CHAPTER XI
RED INDIA
“THESE Red Indians are not red,” was our first cry when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come into the town to be painted as English ladies go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged within a short time after their arrival in daubing their cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything you please except red.
The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lorette, were French in training if not in blood; the Pottawatomies of St. Mary‘s Mission, the Delawares of Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they can hardly be called red; but still I had expected to have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of the color from which they take their name. Save for paint, I found them of a color wholly different from that which we call red.
Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tartar-faced, the Indians of the plains are a distinct people from the tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern States. It is impossible to set eyes on their women without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found in the mounds of Missouri and Iowa; but, men or women, the Utes bear no resemblance to the bright-eyed, graceful people with whom Penn traded and Standish fought. They are not less inferior in mind than in body. It was no Shoshoné, no Ute, no Cheyenne, who called the rainbow the “heaven of flowers,” the moon “the night queen,” or the stars “God‘s eyes.” The plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in poetry: they have never even produced a general, and White Antelope is their nearest approach to a Tecumseh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the country in which they dwell, have nothing in them to suggest a reason for their debased condition. The reason must lie in the blood, the race.
All who have seen both the Indians and the Polynesians at home must have been struck with innumerable resemblances. The Maori and Red Indian wakes for the dead are identical; the Californian Indians wear the Maori mat; the “medicine” of the Mandan is but the “tapu” of Polynesia; the New Zealand dance-song, the Maori tribal scepter, were found alike by Strachey in Virginia and Drake in California; the canoes of the West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther side of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Polynesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island the people who built their mounds and rock temples there, may as easily have been carried on by the Chilian breeze and current to the South American shore. The wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the northern plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamtchatkans, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting their way round by Behring Straits, and then down south, drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia and California. No theory but this will account for the sharp contrast between the civilization of ancient Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which the Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times. Mounds, rock temples, worship, all are alike unknown to the Indians of the plains; to the Polynesian Indians, these were things that had come down to them from all time.
Curious as is the question of the descent of the American tribes, it has no bearing on the future of the country – unless, indeed, in the eyes of those who assert that Delawares and Utes, Hurons and Pawnees, are all one race, with features modified by soil and climate. If this were so, the handsome, rollicking, frank-faced Coloradan “boys” would have to look forward to the time when their sons’ sons should be as like the Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the Indians they expelled – that, as the New Englanders are tall, taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of the next age should be flat-faced warriors, five feet high. Confidence in the future of America must be founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of race.
Kamtchatkans or Polynesians, Malays or sons of the prairies on which they dwell, the Red Indians have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely be one of pure blood alive within the United States.
In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests gradually mingle with the whiter inhabitants of the coast, and become indistinguishable from the remainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti, the French intermingle with the native race: the Hurons are French in everything but name. In Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation will never be brought about. The pride of race, strong in the English everywhere, in America and Australia is an absolute bar to intermarriage, and even to lasting connections with the aborigines. What has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening in New Zealand and on the plains. When you ask a Western man his views on the Indian question, he says: “Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of war, or thin ’em out by whisky; but the thinning process is plaguy slow.”
There are a good many Southerners out upon the plains. One of them, describing to me how in Florida they had hunted down the Seminoles with bloodhounds, added, “And sarved the pesky sarpints right, sah!” Southwestern volunteers, campaigning against the Indians, have been known to hang up in their tents the scalps of the slain, as we English used to nail up the skins of the Danes.
There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Americans than with ourselves. In 1840, the British government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand in a proclamation which set forth with great precision that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the aborigines in the possession of their lands. The Maories numbered 200,000 then; they number 20,000 now.
Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion on the Indian question. Rifle and revolver are their only policy. The New Englanders, who are all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings with the red men, are not similarly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of the nature of the Indian, call out for agricultural employment for the braves; those who know nothing of the Indian‘s life demand that “reserves” be set aside for him, forgetting that no “reserve” can be large enough to hold the buffalo, and that without the buffalo the red men must plow or starve.
Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all but a total failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies living at St. Mary‘s mission, the Delawares existing at Leavenworth; but in all these cases there is a large infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are completely civilized; but then they are completely French. If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will suddenly return to his untamed state. An Indian girl, one of the most orderly of the pupils at a ladies’ school, has been known, on feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The same tendency showed itself in the case of the Delaware chief who built himself a white man‘s house, and lived in it thirty years, but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the dining-room, in disgust. Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visited Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young Englishman, who came out soon after, told the President that he was going West, he gave him a letter to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas. The Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal friendship, slept upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his own hand.
The English everywhere attempt to introduce civilization, or to modify that which exists, in a rough-and-ready manner which invariably ends in failure or in the destruction of the native race. A hundred years of absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under every advantage, seen the success of our repeated attempts to establish trial by jury in Bengal. For twenty years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost universally professed themselves Christians, have attended English schools, and learnt to speak the English language, and to read and write their own; in spite of all this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to reduce almost the whole race to a condition of degraded savagery. The Indians of America have, within the few last years, been caught and caged, given acres where they once had leagues, and told to plow where once they hunted. A pastoral race, with no conception of property in land, they have been manufactured into freeholders and tenant farmers; Western Ishmaelites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its legendary life begins, they have been subjected to homestead laws and title registrations. If our experiments in New Zealand, in India, on the African coast have failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended the hurried American experiments. It is not for us, who have the past of Tasmania and the present of Queensland to account for, to do more than record the fact that the Americans are not more successful with the red men of Kansas than we with the black men of Australia.
The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject for civilization than the red man; the Ute is not even gifted with the birthright of most savages, the mimetic power. The black man, in his dress, his farming, his religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the white. In the Indian there is none of this: his ancestors roamed over the plains – he will roam; his ancestors hunted – why should not he hunt? The American savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative; the African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties of the mind. Just as the Indian is less versatile than the negro, so, if it were possible gradually to change his mode of life, slowly to bring him to the agricultural state, he would probably become a skillful and laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the Western soil; as it is, he is exterminated before he has time to learn. “Sculp ’em fust, and then talk to ’em,” the Coloradans say.
Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Washington to treat with hostile tribes upon the plains. The Indians invariably continue to fight and rob till winter is at hand; but when the snows appear, they send in runners to announce that they are prepared to make submission. The commissioners appoint a place, and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends, come down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the Indians are kept in food and drink; whisky even is illegally provided them, with the cognizance of the authorities, under the name of “hatchets.” Blankets, and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to them as necessary to their existence on the plains; but when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep up through the snow-drifts on the prairies, they take their leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war-path, plundering and scalping all the whites.
Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem as though the white man and the red cannot exist on the same soil. Step by step the English have driven back the braves, till New Englanders now remember that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in Hampshire. King Philip‘s defeat by the Connecticut volunteers seems to form part of the early legendary history of our race; yet there is still standing, and in good repair, in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a frame-house which in its time has been successfully defended against Red Indians. On the other hand, step by step, since the days of Cortez, the Indians and half-bloods have driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian at Vera Cruz, but he was shot by full-blooded Indians at Queretaro.
If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians that remain, it must be worked out in the Eastern States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed back the Indians westward: if they would rescue the remnant from starvation, they must bring them East, away from Western men and Western hunting-grounds, and let them intermingle with the whites, living, farming, along with them, intermarrying, if possible. The hunting Indian is too costly a being for our age; but we are bound to remember that ours is the blame of having failed to teach him to be something better.
After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and physically inferior to the white man, it is in every way for the advantage of the world that the next generation that inhabits Colorado should consist of whites instead of reds. That this result should not be brought about by cruelty or fraud upon the now existing Indians is all that we need require. The gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.
The Indian question is not likely to be one much longer: before I reached England again, I learnt that the Coloradan capital had offered “twenty dollars a piece for Indian scalps with the ears on.”
CHAPTER XII.
COLORADO
WHEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is ground enough to satisfy the most covetous and wide affection.” The freedom of these grand countries was worth the tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost question; their future is of enormous moment to America.
Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a country‘s value, to despise no feature of the landscape; that of the plains is full of life, full of charm – lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the grandeur of monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the grand distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even when most hot; the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the plains.
Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. The Arkansas River, which is born and dies within the limit of the plains, is two thousand miles in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. The Platte and Yellowstone are each of them as long. Into the plains and plateau you could put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveler wishing here to end his days.
To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is we are always expecting to hail it from off the top of the next hillock.
The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been remarked by Coloradan writers; it may be traced much farther than they have carried it. Not only are the earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as in Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes. The color of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever.
The eastern and western portions of the plains are not alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank; the ravines are filled with cottonwood, hickory, and black walnut; here and there are square miles of sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the winter they work to the west in search of the sweet and juicy “blue grass,” which they rub out from under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you can mow it. The “blue grass” has high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once springs up, and holds the ground forever.
The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast and silent, fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable, nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all – a green field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting smiling, hands and plow.
There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the rivers depend on the melting of distant snows for their supplies, and in the hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the Western mode of “prospecting” after water, under which it is agreed that if none be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at eleven.
Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those we are building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and time. The never-failing breezes of the plains may be utilized for water-raising, and with water all is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has been by French farmers in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the more alkali the better corn crop.
When fires are held in check by special enactments, such as those which have been passed in Victoria and South Australia, and the waters of the winter streams retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when artesian wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts of timber will become possible upon the plains. Once planted, these will in their turn mitigate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, and steam will soon be available for pumping water out of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that all would be well were it not for the locusts – the scourge of the plains – the second curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a real calamity in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever it occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State.
I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of every leaf and cob by the crickets; but the owner told me that he found consolation in the fact that they ate up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no cure. The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Coloradans must learn to expect that the locusts will increase with the increase of the crops on which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts – the more plovers, perhaps; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen.
The Coloradan “boys” are a handsome, intelligent race. The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a generous and noble manhood; and the freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind and sun, has exterminated ague, and driven away the hatchet-face; but for all this, the Coloradans may have to succumb to the locusts. At present they affect to despise them. “How may you get on in Colorado?” said a Missourian one day to a “boy” that was up at St. Louis. “Purty well, guess, if it warn‘t for the insects.” “What insects? Crickets?” “Crickets! Wall, guess not – jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther, bar, catamount, and sichlike.”
“The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper” would be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would not represent a fact. The locusts may alter the step, but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on the natural grass. For horses, for merino sheep, these rolling table-lands are peculiarly adapted. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole of this vast region – Dutch clover, French lucern, could replace the Indian grasses, and four sheep to the acre would seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying capability of the lands. The world must come here for its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.
In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger. Flocks and herds are the main props of great farming, the natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cattle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism, at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous classes of two kinds – those who have too many acres, as well as those who have too few. The danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to be forever that which under nature‘s farming they have ever been – the feeding ground for mighty flocks, the cattle pasture of the world.