ures from the wigwam. The best of these 
 cabins were decorated with brightly colored 
 Indian mats, which the exiled gentry of Lord 
 De la Warre's time playfully compared to 
 " arras hangings and tapestry." In Massa- 
 chusetts many of the poorer settlers dwelt at 
 first in tents and booths, and for a long time 
 after in wigwams. In Maryland, the first 
 comers shared an Indian village with the 
 original owners. In East Jersey, the settler 
 erected in a single day a wigwam that served 
 him until he could build a palisade house. 
 The Quakers in West Jersey were glad to 
 winter in Indian wigwams at first. In the 
 warmer climate of Frederica, in Georgia, 
 bowers of palmetto-leaves took the place of 
 the preliminary bark shelter. Perhaps the 
 only surviving relic of the Indian mode of 
 building among the white people in the East- 
 ern States is the bark "camp" — a sort of 
 wigwam — still used as a place of temporary 
 abode by sportsmen in the northern forests. 
 
 AVith the bark-cabin, with maize, and with 
 tobacco, came the only social customs de- 
 rived from the Indians by the colonists. 
 When a wigwam was to be built, land to be 
 opened for corn, or other difficult work to be 
 done, the Indian called out all of his neighbors; 
 the husking of the maize, too, was always 
 attended by a merry crowd. Such customs 
 were well suited to the physical and social 
 wants of a community in the wilderness ; the 
 " house-raising," the " wood-chopping " and 
 the "apple-peeling" came to be as universal 
 among the colonists as among the Indians. 
 In New England, the word " bee " was in- 
 vented as a generic name for parties of this 
 
 sort. The practice of smoking together by the 
 wayside and elsewhere, in sign of friendship, 
 which the Puritan law-makers thought too 
 pleasant to be harmless, was an Indian cus- 
 tom; among the tribes of the great interior 
 valley it had come to be in some cases a state 
 solemnity, so that the calumet or peace-pipe 
 was the safe-conduct of an ambassador. 
 
 The make-shifts of the wilderness were early 
 acquired from the savages : modes of hunting, 
 of trapping, and of traveling, the "blazing" 
 of trees to mark new forest-paths, the twisting 
 of ropes from the inner bark of the slippery elm, 
 and other devices for meeting the exigences 
 of forest living. For years the Plymouth pil- 
 grims pounded their corn in wooden mortars, 
 after the primitive manner of their neighbors; 
 and the same practice prevailed in other 
 pioneer settlements. The Virginians were 
 still using the fish-weir at the period of the 
 Revolution. When the Southern or Western 
 farmer, dressing his swine, drops hot stones 
 into a barrel of water until it boils, he 
 makes use of a device common to those 
 tribes of Indians that had only wooden ves- 
 sels. The making of sugar from the maple 
 was practiced by the Indians, who boiled the 
 sap in earthen pots. The pine-knot candle, so 
 generally used in the cabins of the colonists, 
 had lighted the smoky wigwams, no doubt, 
 for ages before Europeans arrived. The canoe 
 made by excavating a log is still in use: the 
 Indian wrought it painfully by burning the 
 wood and scraping it out with shells or stones. 
 If one may believe the reports, there were 
 some canoes, probably of iDark, among the 
 Long Island tribes, that would carry eighty 
 men apiece ; those carrying half that number 
 were not uncommon. The birch-bark canoe 
 — the Indian's masterpiece — still holds its 
 own among the Northern trappers, guides, 
 and voyageius, as does also the ingenious net- 
 work snow-shoe. So, too, the dressing of skins 
 with the brains of the animal, and the making 
 of basket-splints by pounding ash-wood until 
 the " growths " separate, are lessons which the 
 frontierman learned from the savage. 
 
 It is evident that the contributions of the 
 red race to pioneer life in this country were 
 many and important. In estimating the in- 
 fluence of the Indians on colonial character, 
 we must take into account the corruption of 
 manners on the frontier, proceeding from the 
 trickery which always accompanies trade with 
 ignorant and childish savages, and from the 
 irregular relations of Avhite men with Indian 
 women. The idleness and the paucity of 
 moral restrictions in savage life rendered it 
 attractive to reckless men. The New Eng- 
 land lawgivers punished dwellers in the tents 
 of the heathen for their pagan way of living; 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 one such straggler is described as " a sad 
 wretch ; he never heard a sermon but once 
 these fourteen years." The many degen- 
 erate white men who hngered among the 
 Southern tribes are spoken of by the natural- 
 ist Brickell as " a lost and unfortunate sort of 
 people." These Southern lotus-eaters attrib- 
 uted their long loitering to the waters of 
 Herbert's Spring at the head of the Savannah : 
 whoever drank of this fountain was doomed 
 to spend seven years in tlie wilderness 
 beyond. The superstition became a fixed 
 one ; men fainting with thirst passed by the 
 fatal fountain without drinking, fearing to 
 *' pluck the fruit of the forbidden ground." 
 
 DECAY OF THE OLD LIFE OF THE INDIAN. 
 
 On the other hand, every part of the 
 Indian's life was disturbed by the approxima- 
 tion of civihzation. Savages who had not 
 yet advanced beyond the stage of stone 
 hatchets and chronic inter-tribal warfare, 
 were not suffered to develop into that of iron 
 implements and commercial activity through 
 tedious cycles by the slow processes of race 
 culture and natural selection, but were over- 
 whelmed by the premature arrival of a com- 
 plex civilization out of another world. The 
 flint hatchet and the spear tipped with deer's 
 horn did not grow by degrees into the thousand 
 implements of the world of artificers ; they 
 were abolished suddenly while yet the people 
 whose intelligence was gauged by them were 
 incapable of accepting the new life which had 
 engulfed their old. The economic equilibrium 
 of savagery was overturned. The hoe was a 
 helpful addition to the Indian's power, but 
 fire-arms and the white man's commodities 
 broke down the old relation of supply and 
 demand in his life ; the necessity for exertion 
 became less strenuous, wild animals were 
 more easily killed with the new weapons, and 
 unwonted supplies could be bought from the 
 trader with furs and deer-skins. Under the 
 augmented demand the fur-bearing animals 
 soon grew scarce ; with the increased facilities 
 for capture, game disappeared. By this time 
 new habits had been formed, and new wants 
 aggravated the misery of savage life ; the son 
 of the fierce, indolent, and independent war- 
 rior found himself a parasite — a hewer of 
 wood for the white man. It is not surprising 
 that, in despair and blind resentment, the 
 Indian tribe sometimes dashed itself to pieces 
 in futile resistance to the incoming civihzation. 
 
 Not that Indian life was, at its best, a desir- 
 able or endurable mode of existence for any 
 but one who had the tastes of a savage. It was 
 
 squalid, inconvenient, and miserable, with the 
 addition of life-long insecurity growing out of 
 perpetual inter-tribal warfare. Even in the cab- 
 ins of the Creek tribes, and in the fixed bark- 
 houses of the Iroquois-Huron race, there was 
 no furniture but the rudest implements, and a 
 platform covered with skins or mats for a bed, 
 and used by all the family. There were no 
 provisions for privacy or decency. The higher 
 Algonkins, like the Powhatans and some 
 others, were not better provided for; while 
 the roving tribes of mere hunters had never 
 more of household goods than could be con- 
 veniently packed upon the back of a squaw, 
 and carried by a strap across her forehead. 
 If we could assemble the implements and 
 utensils possessed by all the different tribes, 
 — the knives of horn, the baskets of husks 
 and splints, the pails of bark; the mats for 
 doors, house-lining, and beds; the bone awls 
 for sewing and drilling wampum ; the canoes 
 of various sorts; the wooden, earthenware, and 
 even soap-stone vessels ; the spears, bows, 
 arrows, war-clubs, and stone axes, with the 
 rude threddles of the Muscogees, — we should 
 have a considerable variety. But the num- 
 ber of kinds possessed by any one tribe was 
 small, and the articles owned by any one 
 family were exceedingly few. 
 
 The lightly built Indian village was usually 
 removed when the fire-wood became scarce 
 or the corn-ground showed signs of ex- 
 haustion ; whole tribes would be jostled out 
 of their places by an aggressive enemy, who 
 made their villages too insecure even for the 
 endurance of a savage. By a few reverses, 
 a tribe might be partly exterminated and 
 wholly broken up. Its remaining members 
 were then forced to incorporate with other 
 nations for protection. Thus boundaries, 
 always uncertain, were ever receding, or 
 advancing, or wholly vanishing. 
 
 The arrowheads of flint or horn, turkey-spur 
 or eagle-claw, the vessels of earthenware or 
 steatite, the fish-hooks of bone and the richly 
 decorated costumes of buckskin, silk-grass, 
 turkey and other plumage, and of fur, — some- 
 times skillfully painted on the smooth side, 
 so that " they looked like lace," or decor- 
 ated with dyed porcupine-quills and the 
 bright-colored skins of ducks' heads, — showed 
 that the Indians possessed ingenuity, and, on 
 occasion, patient application. But the range 
 of their ingenuity was narrow, and their dil- 
 igence needed the goad of necessity, or the 
 spur of their inordinate passions for revenge 
 and display. There was never among them a 
 spontaneous movement to acquire the arts of 
 the white man. It was enough for them to 
 get, by trade or pilfering, or in war, the arti- 
 cles which the Europeans made. Of all the new 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 plants brought in by the colonists, the Iro- 
 quois adopted only the apple and pear trees, 
 and the Delaware peaches. The Indians 
 often preferred to buy their tobacco of the 
 white man, and they even sometimes de- 
 pended on trading furs for a supply of maize, 
 thus tending to lose their small agricultural 
 advancement. 
 
 Almost every convenience procured from 
 the Europeans brought disturbance to the old 
 mode of living. The dog having been, with the 
 exception of tame birds, the Indian's only brute 
 companion, it was long before his life could 
 be adjusted to the sHght addition of a second 
 domestic animal. The Hurons, on receiving 
 horses from the French, were filled with 
 childish delight, and the men volunteered to 
 assist the women in getting fire-wood — the 
 driving of horses was a new diversion for 
 idlers. But the gift was a fatal one at first : 
 the horses ate the unfenced maize, and the 
 village was thrown into consternation. When 
 iron and brass kettles, with poor iron hatchets 
 manufactured on purpose for the Indian 
 trade, could be had in exchange for beaver- 
 skins, there was no longer need for the la- 
 borious making of earthen pots or stone 
 hatchets ; the rudimentary arts of pottery and 
 stone-cutting were quickly forgotten, and the 
 Indian took a step backward in becoming 
 by so much less an artificer and by so much 
 more a mere hunter. Even the shell-beads 
 which the sea-coast Indians manufactured 
 with so much toil and painstaking, for orna- 
 ment and money, were better made by the 
 Dutch at Hackensack and Albany. The 
 elaborate fur garments were ripped up and 
 sold, and their kind made no more ; the duffel 
 cloth, without so much as a hem or seam, was 
 thrown about the shoulder, and the Indian 
 was more than before a savage. His guns, 
 his traps, his knives, his hatchets, his outer 
 garment, and his wampum money, were all 
 purchased in exchange for skins, and thus he 
 lost his skill, exterminated his game, and sac- 
 rificed his independence. 
 
 What made the lean and hungry fox think 
 his lot better than that of the pampered house- 
 dog was the collar-mark on the dog's neck. 
 That which was dearest to the Indian in his 
 rugged life was its entire freedom. From in- 
 fancy he was subject to almost no authority, 
 either of parent or chieftain. Where there was 
 litde property and entire Hberty of secession 
 from the band, the control of a chief was of 
 necessity small. The men and women of the 
 tribe were rather managed than governed by 
 their head men. The execution of penalties 
 was left almost always to private revenge ; 
 quarrels were settled without the intervention 
 of authority, unless a dispute threatened the 
 
 integrity of the band, in which case it was 
 taken in hand and managed by the craft of 
 the chief and the council. If a member of the 
 tribe was troublesome, and his death regarded 
 as desirable for public reasons, suggestions 
 were adroitly throv/n out that he was a 
 worker of evil charms, and all the ills that 
 happened in the village came tlienceforth to be 
 attributed to his malice and magic ; he was at 
 length put to death in obedience to a popular 
 clamor, while the chief men who had purposed 
 his destruction did not appear in the matter. 
 In rare cases of sedition or witchcraft, the 
 council appointed executioners to stab the 
 offender. 
 
 It is related that once, among the Hurons 
 of Canada, a public execution was deemed 
 needful under the following circumstances : A 
 man had " cast away " his v/ife, but she went 
 in the annual hunting-party, accompanied by 
 her brothers. Perceiving by accident that 
 her husband, who was of the party, was 
 watching her, she warned her brothers, and, 
 with the youngest of them, concealed herself 
 at night in a tree near their lodge, where 
 she was witness to a struggle in which the 
 rest of her brothers were slain by her husband 
 and his friends. The woman, after many 
 narrow escapes, contrived to reach the village 
 first, where she related the occurrence to her 
 own family, and then to the council, giving for 
 assurance of the truth of her story the state- 
 ment that one of the assailants had been 
 badly bitten in the hand. It was not thought 
 best to leave so flagrant a crime to be avenged 
 by a family several of whose Avarriors had 
 been killed at a blow. A feast was therefore 
 prepared in the council-house in honor of the 
 returning party, who, besides having good 
 luck, were laden with the spoils of the slain. 
 The hunters related their adventures to the 
 guests, as the manner is at such times, and 
 told, with apparent grief, of the irruption of 
 enemies who had cut off those that were miss- 
 ing. The man with a bandaged hand said 
 that a beaver had bitten him. Then, from 
 their concealment behind a mat, were suddenly 
 brought forth the woman and the youth to 
 confront the assassins v/ith the story of their 
 crime. When this circumstantial accusation 
 was finished, young men who had been 
 placed next to the criminals, stabbed them to 
 death, the murderers submitting to their fate 
 without complaint or resistance, after the 
 manner of an Indian doomed by his own 
 tribe. 
 
 Under the system of private retaliation for 
 private offenses, and of tribal vengeance for 
 public or foreign ones, the hideous passion of 
 inveterate revenge took the place of patriot- 
 ism and religion in the brain of the Indian. 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COIONISTS. 
 
 103 
 
 It was the pride of an injured man to dissem- 
 ble, but never to forget — wreaking vengeance 
 long years after the offense. Out of this in- 
 satiable lust for revenge came the ever-recur- 
 ring and almost unintermitting warfare be- 
 tween tribes. Battle was, indeed, a necessary- 
 pastime for idle young braves, and peace was 
 irksome, so that war was often sought merely 
 for the sake of excitement, and for the oppor- 
 tunity it gave of acquiring distinction. It was 
 this passion for revenge, uplifted to a patriotic 
 and pious duty, that brought about the cruelty 
 to prisoners w^hich makes the history of In- 
 dian wars one long horror of human perdition. 
 In every village through which the captive 
 passed, tortures of one kind or another were 
 inflicted by men, women, and children, who 
 thus consoled themselves for the loss of 
 friends. Sometimes it was the gauntlet, some- 
 times a widow would solace her spirit by 
 cutting off a joint of a finger, or biting out a 
 nail. If the prisoner did not chance to be 
 adopted as a slave into some cabin, in place 
 of a dead member, he was at last " cast into 
 the fire," under which phrase there lurked the 
 indescribable tortures which were inflicted for 
 dreary hours upon the defiant victim. In 
 some tribes these torture-scenes were con- 
 ducted by the women. The eating of the 
 flesh of victims burned at the stake seems to 
 have grown out of a desire to wreak a final 
 and ferocious vengeance on his body, though 
 there were warriors who boasted a great relish 
 for human flesh. In war-time, the northern 
 tribesmen were accustomed to " subsist on 
 the enemy " in a literal way. Denonville, 
 Governor of Canada, having vanquished 
 the Senecas in 1687, was horrified at seeing 
 twenty-five of the latter, who had been killed 
 in battle, quartered, boiled, and devoured by 
 his Ottawa allies; and six years later, the 
 New York commander. Major Peter Schuyler, 
 was not pleased to find a Frenchman's hand 
 in the soup served to him in the camp of his 
 Iroquois soldiers. 
 
 In war, as at home, the Indian refused 
 discipline, following the leader whom he 
 trusted, and returning home whenever he be- 
 came discontented with the conduct of the 
 expedition. But, despite his lawlessness and 
 idleness, his freedom was checked on many 
 sides by the unseen bands of traditional cus- 
 tom and tyrannical public sentiment. What 
 he must do in certain contingencies was firmly 
 prescribed for him by the immemorial usage 
 of his race, and it was rare that any Indian 
 was strong enough to break through this 
 chain. Trammeled even in small matters by 
 fixed customs and an intricate etiquette, as 
 well as by superstitions innumerable, he never 
 submitted to any despotism besides. Attempts 
 
 of white men to enslave Indians were gen- 
 erally fatal to the savages, who were as un- 
 wonted to such restraints as other creatures 
 of the wilderness. 
 
 Excitement of some kind was indispensa- 
 ble to relieve the tedium of the idleness in 
 which a great part of savage life was spent. 
 The intervals between hunting and war-par- 
 ties were filled up by an inconceivable num- 
 ber of ungraceful dances of various kinds, all 
 regulated by a rather complicated etiquette^ 
 many mixed with superstition, and some end- 
 ing in debauch. There were feasts of many 
 sorts, at which those not invited might crowd 
 the door-ways as spectators, or strip off the 
 bark sides of the cabins to see the cere- 
 monies ; and there were athletic games, and 
 games of hazard, with dice of bones or cherry- 
 stones, in which the excited players would often 
 lose all their possessions, not sparing to wager 
 their wives ; the reckless gamester sometimes 
 even staked his own liberty, and became a 
 slave to the winner until his friends could re- 
 deem him. Sometimes the lucky arrival of 
 prisoners in transit, who could be beaten as 
 they ran the gauntlet, furnished diversion, 
 and on grand occasions the savage could re- 
 pair to the council-house as to a theater, to 
 see the long-drawn torture of a captive — a 
 sight as well suited to his taste as bull-fight- 
 ing to a Spaniard's, or bear-baiting and 
 cock-fighting to that of our English ancestors. 
 
 OBSTACLES TO CIVILIZATION AMONG THE 
 INDIANS. 
 
 Attempts w^ere made in every colony tO' 
 civilize the Indians, but to these their im- 
 memorial and inflexible customs offered in 
 many cases an insuperable barrier. Not only 
 the natural indolence and ferocity of the in- 
 dividual, but the whole economic system of 
 the American tribes tended to promote a 
 barbarous unthrift. All the rewards which 
 civilized life gives to industry and frugality 
 were lacking. The family who had prudently 
 grown a larger supply of corn than its neigh- 
 bor was compelled by custom to share with 
 those less provident. The inflexible law of 
 savage hospitality assured to the idler a sub- 
 sistence in the wigwams of his neighbors, and 
 impaired the sense of property. In some of the 
 tribes, at least, the estate of a man deceased 
 was divided by his relatives without regard 
 to his widow and children, who by prescrip- 
 tion belonged to another cabin and another 
 " totem," and were not accounted of his kin- 
 dred in such sense as to inherit his goods. 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 104 
 
 The wife's property, likewise, did not belong 
 in any case to the husband. 
 
 Deep-seated hereditary savagery, which 
 regales itself with torture and cannibalism, 
 cannot be removed in one generation; and 
 before time could be given for permanent re- 
 sults of missionary efforts, the savages were 
 effaced or swallowed up by civilization. The 
 Indian mind was involved in a compli- 
 cated mass of superstition which rendered 
 the adoption of a new religion difficult. _ Fet- 
 ichism, mixed with abject dread of invisible 
 demons that must be appeased, an incred- 
 ible reverence for dreams, and a perpetual 
 fear of witchcraft, were the things that stood 
 for religion among them. Some tribes had 
 images that were used for charms, and the 
 veneration of these rose occasionally into 
 something like idolatry. The Indians threw 
 tobacco to the spirit supposed to inhabit 
 water-falls and whirlpools, and among the 
 Iroquois the torturing and eating of their 
 enemies partook of the nature of human 
 sacrifice to the demon Aireskoui. There were 
 in some tribes conjurations addressed to in- 
 ferior animals and other objects of reverence. 
 Fire, — which cooked food when pleased and 
 consumed the cabin when angry, — the sun, 
 the four winds, and all things that were " subtle, 
 crafty, and beyond human power," were super- 
 natural. The powwows or seers, who seem to 
 have wrought themselves into trances, and to 
 have added to these much of juggling impos- 
 ture, maintained a great ascendency over the 
 common people. It was they who, with danc- 
 ing, contortion, shaking rattles, and howling, 
 exorcised the spirit that caused sickness, often 
 with mysterious passes drawing visibly with 
 their teeth from various parts of the patient's 
 body bits of hair and bone which had been in- 
 serted by witchcraft, to the no small damage 
 of the sick man's health. Under their direc- 
 tion the tribes held prolonged huggermug- 
 gerings, in dry seasons, to bring rain upon 
 the fainting fields of maize. 
 
 Superstition settled many questions of war 
 and of tribal policy. A band of Indians emi- 
 grated in a body from the Minnisink region, 
 to avoid a malign genius of the place. A 
 party of Senecas chased a young Catawba 
 warrior for five miles. He succeeded in kill- 
 ing seven of them before they captured him. 
 The next day, when he was led out to the 
 torture, he escaped by a sudden dash, leaped 
 into the river amid a shower of bullets, and 
 swam under water like an otter, only rising 
 to take breath. On the opposite bank he 
 made insulting gestures at his enemies, and 
 fled away. Of those who pursued him, he 
 slew a party of five while they slept, mangled 
 and scalped them, and then returning in the 
 
 night, dug up and scalped the seven whom he 
 had slain at first. A solemn council of his foes 
 decided that he must be a wizard, and that 
 pursuit would therefore be useless. 
 
 Many were the stories of the transforma- 
 tion of wizards told by the Indian fires ; in 
 such tales consisted much of their folk-lore. 
 There was one of a village whose chief men 
 died of a plague, " once upon a time." The 
 conjuring medicine-men knew well that the 
 bird of death which flapped its wings and 
 uttered its cries every night over the cabins 
 of those doomed to destruction could be none 
 other than a transformed wizard, but all their 
 arts availed nothing. At last a deputation 
 from the doomed village visited the lodge of 
 The -Man -With -Very-Long-Hair — a hermit 
 of the wilderness — to implore assistance. He 
 made them some charmed arrows. With one 
 of these they wounded the fatal bird. The 
 next day a young man living in a poor wig- 
 wam with his mother was reported to be very 
 ill. Some of the elders visited him, and 
 found, as they expected, the magical arrow 
 sticking in his flesh ; under pretense of with- 
 drawing it, they gave it such a thrust as to 
 kill him. 
 
 Whatever a man dreamed of must be given 
 him at all hazards to save him from fatal 
 calamity. In one instance a wife was sur- 
 rendered to a dreamer ; in another a slave was 
 killed and cooked for one; in yet another, 
 where the sleeper had dreamed of capture 
 and torture, he persuaded his friends to mimic 
 capture and subject him to a considerable 
 torture, to prevent his falling into the hands 
 of his enemies. Designing men often used 
 dreams to procure what they coveted, and 
 there are amusing stories of retorts in kind 
 on such dreamers. 
 
 A trade in charms was carried on in some, 
 if not in all, the tribes. Old men no longer 
 able to hunt either set up for doctors, or man- 
 ufactured and sold a "beson" — that is, a 
 medicine which, taken inteniaUy with exact 
 and appropriate ceremonies, would give luck 
 to the hunter. All of their medicines were ad- 
 ministered with precise ceremonies necessary 
 to their efficacy, and the greater part of In- 
 dian medical practice was the sheerest im- 
 posture and howling nonsense. They knew 
 the value of certain simples of the country, 
 they were skillful in dressing wounds ; and the 
 " sweating-house," in which they were accus- 
 tomed to parboil themselves, after the manner 
 of a Russian vapor-bath, was serviceable for 
 cleanliness, if not for cures. 
 
 A serious obstacle to the civilizing influence 
 of the missionary among the Indians was 
 the wide difference between the moral stand- 
 ards and social conventions of the white race 
 
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 ' Jhema'^-.troj-thur {^Jh:n, 
 
 Vol. XXVI.— II. 
 
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 THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
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 FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAWING MADE V.\ JOHN '.VHITE, IN 
 1585. (BY PERMISSION OF THK BRITISH MFSKUM.) 
 
 and the red. Falsehood and craft were as 
 much esteemed among the American sav- 
 ages as among those of Lacedsmon ; per- 
 fidy and cruel treachery were matters for 
 public boast in a war-dance. Chastity, as 
 such, was held in no repute. The wife must 
 be faithful to her husband while she remained 
 with him, and he might punish her infidelity 
 on detection, or he might beat her paramour 
 cruelly, — even to death, if he chose ; but if the 
 woman's unchastity were with the husband's 
 consent, there was no odium attached to it. 
 In most of the tribes polygamy was allowed ; 
 in all the man might " throw away " his wife 
 when he chose, and she was equally free to 
 leave him. Marriages for a limited time, and 
 alliances on probation with a view to mar- 
 riage, were often contracted. In the unmar- 
 ried women unchastity was common and 
 unreproved in all the tribes. In many tribes 
 the chiefship was prudently made hered- 
 itary through the female line. The sentiment 
 of purity did not exist among American sav- 
 ages, the property sense was feeble, and hu- 
 man life was held very cheap — the payment 
 of a few belts of wampum being sufficient, in 
 many cases of homicide, to take the hatchet 
 out of the head of the slain, to bury him de- 
 cently, and to wipe the tears from the eyes 
 of his kindred, — in the words of the ceremony 
 with which the shell-money was presented. 
 
 The Indian notions of morality were the 
 outgrowth of Indian life. To the state of 
 the savage his code of social conventions was 
 appropriate ; the white man's moral standard 
 would have been inapplicable and impossible 
 to him, so long as he remained a wandering 
 hunter and fisherman, and a guerilla soldier. 
 Hence, it was seen by such philanthropists as 
 Eliot that tillage and fixed dweUings must 
 precede the advent of a new religion and a 
 new code of law. 
 
 MISSIONARY AND OTHER PHILANTHROPIC 
 EXPERIMENTS. 
 
 The French Jesuits who entered by way of 
 Canada were the first to propagate Christian- 
 ity among the Indians within the limits of the 
 thirteen original States. The French of every 
 class, indeed, succeeded better in insinuating 
 themselves into the favor of the savages than 
 the English. The Frenchman was the quicker- 
 witted, more alert, flexible, good-humored, 
 and adventurous; by these traits and his 
 suavity, he was far better qualified to ingra- 
 tiate himself with his antipodes, than the 
 cooler, stiffer, and more regularly moral Eng- 
 lishman. The eager and undaunted zeal of 
 the Jesuit, that shrank from no peril or hard- 
 ship, was pressed forward by a discipline 
 much more austere than a military regime — 
 a discipline enforced by the rewards and penal- 
 ties of eternity. Miracles are always wrought 
 by this sort of devoted enthusiasm ; it made 
 Brebceuf patient and defiant amidst the hellish 
 tortures of the Iroquois ; it sent the irre- 
 pressible Marquette from one untamed tribe 
 to another, in the great unknown valley, 
 until he sank and died on the remote shores 
 of Lake Michigan ; and it carried the already 
 maimed Father Jogues, in obedience to the 
 hard orders of his superiors, back to the 
 cruel Iroquois, certain of death, and shrink- 
 ing in every nerve from the probable inflic- 
 tion of such torture as he had seen others 
 suffer. There is a whole world of pathos in 
 Jogues' brave, half-despairing words, '■'■ Ibo 
 et 110)1 redibo — I shall go, and not come 
 back." 
 
 The Jesuit worship and teaching was more 
 easily propagated than the dogmatic, inflexible 
 and naked system of the Puritan, or the more 
 formal but not imposing worship of the Eng- 
 lish Church. The Amalingans whom Father 
 Rale baptized almost in a body were first 
 impressed with the superiority of Christianity 
 by their deputies having seen the procession 
 of the consecrated host conducted with much 
 pomp and with something like magnificence in 
 a village of the Abnakis. Rale knew well how 
 to take advantage of a barbarian's susceptibil- 
 ity to display. Skillful in the art of turning 
 wood, and knowing something of painting, 
 he labored with his own hands to render 
 his church in the wilderness of Maine im- 
 posing. This externalism gave Catholicism a 
 great advantage on all sides. The medi- 
 cine-men were natural rivals and enemies 
 of the " black-robes," who preached against 
 their powwowing, but, on the plan of keeping 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COIONISTS. 
 
 107 
 
 on the safe side, even they were wilHng 
 that their children should get whatever bene- 
 fit there might be in the mysterious, and, to 
 them, magical rite of baptism. " In this con- 
 sists the best fruits which our mission at first 
 receives," writes one of the Fathers, " and 
 which is the most certain ; for, among the 
 great number of infants whom we baptize, 
 not a year passes but many die before they 
 are able to use their reason." One of the 
 
 not to be dissolved, was a saying hard to 
 be received by savages. Permanent mar- 
 riage is indispensable to a high civilization, 
 but its necessity is not felt among a barbarous 
 people, where property is not accumulated, 
 where the wife carries the chief burden of the 
 family in any case, and where the domestic 
 affections have not yet passed from brute feel- 
 ing into human sentiment. Virtues common 
 enough in a regular and industrious society 
 
 Jesuits told the captive minister of Deerfield are not easily preserved in the idle, wander- 
 
 that he always charged the Indians, when 
 they went against the English settlements, to 
 baptize the children before killing them. This 
 doctrine of the benefit of the exact observance 
 of sacraments and other ceremonials was en- 
 tirely comprehensible to the Indian's mind, 
 and was in the line of his habitual thinking. 
 It was not needful to exact an advanced 
 civilization; the" Catholic Church was able to 
 bend itself to the state of the wild man, and 
 to arouse in him the profoundest enthusiasms 
 of which his nature was capable. Voluntary 
 fasts of the severest sort were common among 
 the Indians, on arrival at manhood, in mourn- 
 
 ing, and promiscuous life of the wigwam. 
 
 The patient heroism of the French Jesuits 
 must always excite admiration, but their 
 labors for the Indian race have produced 
 no larger or more enduring result than those 
 of others who have spent themselves in the 
 attempt to elevate the American savages. 
 From the first, the English adventurers to 
 America, having no conception of the diffi- 
 culty of changing the leopard's spots, pro- 
 posed to make their colonies a means of 
 propagating the faith among the Indians. 
 Captain John Smith was censured because 
 he had not already wrought the conversion 
 
 for the dead, and to procure good luck in of the heathen, in the first two years of storm 
 
 ing 
 
 hunting ; the austerities recommended by the 
 Church were therefore readily received, and 
 the stern savage nature felt their fascination. 
 At the Canadian Mission of St. Xavier, Indian 
 neophytes used flagellations unto blood, and 
 belts lined with points of iron. The amiable 
 Mohawk fanatic, Catherine Tehgahkouita, 
 who is called the Iroquois saint, and at whose 
 tomb French as well as Indian devotees 
 were healed of divers sicknesses, carried her 
 austerities to such an extreme as to purchase 
 sanctity with her life. 
 
 When the Mohawks captured some 
 of the converts whose religion had 
 brought them into alliance with Can- 
 ada, the new Catholics had an oppor- 
 tunity to display that fortitude which 
 is in the very fiber of the Indian, by 
 suffering the torments skillfully in- 
 flicted by their own tribesmen. These 
 martyrdoms inflamed the zeal of the 
 neophytes, and increased the luster 
 of the new faith in the eyes of the 
 savages. 
 
 The Jesuit fathers had frequent 
 cause to complain of the stumbling- 
 block which the lax moral code of the 
 Indians jnit in their way. The devout 
 Father Jogues recoiled with horror 
 from what he could not help seeing 
 while a captive in the tents of the Mo- 
 hawks, fearing that his own soul might 
 suffer contamination. The teaching 
 of the Church that a man should have 
 but one wife, and that marriage was 
 
 and stress, while all his endeavors were 
 directed to cajoling or frightening the savages 
 into giving him corn enough to keep his 
 cadaverous company alive. The conversion 
 of the " Princess " Pocahontas was believed 
 to be the coming-in of the first-fruits of the 
 tribes; but the young Indians sent to Eng- 
 land only learned the vices of Englishmen. 
 One of the first clergymen in Virginia, Jonas 
 Stockam, losing patience, proposed that the 
 throats of their " priests and ancients " should 
 
io8 
 
 THE ABORIGINES AND THE COIONISTS. 
 
 be cut, as a necessary preliminary to the 
 conversion of the aborigines; and even the 
 geographer Hakluyt said that "if gentle deal- 
 ing will not serve," there were " hammerers 
 and rough masons enough,— I mean our old 
 
 minating the Indians took the place of the 
 desire for their conversion. Toward the close 
 of the seventeenth century, and in the early 
 years of the eighteenth, the experiment of 
 giving a liberal training to Indian youth was 
 
 soldiers trained up in the Netherlands, — to tried for many years in the College of Wil- 
 
 square and prepare them to our preachers' Ham and Mary, in which a professorship for 
 
 hands." Force being a favorite means of their benefit was founded by a legacy of the 
 
 grace for Papists and Puritans at that time, famous Robert Boyle, and Governor Spots- 
 
 J^- ■' 
 
 A DANCE OF THE CAROLINA INDIANS. (FROM JOHN WHITE S ORIGINAL, IN THE GRENVILLE COLLECTION OF 
 
 THE BRITISH MUSEUM.) 
 
 it was naturally thought a wholesome thing 
 for heathen savages. One of the earliest 
 projectors of the Virginia colony spoke more 
 softly, and urged that the Spanish example 
 should not be imitated, but that the savages 
 should be converted " by faire and loving 
 means suiting to our English natures, like 
 that soft and gentle voice wherein the Lord 
 appeared to Elias." Collections were made 
 in the churches in England to found a col- 
 lege at Henrico for the purpose of " educat- 
 ing infidel children in the true knowledge 
 of God." Ten thousand acres of land were 
 set apart for this school, and an amiable 
 and enthusiastic gentleman — Mr. Thorpe — 
 took charge of its affairs. But upon the be- 
 ginning of Indian horrors in 1622, Thorpe 
 himself was killed, the colony was driven to 
 the verge of ruin, and the passion for exter- 
 
 wood established at his own expense an In- 
 dian school among the Saponies, where, about 
 1720, as many as seventy-seven children were 
 under the teaching of the excellent Charles 
 Griffin. But the Indian students at William 
 and Mary died from uncongenial surround- 
 ings, or relapsed into savagery, and Spots- 
 wood's school had no other result than that 
 of making the Saponies a little more cleanly 
 than other Indians. 
 
 Missionary efforts were also made by the 
 English Jesuits, who came over with Governor 
 Calvert, at the planting of Maryland, in 1634. 
 Here, first, perhaps, in an English colony, 
 translations were made into an Indian dialect 
 for purposes of conversion. Nothing could 
 be more romantic than the wilderness voyages 
 on the waters of the Potomac and its tribu- 
 taries, such as were frequently made in a little 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 109 
 
 ROBERT BOYLE. (AFTER A PRINT FROM A PAINTING IN POSSESSION OF LORD DOVER.) 
 
 boat by one or another of these fathers, 
 accompanied by an interpreter and a ser- 
 vant. A chest containing bread and butter, 
 a httle green-dried maize, some beans, and a 
 Httle flour, was the store of supphes in case 
 night should overtake them far from the hos- 
 pitaUty of wigwam or cabin. In another chest 
 were a bottle of wine for the Eucharist, and six 
 bottles of holy water for baptisms. There 
 was a casket containing sacred utensils, and 
 a small table for an altar. Another casket 
 was filled with little bells, combs, fish-hooks, 
 needles, thread, and other such things " to 
 concihate the affection " of the Indians. 
 One can imagine the impression made upon 
 the savage mind by the unpacking of these 
 bottles of consecrated wine and holy water, 
 and the setting out of the little table and the 
 mysterious sacred utensils. When at length 
 Father White cured some dangerous wounds 
 by the application of the cross to them, there 
 
 could be no longer a doubt of the superior effi- 
 cacy of the new religion. Similar cures through 
 religious agencies were starting-points with 
 some of the New England missions. But in 
 the course of years Indian wars, and the con- 
 sequent removal and destruction of the Mary- 
 land tribes, obhterated every vestige of the 
 work of these Jesuit missionaries. 
 
 Two curious devices for taming the Indians 
 by degrees were tried in Maryland and Vir- 
 ginia. In 165 1, Lord Baltimore proposed to 
 settle six bands on a tract of land with copy- 
 hold estate, and the machinery of a feudal 
 manor. In 1655, Virginia tried the plan of 
 giving them a cow for every eight wolves' 
 heads, but the Indians neglected to milk the 
 cows hi summer and allowed them to starve 
 in winter. Nearly a hundred years later 
 the Abbe Picquet tried to establish pastoral 
 habits in the Indians at Ogdensburg. 
 
 Soon after Father White had translated a 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 catechism into the speech of the Piscataways 
 on the Potomac, John Campanius, a Lutheran 
 minister, in New Sweden, rendered the Luth- 
 eran catechism into the cognate dialect of the 
 Lenni Lennape, the Indians of the Delaware. 
 It was not only translated, but adapted to the 
 savage understanding : " Give us this day a 
 plentiful supply of corn and venison," was 
 one of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, as 
 rendered by Campanius ; to this the heart of a 
 savage would be sure to respond. The French 
 Jesuits took similar liberties when they repre- 
 sented, in the Iroquois, that the soil of heaven 
 yields corn, beans, and pumpkins, without 
 the trouble of tillage. The return of Cam- 
 panius to Europe, and the overthrow of 
 New Sweden by the Dutch, put an end to 
 this mission. But half a century after Cam- 
 panius we find the catechism printed for 
 
 the first time, and put in use 
 for the instruction of the In- 
 dians. 
 
 About the time that Campanius 
 began to learn the language of 
 the Delawares,a similar impulse 
 moved Megapolensis, a Dutch 
 clergyman at Albany, to attack 
 the " heavy language " of the 
 Mohawks. At a later period 
 other Dutch ministers made 
 similar endeavors. Nowhere 
 are the vanities and vices of 
 the savage set down more viva- 
 ciously than in a racy letter 
 of " Dominie " Megapolensis. 
 The children, he tells us, went 
 " mother -naked " until they 
 were ten, twelve, or fourteen 
 years of age, and the adults 
 were almost naked in sum- 
 mer. They wore shoes of buck- 
 skin or corn-husks, and had a 
 streak of short hair in the mid- 
 dle of the head, " like hog's 
 bristles." AVhen one of them had 
 bought half an ell of duffel cloth, 
 he hung it loosely about him, 
 " without sewing, just as torn off, 
 and, as they go away, they look 
 very much at themselves, and 
 think they are very fine." The 
 energy of the French Catho- 
 lic and of the New England 
 Puritan missionaries was for- 
 eign to the temper of the Dutch 
 Calvinists ; but the churches of 
 Albany succeeded, from time 
 to time, in bringing a number 
 of the Indians to Christianity. 
 The Dutch dominies found it a 
 discouraging work, however, as 
 well among the Indians on the sea-coast as 
 among the Mohawks about Albany. In 1657 
 Megapolensis, then at New Amsterdam, and 
 his colleague, wrote to Holland that the 
 Indian whom they had had under instruc- 
 tion to teach his people, and who had 
 learned to read and write good Dutch and 
 had made a public profession of faith, had 
 of late taken to drinking brandy, had pawned 
 his Bible, and had " become a real beast." 
 This was the end of similar beginnings in 
 many places. 
 
 It was, however, in the colonies of Massa- 
 chusetts and Plymouth, and on the island of 
 Martha's Vineyard, that the most persistent 
 and successful attempts were made in colo- 
 nial times to assimilate the Indian's modes 
 of living and thinking to that of the white 
 man. There was a force and tenacity in 
 
 IN 1585. 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 Puritanism that rivaled in effective- 
 ness the enthusiasm and disciphne 
 of the Jesuits, and when once the 
 energies of the New England divines 
 were tlirected to the Christianizing 
 and civilizing of pagans, some result 
 was sure to follow. Though the work 
 was attempted by Roger Williams in 
 Rhode Island and was begun success- 
 fully bv the Mayhews, father and son, 
 on Martha's Vineyard, it found its 
 chief agent in John Eliot, the famous 
 "aposde to the Indians," whose cour- 
 age, sagacity, and self-denial are the 
 highest glory of early New England 
 Puritanism. The lapse of time, which 
 dims the fame of the eloquence of 
 Cotton and Hooker, and the advance 
 of thought, which makes the debates 
 of the great synod of Cambridge puerile non- 
 sense and the learning of Norton and the 
 Mathers of little account, only increase the 
 luster of the Roxbury preacher. His patient 
 devotion made the wilderness of barbarism to 
 blossom with Indian villages governed by 
 law and striving after regular morality, while 
 his example infused a more humane spirit 
 into the rigorous Puritanism of his time. He 
 remembered that such work must be slow, 
 and chose for his motto : Ab extreino ad ex- 
 treniiun nisi per media. He had the supreme 
 condescension of strong goodness to the in- 
 firmities begotten of savagery and vice. He 
 entertained no false notions of savage char- 
 acter, but felt the hideousness of human bar- 
 barism ; he even calls the Indians " the dregs 
 of mankind." He stooped to win their affec- 
 tions by means suited to their childishness : 
 at the close of his first public interview he 
 gave apples to the children and tobacco to 
 the men. When they wept, he shed tears ; his 
 heart was like a mother's to them. The first 
 prayer he was able to utter in their tongue 
 touched their stolid natures profoundly. They 
 would sometimes lie awake all night from the 
 excitement caused by his sympathetic dis- 
 courses. It is impossible, even now, to read 
 
 
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 FROM THE ORK.IN. 
 
 1585. 
 
 without emotion his narrative of the awaken- 
 ing of conscience in some of the Indians, of 
 the confession of faults, and the tearful rec- 
 onciliation of domestic quarrels. 
 
 Their minds, not inured to the hardy specu- 
 lations of theology, received Eliot's system 
 with difficulty. They asked him what would 
 become of the soul of a man if he were cased 
 in iron a foot thick, and cast into the fire. 
 They wished to know why God did not kill 
 the devil, and have done with him. But he 
 chiefly won them by his appeals to a common- 
 place sense of right and wrong, and to their 
 domestic feelings. He persuaded the tyran- 
 nical husband to make public and contrite 
 confession of wife-beating, and he reconciled 
 the unruly son and unkind father by bring- 
 ing them to mutual confessions and forgive- 
 ness in the presence of their neighbors. 
 By seeking the Indians at their great fish- 
 ing resorts, by accepting the rude condi- 
 tions of their life, by hardihood under expos- 
 ure, and by coolness in peril, he won their 
 esteem. 
 
 Eliot had need of his motto, for his con- 
 verts began their new life at a very low 
 point, as the early laws which they instituted 
 for their own reformation bear witness. They 
 
 WAMPUM BELT, PRESENTED 
 
 INDIANS TO WILLIAM FENN. (BV PERMISSION OF THE LIBRARY COMPANY 
 OF PHILADELPHIA.) 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 JOHN ELIOT (by PERMISSION, FROM A PORTRAIT IN POSSESSION OF THE FAMILY OF THE LATE WILLIAM WHITING, ESQ.) 
 
 imposed penalties on idleness, lewdness, long 
 hair in men and short hair in women, spong- 
 ing on one's neighbors, scantiness of apparel 
 in women. Later there were rules against 
 powwowing, lying, stealing, polygamy, quar- 
 reling, pride, Sabbath-breaking, greasing one's 
 self, and certain other offenses that are better 
 left unnamed. These are the blue laws of the 
 aborigines. By degrees many of the Indians 
 were reduced to some order, though they 
 never became industrious, and were liable to 
 many lapses into savagery. General (iookin, 
 the agent of the Massachusetts General Court, 
 was Eliot's principal assistant in the civil part 
 of his work. There was much opposition from 
 the medicine-men, and a more dangerous an- 
 tagonism was stirred up by the jealousy of the 
 chiefs. Mockery was added to intimidation. 
 Two lads from the Christian village were 
 jeeringly nicknamed respectively Jehovah 
 
 and Jesus. One of the chiefs on Martha's 
 Vineyard, for " walking with the English," 
 was wounded by an assassin sent from the 
 mainland. One cannot but regret the waste 
 of time and effort in Eliot's translation of the 
 whole Bible into a dialect spoken by a few 
 thousand people, and destined to pass swiftly 
 out of use. He also spent breath in giving 
 lectures to Indian teachers on "logic and 
 theology," after the manner of the times, and 
 in 1672 printed a thousand "logic primers" 
 in their language. Money was freely given 
 in England by Robert Boyle and others; 
 much of it was expended in New England 
 in trying to educate Indians in Harvard Col- 
 lege, for the ministry. Aside from the inherent 
 folly of giving classical or scholastic instruc- 
 tion to an Indian preacher, the Indian youth 
 were not fitted by nature to receive a liberal 
 education, and the change in their hereditary 
 
THE ABORIGINES AND THE COLONISTS. 
 
 113 
 
 habits aggravated their natural tendency to 
 puhnonary disease, so that this part of the 
 experiment was an entire faihire — the only 
 Indian graduate died at twenty years of age, 
 and, failing students, the " Indian College " 
 building was turned into a printing-office. 
 But the most trying part of Ehot's experi- 
 ence must have come from the instability of 
 many of his converts. Some of the most 
 prominent relapsed into barbarism and vice, 
 and some engaged in Philip's massacres. 
 Among these was the Indian printer who had 
 helped Eliot in issuing the Bible. Yet those 
 of his converts who took part with Philip in 
 the massacres scrupled much as to whether 
 they might eat horse-flesh in case of necessity. 
 
 We must not, however, estimate at too low a 
 rate the results of the labors of the apostle and 
 those associated with him. Just before the out- 
 break of Philip's massacres, when the mission- 
 ary work was at its best, there were about 
 four thousand in the villages of the " praying 
 Indians," on Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, 
 and about Boston, chiefly among sedentary 
 fishing tribes, and those living intermingled 
 with the settlers. Missionary labor was never 
 very successful in a dominant tribe. 
 
 In the hurricane of popular resentment 
 which broke forth after the outbreak of the 
 massacre under Philip, Eliot and Gookin 
 had need of all their courage and address to 
 preserve the faithful praying Indians from the 
 wrath of the white man. The apostle's former 
 popularity in these times turned into some- 
 thing like odium, but his courage and 
 devotion increased with the distress of his 
 people, who were shut up on one of the 
 islands in Boston harbor for safety until they 
 were at last permitted to fight against Philip. 
 After the tempest subsided, it came to pass, 
 by the labor of those who succeeded Eliot, 
 that all of the New England Indians who 
 survived the wars, the diseases, and the vices 
 introduced by Europeans, were brought, to a 
 greater or less extent, under the influence of 
 Christianity and law. But a regular life has 
 always proved not only irksome, but unwhole- 
 some, to the Indian. Caucasians have been 
 acclimated to civilization only by the slow 
 advance of centuries. A rapid reduction to a 
 civilized state- is a passage from extreme to 
 extreme, without the intervening mean. The 
 moral and economic improvement wrought 
 in the condition of the Indians in New Eng- 
 land and on Long Island has produced a 
 gradual and almost total extinction of the 
 red race ; the white man's virtues are nearly 
 as fatal to the Indian as his vices. 
 
 It is not my purpose to trace here the 
 history of Indian missions, except in so far as 
 it illuminates some traits of colonial life, and 
 Vol. XXVL— 12. 
 
 the character and fate of the aboriginal race. 
 The politico-religious mission of the English 
 Church among the IrO(|uois belongs to the 
 history of the conflict between the English 
 and French colonies. The later and partly 
 successful missions of the Congregationalists 
 and Scotch Presbyterians were the overflow 
 of the great Whitefieldian revival, and their 
 history belongs to the account of that move- 
 ment. The discouragement attending all these 
 eflbrts is well expressed in the confession of 
 the veteran missionary, John Brainerd, at the 
 close of the colonial epoch : " There is too 
 much truth in the common saying, ' Indians 
 will be Indians.' " 
 
 But it would be a mistake not to mention 
 here the quaintly picturesque mission of the 
 Moravian brotherhood, which began in 1739, 
 at Shokomeko, on the borders of New York 
 and Connecticut, and spread to many tribes, so 
 that the voices of the Geniian brethren were 
 heard in the valley of the Ohio long before 
 the Revolution. Never was there a more 
 single-hearted religious enthusiasm than that 
 of the Moravian missionaries, dwelling often 
 in wigwams remote from human fellowship, 
 and in frequent perils, winning the savages by 
 incredible affection, and recalling them from 
 their disheartening lapses into barbarism by 
 a long-suffering patience that knew no exhaus- 
 tion. The communal organization of the 
 Moravians gave them an isolation from 
 worldly interest, and a discipline as effective 
 as that of the Jesuits, while the gentle sim- 
 plicity of their manners and the intensity of 
 their religious faith fitted them for a work of 
 reformation among savages. They did not 
 escape the fatality attending all Indian mis- 
 sions. Though they held a peaceful position 
 aloof from the conflicts between France and 
 England, Royahsts and Continentals, which 
 agitated even the wilderness, yet they were 
 often ground between the millstones. The 
 ignorant settlers about their first mission 
 accounted them French Jesuits in disguise, 
 and the meek brethren endured the most 
 shameful persecutions from the authorities in 
 New York, who were unwilling that a drunken 
 Indian should be brought to decency without 
 the Governor's license. They suffered much 
 from hostile Indians, and more from barba- 
 rous frontiermen ; nearly a hundred of their 
 converts — men, women, and children — were 
 massacred by white men at Gnadenhutten in 
 1782. 
 
 There is one indirect and unexpected result 
 of religious propagandism among the natives. 
 The old religion in some of the pagan tribes 
 has suffered a change. The Great Spirit, chief 
 of all the gods and demons, — hardly, if at all, 
 known to their thought before, — has come 
 
H 
 
 THE ABORIGINES AND THE COIONISTS. 
 
 into prominence. Their festivals and super- 
 stitious observances are now marked by 
 something more entitled to be called worship 
 than were their old incantations. The relig- 
 ious ideas disseminated among them in the 
 later colonial time affected the teachings of 
 the Indian prophets, who arose after the 
 Revolution in great numbers. Such was the 
 great Ganeodiyo, the Iroquois reformer, 
 brother of the famous chief, Cornplanter. 
 After a life of dissipation, Ganeodiyo fell into 
 a trance and saw visions sent by the Great 
 Spirit. He devoted the last sixteen years of 
 his life to reforming the ancient religion and 
 setting to rights the morals of his fellow- 
 tribesmen. All of the unchristianized Iroquois 
 received his message, and after his time the 
 decrease of their numbers through intemper- 
 ance ceased. One curious effect of his religious 
 teaching has been a sort of apotheosis of 
 Washington; for though no white man can 
 ever enter the kingdom of heaven, yet George 
 Washington, the magnanimous friend of the 
 Six Nations, abides in luxury, solitude and 
 silence, in a house fast by the very door of 
 Paradise, where every good Indian, on his 
 way to bhss, is permitted to look in and see 
 him. Similar though less dominant prophets 
 arose among the Delawares, one of whom 
 supported Pontiac's hostihties ; and of the 
 same kind was the Shawnee prophet, Tensk- 
 watawa, the brother of Tecumseh, who 
 strongly influenced the Indians of Ohio and 
 Indiana, in the beginning of this century, and 
 such perhaps were the prophets among the 
 Creeks. These reformers adopted the old 
 superstitions, customs, and festivals, but seem 
 to have given them a somewhat deeper sig- 
 nificance. To the amorphous superstitions of 
 the savages they added certain notions that 
 were, no doubt, received from the mission- 
 aries, such as that of a supreme deity, and 
 that of reward and penalty in a future life. 
 All, or nearly all of them, made abstinence 
 from strong drink a prominent article in 
 their moral code, and denounced witches 
 and sorcery ; and all of them set their faces 
 against the influence of the white man, of 
 which they were themselves the unconscious 
 offspring. 
 
 Speculation on the possibilities of develop- 
 ment in the Indian race must always be 
 rather void of result. In Mexico and Peru 
 two of its branches had attained a consider- 
 able civilization, a ponderous architecture, 
 a grotesque and colossal sculpture, and a 
 hieroglyphic system of writing. Within the 
 bounds of the thirteen colonies, the Creeks 
 or Muscogees had come to plant extensively, 
 to build log-houses with a roof of thatch, to 
 do some rude wood-carving, to sculpture elab- 
 
 orate tobacco-pipes of stone, and to weave 
 with a rude threddle. The Hurons, before the 
 earliest period of European settlement, car- 
 ried on an intermediary commerce with other 
 tribes; the Tuscaroras made maple bowls and 
 ladles for sale to other Indians. The power- 
 ful Muscogee Confederacy at the South, and 
 that of the Iroquois Five Nations at the 
 North, were triumphs of savage statecraft, and 
 had apparently set out on that tedious and 
 bloody path to civilization trodden for ages 
 by the European races. The superiority of 
 the Iroquois to the Algonkin tribes has been 
 exaggerated; but the former certainly had 
 more convenient houses, a larger dependence 
 on agriculture, superior craft and enterprise in 
 attack, a better foresight and skill in fortifica- 
 tion, and were able to transmit from one 
 generation to another a stronger national 
 cohesion than that of the tribes about them. 
 They had emerged from the state in which 
 petty clans are mutually repellant, like the 
 molecules of gases; a very slow process of 
 condensation was probably going on, and the 
 far-reaching conquests and fierce extennina- 
 tion of foes by the Five Nations tend to show 
 that the awful law of selection by survival of 
 the strongest, the most compacdy organized, 
 and the most ingenious and energetic, was at 
 work in the tribal warfare of America. On 
 the other hand, the remains of ancient art 
 found in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, 
 and the massive earth-works of the same 
 region, indicate that the Indians in that 
 valley in antiquity were as far advanced in 
 the arts as the more recent tribes, and that 
 they were as compactly and extensively or- 
 ganized, and were possibly more agricultural 
 than any of the modern tribes north of 
 Mexico. Development in art and organi- 
 zation would seem to be always a result 
 of the necessities growing out of an in- 
 creasing density of population, but the pop- 
 ulation of the tribes in the colonies was 
 apparently stationary. Incessant war, fre- 
 quent want, occasional pestilence, and the 
 destruction of unborn offspring caused the 
 increase, if there was any, to be very small. 
 Whether in some far distant future a civiliza- 
 tion might have been evolved comparable to 
 that achieved on the Eastern continent, can- 
 not now be conjectured ; the arrival of Euro- 
 peans put an end to the experiment. There 
 is abundant compensation for the temporary 
 evils that followed the contact of the two 
 races, in that eons of massacre and torture 
 horrible to contemplate have been spared by 
 the introduction of a civilization already 
 somewhat advanced and necessarily dominant 
 over and exclusive of the primitive bar- 
 barism. 
 
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 Collection of Mattf) Caroliniana 
 
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UNIVERSITY OF N.C AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
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