While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The most shameful chapter of American history is
that in which is recorded the account of our dealings with the
Indians. The story of our government's intercourse with this
race is an unbroken narrative of injustice, fraud, and robbery.
Our people have disregarded honesty and truth whenever they have
come in contact with the Indian, and he has had no rights
because he has never had the power to enforce any.
Protests against governmental swindling of these
savages have been made again and again, but such remonstrance's
attract no general attention. Almost every one is ready to
acknowledge that in the past the Indians have been shamefully
robbed, but it appears to be believed that this no longer takes
place. This is a great mistake. We treat them now much as we
have always treated them. Within two years, I have been present
on a reservation where government commissioners, by means of
threats, by bribes given to chiefs, and by casting fraudulently
the votes of absentees, succeeded after months of effort in
securing votes enough to warrant them in asserting that a tribe
of Indians, entirely wild and totally ignorant of farming, had
consented to sell their lands, and to settle down each upon 160
acres of the most utterly arid and barren land to be found on
the North American continent. The fraud perpetrated on this
tribe was as gross as could be practiced by one set of men upon
another. In a similar way the Southern
Ute were recently
induced to consent to give up their reservation for another.
Americans are a conscientious people, yet they take no
interest in these frauds. They have the Anglo-Saxon spirit of
fair play, which sympathizes with weakness, yet no protest is
made against the oppression which the Indian suffers. They are
generous; a famine in Ireland, Japan, or Russia arouses the
sympathy and calls forth the bounty of the nation, yet they give
no heed to the distress of the Indians, who are in the very
midst of them. They do not realize that Indians are human beings
like themselves.
For this state of things there must be a reason, and
this reason is to be found, I believe, in the fact that
practically no one has any personal knowledge of the Indian
race. The few who are acquainted with them are neither writers
nor public speakers, and for the most part would find it easier
to break a horse than to write a letter. If the general public
knows little of this race, those who legislate about them are
equally ignorant. From the congressional page who distributes
the copies of a pending bill, up through the representatives and
senators who vote for it, to the president whose signature makes
the measure a law, all are entirely unacquainted with this
people or their needs.
Many stories about Indians have been written, some of
which are interesting and some, perhaps, true. All, however,
have been written by civilized people, and have thus of
necessity been misleading. The reason for this is plain. The
white person who gives his idea of a story of Indian life
inevitably looks at things from the civilized point of view, and
assigns to the Indian such motives and feelings as govern the
civilized man. But often the feelings which lead an Indian to
perform a particular action are not those which would induce a
white man to do the same thing, or if they are, the train of
reasoning which led up to the Indian's motive is not the
reasoning of the white man.
In a volume about the Pawnees,1 I endeavored
to show how Indians think and feel by letting some of them tell
their own stories in their own fashion, and thus explain in
their own way how they look at the every-day occurrences of
their life, what motives govern them, and how they reason.
In the present volume, I treat of another race of
Indians in precisely the same way. I give the Blackfoot stories
as they have been told to me by the Indians themselves, not
elaborating nor adding to them. In all cases except one they
were written down as they fell from the lips of the storyteller.
Sometimes I have transposed a sentence or two, or have added a
few words of explanation; but the stories as here given are told
in the words of the original narrators as nearly as it is
possible to render those words into the simplest every-day
English. These are Indians' stories, pictures of Indian life
drawn by Indian artists, and showing this life from the Indian's
point of view. Those who read these stories will have the
narratives just as they came to me from the lips of the Indians
themselves; and from the tales they can get a true notion of the
real man who is speaking. He is not the Indian of the
newspapers, nor of the novel, nor of the Eastern sentimentalist,
nor of the Western boomer, but the real Indian as he is in his
daily life among his own people, his friends, where he is not
embarrassed by the presence of strangers, nor trying to produce
effects, but is himself--the true, natural man.
And when you are talking with your Indian friend, as
you sit beside him and smoke with him on the bare prairie during
a halt in the day's march, or at night lie at length about your
lonely camp fire in the mountains, or form one of a circle of
feasters in his home lodge, you get very near to nature. Some of
the sentiments which he expresses may horrify your civilized
mind, but they are not unlike those which your own small boy
might utter. The Indian talks of blood and wounds and death in a
commonplace, matter-of-fact way that may startle you. But these
things used to be a part of his daily life; and even to-day you
may sometimes hear a dried-up, palsied survivor of the ancient
wars cackle out his shrill laugh when he tells as a merry jest,
a bloodcurdling story of the torture he inflicted on some enemy
in the long ago.
I have elsewhere expressed my views on Indian
character, the conclusions founded on an acquaintance with this
race extending over more than twenty years, during which time I
have met many tribes, with some of whom I have lived on terms of
the closest intimacy.
The Indian is a man, not very different from his white
brother, except that he is undeveloped. In his natural state he
is kind and affectionate in his family, is hospitable, honest
and straightforward with his fellows,--a true friend. If you are
his guest, the best he has is at your disposal; if the camp is
starving, you will still have set before you your share of what
food there may be in the lodge. For his friend he will die, if
need be. He is glad to perform acts of kindness for those he
likes. While traveling in the heats of summer over long,
waterless stretches of prairie, I have had an Indian, who saw me
suffering from thirst, leave me, without mentioning his errand,
and ride thirty miles to fetch me a canteen of cool water.
The Indian is intensely religious. No people pray more
earnestly nor more frequently. This is especially true of all
Indians of the Plains.
The Indian has the mind and feelings of a child with
the stature of a man; and if this is clearly understood and
considered, it will readily account for much of the bad that we
hear about him, and for many of the evil traits which are
commonly attributed to him. Civilized and educated, the Indian
of the better class is not less intelligent than the average
white man, and he has every capacity for becoming a good
citizen.
This is the view held not only by myself, but by all of
the many old frontiersmen that I have known, who have had
occasion to live much among Indians, and by most experienced
army officers. It was the view held by my friend and schoolmate,
the lamented Lieutenant Casey, whose good work in transforming
the fierce Northern Cheyenne into United States soldiers is well
known among all officers of the army, and whose sad death by an
Indian bullet has not yet, I believe, been forgotten by the
public.
It is proper that something should be said as to how
this book came to be written.
About ten years ago, Mr. J. W. Schultz of Montana, who
was then living in the Blackfoot camp, contributed to the
columns of the _Forest and Stream_, under the title "Life among
the Blackfeet," a series of sketches of that people. These
papers seemed to me of unusual interest, and worthy a record in
a form more permanent than the columns of a newspaper; but no
opportunity was then presented for filling in the outlines given
in them.
Shortly after this, I visited the Pi-k[)u]n-i tribe of
the Black-feet, and I have spent more or less time in their
camps every year since. I have learned to know well all their
principal men, besides many of the Bloods and the Blackfeet, and
have devoted much time and effort to the work of accumulating
from their old men and best warriors the facts bearing on the
history, customs, and oral literature of the tribe, which are
presented in this volume.
In 1889 my book on the Pawnees was published, and
seemed to arouse so much interest in Indian life, from the
Indian's standpoint, that I wrote to Mr. Schultz, urging him, as
I had often done before, to put his observations in shape for
publication, and offered to edit his work, and to see it through
the press. Mr. Schultz was unwilling to undertake this task, and
begged me to use all the material which I had gathered, and
whatever he could supply, in the preparation of a book about the
Blackfeet.
A portion of the material contained in these pages was
originally made public by Mr. Schultz, and he was thus the
discoverer of the literature of the Blackfeet. My own
investigations have made me familiar with all the stories here
recorded, from original sources, but some of them he first
published in the columns of the Forest and Stream. For this work
he is entitled to great credit, for it is most unusual to find
any one living the rough life beyond the frontier, and mingling
in daily intercourse with Indians, who has the intelligence to
study their traditions, history, and customs, and the industry
to reduce his observations to writing.
Besides the invaluable assistance given me by Mr.
Schultz, I acknowledge with gratitude the kindly aid of Miss
Cora M. Ross, one of the school teachers at the Blackfoot
agency, who has furnished me with a version of the story of the
origin of the Medicine Lodge; and of Mrs. Thomas Dawson, who
gave me help on the story of the Lost Children. William Jackson,
an educated half-breed, who did good service from 1874 to 1879,
scouting under Generals Custer and Miles, and William Russell,
half-breed, at one time government interpreter at the agency,
have both given me valuable assistance. The latter has always
placed himself at my service, when I needed an interpreter,
while Mr. Jackson has been at great pains to assist me in
securing several tales which I might not otherwise have
obtained, and has helped me in many ways. The veteran prairie
man, Mr. Hugh Monroe, and his son, John Monroe, have also given
me much information. Most of the stories I owe to Blackfeet,
Blood, and Piegan of pure race. Some of these men have died
within the past few years, among them the kindly and venerable
Red Eagle; Almost-a-Dog, a noble old man who was regarded with
respect and affection by Indians and whites; and that matchless
orator, Four Bears. Others, still living, to whom I owe thanks,
are Wolf Calf, Big Nose, Heavy Runner, Young Bear Chief, Wolf
Tail, Rabid Wolf, Running Rabbit, White Calf,
All-are-his-Children, Double Runner, Lone Medicine Person, and
many others.
The stories here given cover a wide range of subjects,
but are fair examples of the oral literature of the Blackfeet.
They deal with religion, the origin of things, the performances
of medicine men, the bravery and single-heartedness of warriors.
It will be observed that in more than one case two
stories begin in the same way, and for a few paragraphs are told
in language which is almost identical. In like manner it is
often to be noted that in different stories the same incidents
occur. This is all natural enough, when it is remembered that
the range of the Indians' experiences is very narrow. The
incidents of camp life, of hunting and war excursions, do not
offer a very wide variety of conditions; and of course the
stories of the people deal chiefly with matters with which they
are familiar. They are based on the every-day life of the
narrators.
The reader of these Blackfoot stories will not fail to
notice many curious resemblances to tales told among other
distant and different peoples. Their similarity to those current
among the Ojibwas, and other Eastern Algonquin tribes, is
sufficiently obvious and altogether to be expected, nor is it at
all remarkable that we should find, among the Blackfeet, tales
identical with those told by tribes of different stock far to
the south; but it is a little startling to see in the story of
the Worm Pipe a close parallel to the classical myth of Orpheus
and Eurydice. In another of the stories is an incident which
might have been taken bodily from the Odyssey.
Well-equipped students of general folk-lore will find
in these tales much to interest them, and to such may be left
the task of commenting on this collection.
