My Native Land Part 7

CHAPTER VIII.

WARDS OF OUR NATIVE LAND.

The Indians' Admirers and Critics--At School and After--Indian Courtship and Marriage--Extraordinary Dances--Gambling by Instinct--How "Cross-Eye" Lost his Pony--p.a.w.ning a Baby--Amusing and Degrading Scenes on Annuity Day.

Opinions differ materially as to the rights and wrongs, privileges and grievances, and worthiness and worthlessness of the North American Indian. Some people think that the red man has been shamefully treated and betrayed by the white man, and that the catalogue of his grievances is as long as the tale of woe the former is apt to tell, whenever he can make himself understood by a sympathetic listener.

Holders of this opinion live for the most part in districts where there are no Indians located.

There are others who think that the Indian has been absurdly pampered by the Government, and that it would be as sensible to try to change the arrangement of seasons as to attempt to prevent the survival of the fittest, or, in other words, to interfere with the gradual, but in their opinion inevitable, extermination of the Indian.

Those holding this extreme view are for the most part those who live near Indian reservations, and who have had opportunities of studying the red man's character.

Both views are of course unduly severe. As a useful citizen the Indian varies considerably, and it is rather as an interesting study that we approach the subject.

Civilization has a very peculiar effect upon the American Indian. The schools for Indian children are well managed, and the education imparted should be sufficient to prevent the possibility of a relapse into the unsatisfactory habits and the traditional uncleanliness of the different tribes. Sometimes the effect of education is excellent. There are many Indians to be found who have adopted civilized modes of living, and who have built up homes and ama.s.sed little fortunes by farming, raising cattle and trading. Some of the Indians, notably those of the five civilized tribes or nations in Indian Territory, resemble white men in appearance very much. They will sometimes work side by side with swarthy Caucasians, whose skin has been tanned by exposure to the sun, and except for the exceptionally high cheek bone and the peculiarly straight hair, there is little to distinguish the Indian from the white man.

But these cases are exceptions to the general rule, which is that education is looked upon by Indians as a degradation rather than otherwise. Great difficulty is often experienced in persuading parents to allow their children to be taken to the training schools at all, and so much compulsion is often necessary that an appearance of kidnaping is imparted. The first thing that is done with an Indian boy or girl admitted to one of these schools, is to wash the newcomer with considerable vigor from head to foot, and to cut off the superfluous, and, generally speaking, thickly matted hair.

The comfort of short hair, neatly combed and brushed, seldom impresses itself upon the youthful brave. For obvious reasons this is, however, insisted upon, and while the boy is at school he is kept neat and clean.

Directly, however, he returns to his tribe he is in danger of relapsing into the habits of his forefathers. Too often he is sneered at for his neatness. His short hair is looked upon as an offense, and he is generally willing to fall in with tribal fashions, abandon his neat clothing, and let his hair grow and his face acc.u.mulate the regulation amount of dust and dirt.

The Indian trader and the pioneer generally will tell you that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. He will repeat this adage until it becomes wearisome in its monotony. Then, perhaps, he will vary it by telling you that of all the mean Indians the educated one is the meanest. This is only true in some instances, but it is a fact that education does not invariably benefit the Indian at all.

Almost all Indians are pa.s.sionately fond of dancing. Several books have been written descriptive of the various dances of different tribes. Some of them have a hidden meaning and dangerous significance, while others are merely for the purpose of amus.e.m.e.nt and recreation. For these dances the Indians generally put on the most fancy costumes they have, and their movements are sometimes graceful and sometimes grotesque. The sign dance, as seen in some of the Southwestern tribes, is a curious one. One of the belles of the tribe leads a man into the dancing apartment, which consists of one of two tepees thrown together. In one are the tomtom beaters, in the other the dancers. In this room the couple begin to dance, making signs to each other, the meaning of which may be: "Well, what do you think of me? Do you like me? Do you think me pretty? How do I affect you?" and so on, the signs all being closely watched by the spectators, who applaud, giggle, chuckle or laugh uproariously by turns, as the case may be. Such a dance is a questioning bee, a collision of wits on the part of two really facetious Indians.

Wit is a universal trait of the savage. Some white men draw. All Indians draw. Some white men are cunning. All Indians are cunning. Some white men are humorous. All Indians are witty. Dry wit, with a proverbial philosophy in it which would have delighted the soul of Tupper, is indigenous to the Indian. The Indian is the finest epigrammist on earth.

His sentences are pithy and sententious, because short--never long and involved. A book of Indian wit and wisdom would have an enormous sale, and reveal the very core of his thought on a typical scale.

The Indian flirt is sweet, saucy, subtle, seductive. She has the art of keeping in stock constantly about her a score of bucks, each one of whom flatters himself that he, and he alone, is the special object of her admiration. Every tribe has had its belle. Poquite for the Modocs, Ur-ska-te-na for the Navajos, Mini-haha for the Dakotas, Romona for the neighboring bands. These belles have their foes among Indian women, but, however cordially hated, they never brawl or come to blows.

Love-making is one of the interesting night scenes in an Indian camp.

When a young man wants to court a pretty red couquette, he stands at the door of his lodge on a bright day and flashes a ray of light from his sun-gla.s.s on the face of his sweetheart far away. She sees the ray as it falls on her, and follows in the direction whence it is thrown, right or left. She understands the secret of these flash lights. Soon the lovers meet, each under a blanket; not a word, not a salutation is exchanged; they stand near each other for a time and then retire, only to repeat the affair day after day.

At last, upon some favorable night, the Indian youth visits the door of her lodge; she comes out and sits down on the ground beside him; still no word is spoken. At last she arises from the ground; he also rises, and standing before her, throws his blanket over both of them. No sooner has he done so than she doffs her blanket, letting it fall upon the ground, which is the admission on her part that she loves him, and does him obeisance as her future lord and master.

Every Indian camp at night is full of such lovers, with wooings as sweet, lips as willing, embraces as fond, lives as romantic, hearts as true, and elopements as daring and desperate as ever graced a Spanish court. The old people come together with their friends and hold a council. "How many ponies can he pay for her?" has a good deal to do with the eligibility of the suitor. That night he brings his articles of dowry to the door of his fiancee. If they are still there next morning, he is rejected; if not, accepted.

No formal marriage ceremony is gone through as a rule. The heart is the certificate and the Great Spirit the priest. Under the tribal government of the Indians, the rights of women were respected and clearly defined.

She was the head of the house, and all property, save an insignificant amount, descended at death to her. She was in many tribes personified as the princ.i.p.al object of worship, prayer and adoration, in the tutelary G.o.ddess of the tribe. Now all is changed. The Indian of to-day is not the Indian of fifty years ago, and cannot be studied in the same light.

His manners, customs and habits are all changed, and polygamy, more and more, creeps in with all its appalling degradations.

On special occasions an entire tribe is gathered under an open s.p.a.ce in the cottonwoods to celebrate their princ.i.p.al dances. Hands are wildly waved above the heads of the dancers around a central fire of logs, piled in a conical heap. Around this blazing pile runs the dark circle which was built at sunset, inclosing sacred ground, which must not be trespa.s.sed on. The old chanter stands at the gate of the corral and sings. The men built the dark circle in less than an hour. When done, the corral measures forty paces in diameter. Around it stands a fence eight feet high, with a gate in the east ten feet wide.

At night-fall many of the Navajo people move, temporarily, all their goods and property into the corral, and abandon their huts or hogans.

Those who do not move in are watchers to protect their property, for there are thieves among the Navajos. At 8 o'clock a band of musicians enters, and, sitting down, begins a series of cacophonous sounds on a drum. As soon as the music begins, the great wood pile is lighted. The conflagration spreads rapidly and lights the whole landscape and the sky. A storm of red, whirling sparks fly upward, like bright golden bees from out a hive, to a height of a hundred feet. The descending ashes fall in the corral like a light shower of snow. The heat soon grows so intense that in the remotest parts of the enclosure it is necessary for a person to screen his face when he looks towards the fire.

Suddenly a warning whistle is heard in the outer darkness, and a dozen forms, lithe and lean, dressed only with the narrow white breech-clout and moca.s.sins, and daubed with white earth until they seem a group of living marbles, come bounding through the entrance, yelping like wolves, and slowly moving round the fire. As they advance, in single file, they throw their bodies into diverse att.i.tudes, some graceful, some strained, some difficult, some menacing, and all grotesque. Now they face the east, now the west, now the south, now the north, bearing aloft their slender wands, tipped with eagle down, holding and waving them with surprising effects. Their course around the fire is to the left, east, west, south, north, a course invariably taken by all the dancers of the night.

When they have circled the fire twice, they begin to thrust their wands toward it. Their object is to try to burn off the tip of eagle down.

They dash up to the fire, crawl up to it on their faces, run up holding their heads sidewise, dart up backward and approach it in all sorts of att.i.tudes. Suddenly, one approaching the flaming pile throws himself on his back, with his head to the fire, and swiftly thrusts his wand into the flames. Many are the unsuccessful attempts, but at length, one by one, they all succeed in burning the downy b.a.l.l.s from the end of their wands. As each accomplishes his feat, it becomes necessary, as the next duty, to restore the ball of down, which is done by refitting the ring held in the hand with down upon it, and putting it on the head of the aromatic sumac wand.

The dance customs and ideas differ with the tribes and localities.

Sometimes the dance is little more than an exhibition of powers of endurance. Men or women, or both, go through fatiguing motions for hours and even days in succession, astounding spectators by their disregard of the traditions of their race, so far as idleness is concerned. Other dances are grotesque and brutal. On special occasions weird ceremonies are indulged in, and the proceedings are sensational in the extreme.

Of the ghost dance and its serious import, readers of the daily papers are familiar. Of the war dances of the different tribes a great deal has also been written, and altogether the dance lore of the American Indian is replete with singular incongruities and picturesque anomalies.

Dancing with the Indian is often a religious exercise. It involves hardship at times, and occasionally the partic.i.p.ants even mutilate themselves in their enthusiasm. Some of the tribes of the Southwest dance, as we shall see later, with venomous snakes in their hands, allowing themselves to be bitten, and relying on the power of the priests to save them from evil consequences.

The Indians gamble as if by instinct. On one occasion the writer was visiting a frontier town just after its settlement. Indians were present in very large numbers, and in a variety of ways they got hold of a good deal of money. The newcomers from the Eastern States were absolutely unprepared for the necessary privations of frontier life. Hence they were willing to purchase necessary articles at almost any price, while they were easily deluded into buying all sorts of articles for which they had no possible need. The Indians, who are supposed to be civilized, took full advantage of the situation, and brought into town everything that was of a salable character, frequently obtaining three or four times the local cash value.

With the money thus obtained they gambled desperately. One Indian, who boasted of the terrible name of "Cross-Eye," brought in two ponies to sell. One of them was an exceptionally ancient-looking animal, which had long since outlived its usefulness, and which, under ordinary local conditions, could certainly have been purchased for $4.00 or $5.00. A friendly Indian met Mr. "Cross-Eye", and a conversation ensued as to the value of the pony and the probable price that it would realize. The two men soon got angry on the subject, and finally the owner of the pony bet his animal's critic the pony against $20.00 that it would realize at least the last-named sum.

With this extra stimulus for driving a good bargain, the man offered his pony to a number of white men, and finally found one who needed an animal at once, and who was willing to pay $20.00 for the antiquated quadruped. "Cross-Eye" made a number of guttural noises indicative of his delight, and promptly collected the second $20.00.

He had thus practically sold a worthless pony for $40.00, and had it not been for his innate pa.s.sion for gambling, would have done a very good day's business. A few hours later, however, he was found looking very disconsolate, and trying very hard to sell some supposed curiosities for a few dollars with which to buy a blanket he sorely needed. His impecuniosity was easily explained. Instead of proceeding at once to sell his second pony, he turned his attention first to gambling, and in less than an hour his last dollar had gone. Then, with the gamester's desperation, he had put up his second pony as a final stake, with the result that he lost his money and his stock in trade as well. He took the situation philosophically and stoically, but when he found it impossible in the busy pioneer town to get even the price of a drink of whisky for his curiosities, he began to get reckless, and was finally escorted out of the town by two or three of his friends to prevent him getting mixed up in a fight.

When the Indians have enough energy they gamble almost day and night.

The women themselves are generally kept under sufficient subjection by their husbands to make gambling on their part impossible, so far as the actual playing of games of chance is concerned. But they stand by and watch the men. They stake their necklaces, leggings, ornaments, and in fact, their all, on the play, which is done sometimes with blue wild plum-stones, hieroglyphically charactered, and sometimes with playing bones, but oftener with common cards. Above the ground the tom-tom would be sounded, but below ground the tom-tom was buried.

An Indian smokes incessantly while he gambles. Putting the cigarette or cigar to his mouth he draws in the smoke in long, deep breaths, until he has filled his lungs completely, when he begins slowly to emit the smoke from his nose, little by little, until it is all gone. The object of this with the Indian is to steep his senses more deeply with the narcotizing soporific. The tobacco they smoke is generally their own raising.

"The thing that moved me most," writes a traveler, describing a visit to an Indian gambling den, "was the spectacle in the furthest corner of the 'shack' of an Indian mother, with a pappoose in its baby-case peeping over her back. There she stood behind an Indian gambler, to whom she had joined her life, painted and beaded and half intoxicated. The Indian husband had already put his saddle in p.a.w.n to the white professional gambler for his $5.00, and it was not five minutes before the white gambler had the saddle and $5.00 both. Then, when they had nothing else left to bet, so intense was their love for gambling, they began to put themselves in p.a.w.n, piecemeal, saying: 'I'll bet you my whole body.'

That means 'I'll put myself in p.a.w.n to you as your slave to serve you as you will for a specified time.'

"So it was that this Indian mother stood leaning back wearily against the wall, half drunk and dazed with smoke and heat, when all at once the Indian who lived with her said to her in Indian: 'Put in the baby for a week. Then pay-day will come.' It was done. The baby was handed over.

That is what civilization has done for the Indian. Its virtues escapes him; its vices inoculate him."

One of these vices is gambling. The Indian is kept poor all the year round and plucked of every pinfeather. That is the princ.i.p.al reason why he steals, not only to reimburse himself for loss, but also to avenge himself upon the white man, who he knows well enough has constantly robbed him.

Gambling, as witnessed in the Indian camp at night, is a very different affair from the cache. The tom-tom notifies all that the bouts with fortune are about to begin. During the game the music is steadily kept up. In the intervals between the games the players all sing. Crowds surround the camp. When a man loses heavily the whole camp knows it in a few minutes, and not infrequently the wife rushes in and puts a stop to the stake by driving her chief away. Gambling is the great winter game.

It is often played from morning till night, and right along all night long. Cheating and trickery of every sort are practiced.

"Lizwin" or "mescal" are the two drinks made by the Indians themselves, one from corn and the other from the "maguay" plant. The plains Indians drink whisky. To gamble is to drink, and to drink is to lose. Gambling is the hardest work that you can persuade an Indian to do, unless threatened by starvation. Different tribes gamble differently.

The Comanches, undoubtedly, have by far the most exciting and fascinating gambling games. The Comanche puzzles, tricks and problems are also decidedly superior to those of any other nation. The gambling bone is used by the Comanches. The leader of the game holds it up before the eyes of all, so that all can see it; he then closes his two hands over it, and manipulates it so dexterously in his fingers that it is simply impossible to tell which hand the bone is in. In a moment he suddenly flings each closed hand on either side of him down into the outreaching hand of the player next to him.

The game commences at this point. The whole line of players pa.s.ses, or pretends to pa.s.s, this bone on from one to another, until at last every hand is waving. All this time the eyes along the opposite line of gamblers are eagerly watching each shift and movement of the hands, in hopes of discovering the white flash of the bone. At last some one descries the hand that holds the bone, or thinks so. He points out and calls out for his side. The hand must instantly be thrown up. If it is right, the watching side scores a point and takes the bone. The sides change off in this way until the game is won. The full score is twenty-one points. The excitement produced by this game is at times simply indescribable.

The Utes play with two bones in each hand, one of which is wrapped about with a string. The game is to guess the hand that holds the wrapped bone. The plum-stone game is played by the plains Indians. It is only another name for dice throwing. The plum-stones are graved with hieroglyphics, and counts are curiously made in a way that often defies computation by white men. The women gamble quite as much as the men, when they dare, and grow even more excited over the game than their lords. Their game, as witnessed among the Cheyennes, is played with beads, little loops and long horn sticks made of deer foot.

The children look on and learn to gamble from their earliest childhood, and soon learn to cheat and impose on their juniors. Their little juvenile gambling operations are done princ.i.p.ally with arrows. Winter breeds sloth, and sloth begets gambling, and gambling, drink. There is no conviviality in Indian drinking bouts. The Indian gets drunk, and dead drunk, as soon as he possibly can, and finds his highest enjoyment in sleeping it off. His nature reacts viciously under drink, however, in many cases, and he is then a dangerous customer.

The women of many tribes are a most pitiable lot of hard working, ragged and dirty humanity. Upon them falls all the drudgery of the camp; they are "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and bend under immense burdens piled upon their backs, while thousands of ponies browse, undisturbed, in every direction. As the troops are withdrawn, the squaws swoop down upon the deserted camps, and rapidly glean them of all that is portable, for use in their domestic economy. An Indian fire would be considered a very cheerless affair by the inmates of houses heated by modern appliances; but such as it is--a few sticks burning with feeble blaze and scarcely penetrating the dense smoke filling the tepee from the ground to the small opening at the top--it consumes fuel, and the demand is always greater than the supply, for the reason that an Indian has no idea of preparation for future necessities. If the fire burns, all right; when the last stick is laid on, a squaw will start for a fresh supply, no matter how cold and stormy the weather may be.

The poetical Indian maiden may still exist in the vivid imagination of extreme youth, but she is not common to-day. The young girls affect gay attire, and are exempt from the hardships of toil which are imposed on their elder sisters, mothers and grandams, but their fate is infinitely worse. Little beauty is to be discerned among them, and in this regard time seems to have effaced the types which were prevalent a few years ago.