FOOTNOTES:
[227] Three millions of fertile acres were to be resumed; several thousand Indians were persuaded to relinquish them, and migrate to a large island (Manitoulin) on Lake Huron. "The greatest kindness," says Sir F. Head, "which we can perform to these intelligent and simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites."—Returns, 1839, p. 145. These are nearly the same arguments which have uniformly been urged in the United States, and would justify incessant acts of arbitrary removal, such as would render all improvement impossible.
No. XLII.
"The small-pox proves almost always fatal to the Red Indian, his hardened skin preventing the appearance of the eruption. In Abyssinia, where this dreadful disease is supposed to have originated, when any person is seized with it, the neighbors surround the house and set it on fire, consuming it with its miserable inhabitants. The American Indians regard the contagion with almost as much horror. The Mahas had been a powerful and warlike tribe till now, when they saw their strength wasted by a malady which they could neither resist nor prevent; they became frantic; they set fire to their village, and many of them killed their wives and children, to spare them the sufferings of disease, and that they might all go together to the land of souls."—Lewis and Clarke's Travels to the Source of the Missouri.
Lambert says, "Many nations have been totally exterminated by the small-pox. When I was in Canada in the spring of 1808, a village of Mississagas, residing near Kingston, was nearly depopulated by the small-pox; not more than twenty escaped of five hundred."
"Repeated efforts have been made, and so far, generally, as the tribes have ever had the disease (or, at all events, within the recollection of those who are now living in the tribes), the government agents (of the United States) have succeeded in introducing vaccination as a protection; but among the tribes in their wild state, who have not yet suffered from the disease, very little success has been met with in the attempt to protect them, on account of their superstitions, which have generally resisted all attempts to introduce vaccination. While I was on the Upper Missouri, several surgeons were sent into the country with the Indian agents, where I several times saw the attempt made without success. They have perfect confidence in the skill of their own physicians, until the disease has made one slaughter in their tribe, and then, having seen white men among them protected by it, they are disposed to receive it, before which they can not believe that so minute a puncture in the arm is going to protect them from so fatal a disease; and as they see white men so earnestly urging it, they decide that it must be some new trick of the pale faces, by which they are to gain some new advantage over them, and they stubbornly and successfully resist it."—Catlin, vol. ii., p. 258.
From the accounts brought to New York in the fall of 1838 by Messrs. M'Kenzie, Mitchell, and others, from the Upper Missouri, and with whom I conversed on the subject, it seems that in the summer of that year the small-pox was accidentally introduced among the Mandans by the fur traders, and that in the course of two months they all perished except some thirty or forty, who were taken as slaves by the Riccarees, an enemy living two hundred miles below them, and who worked up and took possession of their village soon after their calamity, taking up their residence in it, it being a better built village than their own; and from the lips of one of the traders who had more recently arrived from there, I had the following account of the remaining few, in whose destruction was the final termination of this interesting and once numerous tribe:
"'The Riccarees,' he said, 'had taken possession of the village after the disease had subsided, and, after living some months in it, were attacked by a large party of their enemies, the Sioux, and while fighting desperately in resistance, in which the Mandan prisoners had taken an active part, the latter had concerted a plan for their own destruction, which was effected by their simultaneously running through the pickets on to the prairie, calling out to the Sioux (both men and women) to kill them, "that they were Riccaree dogs, that their friends were all dead, and they did not wish to live;" that they here wielded their weapons as desperately as they could, to excite the fury of their enemy, and that they were thus cut to pieces and destroyed.'
"The accounts given by two or three white men, who were among the Mandans during the ravages of this frightful disease, are most appalling, and actually too heart-rending and disgusting to be recorded. The disease was introduced into the country by the Fur Company's steamer from St. Louis, which had two of their crew sick with the disease when it approached the Upper Missouri, and imprudently stopped to trade at the Mandan village, which was on the bank of the river, where the chiefs and others were allowed to come on board, by which means the disease got ashore.
"I am constrained to believe that the gentlemen in charge of the steamer did not believe it to be the small-pox; for if they had known it to be such, I can not conceive of such imprudence as regarded their own interests in the country, as well as the fate of these poor people, by allowing their boat to advance into the country under such circumstances.
"It seems that the Mandans were surrounded by several war parties of their more powerful enemies, the Sioux, at that unlucky time, and they could not, therefore, disperse upon the plains, by which many of them could have been saved; and they were necessarily inclosed within the pickets of the village, where the disease in a few days became so very malignant, that death ensued in a few hours after its attacks; and so slight were their hopes when they were attacked, that nearly half of them destroyed themselves with their knives, with their guns, and by dashing their brains out by leaping head foremost from a thirty-foot ledge of rocks in front of their village. The first symptom of the disease was a rapid swelling of the body, and so very virulent had it become, that very many died in two or three hours after their attack, and that in many cases without the appearance of the disease upon the skin. Utter dismay seemed to possess all classes and all ages, and they gave themselves up in despair as entirely lost. There was but one continual crying and howling, and praying to the Great Spirit for his protection, during the nights and days; and there being but few living, and those in too appalling despair, nobody thought of burying the dead, whose bodies, whole families together, were left in horrid and loathsome piles in their own wigwams, with a few buffalo robes, &c., thrown over them, there to decay, and be devoured by their own dogs. That such a proportion of their community as that above mentioned should have perished in so short a time, seems yet to the reader an unaccountable thing; but, in addition to the causes just mentioned, it must be borne in mind that this frightful disease is every where far more fatal among the native than in civilized population, which may be owing to some extraordinary susceptibility, or, I think, more probably, to the exposed lives they live, leading more directly to fatal consequences. In this, as in most of their diseases, they ignorantly and imprudently plunge into the coldest water while in the highest state of fever, and often die before they have the power to get out.
"Some have attributed the unexampled fatality of this disease among the Indians to the fact of their living entirely on animal food; but so important a subject for investigation I must leave for sounder judgments than mine to decide. They are a people whose constitutions and habits of life enable them most certainly to meet most of its ills with less dread, and with decidedly greater success, than they are met in civilized communities; and I would not dare to decide that their simple meat diet was the cause of their fatal exposure to one frightful disease, when I am decidedly of opinion that it has been the cause of their exemption and protection from another, almost equally destructive, and, like the former, of civilized introduction.
"During the season of the ravages of the Asiatic cholera, which swept over the greater part of the Western country and the Indian frontier, I was a traveler through those regions, and was able to witness its effects; and I learned from what I saw, as well as from what I have heard in other parts since that time, that it traveled to and over the frontiers, carrying dismay and death among the tribes on the borders in many cases, so far as they had adopted the civilized modes of life, with its dissipations, using vegetable food and salt; but wherever it came to the tribes living exclusively on meat, and that without the use of salt, its progress was suddenly stopped. I mention this as a subject which I looked upon as important to science, and therefore one on which I made careful inquiries; and, so far as I have learned, along that part of the frontier over which I have since passed, I have, to my satisfaction, ascertained that such became the utmost limits of this fatal disease in its travel to the west, unless where it might have followed some of the routes of the fur traders, who, of course, have introduced the modes of civilized life.
"From the trader who was present at the destruction of the Mandans I had many most wonderful incidents of this dreadful scene, but I dread to recite them. Among them, however, there is one that I must briefly describe, relative to the death of that noble gentleman, of whom I have already said so much, and to whom I became so much attached, Mah-to-to-pa, or 'the Four Bears.' This fine fellow sat in his wigwam and watched every one of his family die about him, his wives and his little children, after he had recovered from the disease himself, when he walked out round the village, and wept over the final destruction of his tribe; his braves and warriors, whose sinewy arms alone he could depend on for a continuance of their existence, all laid low; when he came back to his lodge, where he carried his whole family in a pile, with a number of robes, and wrapping another around himself, went out upon a hill at a little distance, where he laid several days, despite all the solicitations of the traders, resolved to starve himself to death. He remained there till the sixth day, when he had just strength enough to creep back to the village, when he entered the horrid gloom of his own wigwam, and, laying his body alongside of the group of his family, drew his robe over him, and died on the ninth day of his fatal abstinence.
"So have perished the friendly and hospitable Mandans, from the best accounts I could get; and although it may be possible that some few individuals may yet be remaining, I think it is not probable; and one thing is certain, even if such be the case, that, as a nation, the Mandans are extinct, having no longer an existence.
"There is yet a melancholy part of the tale to be told, relating to the ravages of this frightful disease in that country on the same occasion, as it spread to other contiguous tribes, to the Minatarrees, the Knisteneaux, the Blackfeet, the Chayennes, and Crows, among whom 25,000 perished in the course of four or five months, which most appalling facts I got from Major Pilcher, now Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, from Mr. M'Kenzie, and others."—Catlin's American Indians, vol. ii., p. 257.
No. XLIII.
"In man the coloring matter seems to be deposited in the dermoidal system by the roots or the bulbs of the hair,[228] and all sound observations prove that the skin varies in color from the action of external stimuli on individuals, and is not hereditary in the whole race. The Eskimoes of Greenland, and the Laplanders, are tanned by the influence of the air, but their children are born white. We will not decide on the changes which Nature may produce in a space of time, exceeding all historical traditions. Reason stops short in these matters when no longer under the guidance of experience and analogy. The nations that have a white skin begin their cosmogony by white men; according to them, the negroes and all tawny people have been blackened or embrowned by the excessive heat of the sun. This theory, adopted by the Greeks, though not without contradiction (Onesicritus apud Strabon, lib. xv., p. 983), has been propagated even to our own times. Buffon has repeated, in prose, what Theodectes had expressed in verse two thousand years before, 'that the nations wear the livery of the climate they inhabit.' If history had been written by black nations, they would have maintained what even Europeans have recently advanced (Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man, 1813), p. 233, 239, that man was originally black, or of a very tawny color, and that he has whitened in some races from the effect of civilization and progressive debilitation, as animals in a state of domestication pass from dark to lighter colors. I shall here cite the authority of Ulloa. This learned man has seen the Indians of Chili, of the Andes, of Peru, of the burning coasts of Panama, and those of Louisiana, situated under the northern temperate zone. He had the good fortune to live at a time when theories were less numerous, and, like me, he was struck at seeing the native under the line as much bronzed as brown, in the cold climate of the Cordilleras as in the plains. Where differences of color are observed, they depend on the race."—Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 298.