CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE WHITE RACE AND ITS TREATMENT OF THE INDIAN
Ever since the white race has been in power on the American continent it has regarded the Indian race—and by this I mean all the aboriginal people found here—as its inferiors in every regard. And little by little upon this hypothesis have grown up various sentiments and aphorisms which have so controlled the actions of men who never see below the surface of things, and who have no thought power of their own, that our national literature has become impregnated with the fiendish conception that “the only good Indian is the dead Indian.” The exploits of a certain class of scouts and Indian-hunters have been lauded in books without number, so that even schoolboys are found each year running away west, each with a belt of cartridges around his waist and a revolver in his hip pocket, for the purpose of hunting Indians. Good men and women, people of the highest character, are found to be possessed of an antipathy towards the Indian that is neither moral nor christian. Men of the highest integrity in ordinary affairs will argue forcefully and with an apparent confidence in the justice of their plea that the Indian has no rights in this country that we are bound to respect. They are here merely on sufferance, and whatever the United States government does for them is pure and disinterested philanthropy, for which the Indian should be only grateful and humble.
To me this is a damnable state of affairs. If prior possession entitles one to any right in land, then the Indian owns the land of the United States by prior right. The so-called argument that because the Indian is not wisely using the land, and that therefore he stands in the way of progress and must be removed, and further, that we, the people of the United States, are the providentially appointed instruments for that removal, is to me so sophistical, so manifestly insincere, so horribly cruel, that I have little patience either to listen or reply to it.
If this be true, what about the vast holders of land whom our laws cherish and protect? Are they holding the land for useful and good purposes? Are they “helping on the cause of civilization” by their merciless and grasping control of the millions of acres they have generally so unlawfully and immorally secured? Thousands, nay millions, of acres are held by comparatively few men, without one thought for the common good. The only idea in the minds of these men is the selfish one: “What can I make out of it?”
Let us be honest with ourselves and call things by their proper names in our treatment of the weaker race. If the Indian is in the way and we are determined to take his land from him, let us at least be manly enough to recognize ourselves as thieves and robbers, and do the act as the old barons of Europe used to do it, by force of arms, fairly and cheerfully: “You have these broad acres: I want them. I challenge you to hold them: to the victor belongs the spoils.” Then the joust began. And he who was the stronger gained the acres and the castle.
Let us go to the Indian and say: “I want your lands, your hunting-grounds, your forests, your water-holes, your springs, your rivers, your corn-fields, your mountains, your canyons. I need them for my own use. I am stronger than you; there are more of us than there are of you. I’ve got to have them. You will have to do with less. I’m going to take them;” and then proceed to the robbery. But let us be above the contemptible meanness of calling our theft “benevolent assimilation,” or “manifest destiny,” or “seeking the higher good of the Indian.” A nation as well as a race may do scoundrel acts, but let it not add to its other evil the contemptible crime of conscious hypocrisy. The unconscious hypocrite is to be pitied as well as shaken out of his hypocrisy, but the conscious hypocrite is a stench in the nostrils of all honest men and women. The major part of the common people of the United States have been unconscious of the hypocritical treatment that has been accorded the Indians by their leaders, whether these leaders were elected or appointed officials or self-elected philanthropists and reformers. Hence, while I would “shake them up” and make them conscious of their share in the nation’s hypocrisy, I have no feeling of condemnation for them. On the other hand, I feel towards the conscious humbugs and hypocrites, who use the Indian as a cloak for their own selfish aggrandizement and advancement, as the Lord is said to have felt toward the lukewarm churches when He exclaimed: “I will spew thee out of my mouth.”
In our treatment of the Indian we have been liars, thieves, corrupters of the morals of their women, debauchers of their maidens, degraders of their young manhood, perjurers, and murderers. We have lied to them about our good, pacific, and honorable intentions; we have made promises to them that we never intended to keep—made them simply to gain our own selfish and mercenary ends in the easiest possible way, and then have repudiated our promises without conscience and without remorse. We have stolen from them nearly all they had of lands and worldly possessions. Only two or three years ago I was present when a Havasupai Indian was arrested for having shot a deer out of season, taken before the courts and heavily fined, when his own father had roamed over the region hunting, as his ancestors had done for centuries before, ere there were any white men’s laws or courts forbidding them to do what was as natural for them to do as it was to drink of the water they found, eat of the fruits and berries they passed, or breathe the air as they rode along. The law of the white man in reference to deer and antelope hunting is based upon the selfishness of the white man, who in a few generations has slain every buffalo, most of the mountain sheep, elk, moose, and left but a comparative remnant of deer and antelope. The Indian has never needed such laws. He has always been unselfish enough to leave a sufficient number of this wild game for breeding purposes, or, if it was not unselfishness that commanded his restraint, his own self-interest in piling up meat was sacrificed to the general good of his people who required meat also, and must be able to secure it each year. Hence, to-day we shut off by law the normal and natural source of meat supply of the Indian, without any consultation with him, and absolutely without recourse or redress, because we ourselves—the white race—are so unmitigatedly selfish, so mercenary, so indifferent to the future needs of the race, that without such law we would kill off all the wild game in a few short years.
A WALLAPAI BASKET WEAVER.
Then who is there who has studied the Indian and the white man’s relation to him, who does not know of the vile treatment the married women and maidens alike have received at the hands of the “superior” people. Let the story of the devilish debaucheries of young Indian girls by Indian agents and teachers be fully written, and even the most violent defamers of Indians would be compelled to hang their heads with shame. To those who know, the name of Perris—a southern California Indian school—brings up memories of this class of crime that make one’s blood hot against the white fiend who perpetrated them, and I am now as I write near to the Havasupai reservation in northern Arizona, where one of the teachers had to leave surreptitiously because of his discovered immoralities with Indian women and girls. Only a decade ago the name of the Wallapai woman was almost synonymous with immorality because of the degrading influences of white men, and one of the most pathetic things I ever heard was the hopeless “What can we do about it?” of an Indian chief on the Colorado desert, when I spoke to him of the demoralization of the women of his people. In effect his reply was: “The whites have so driven us to the wall that we are often hungry, and it is far easier to be immoral than to go hungry.”
Then, read the reports of the various Indian agents throughout the country who have sought to enforce the laws against whites selling liquor to Indians. Officials and courts alike have often been supine and indifferent to the Indian’s welfare, and have generally shown far more desire to protect the white man in his “vested interests” than to protect the young men of the Indian tribes against the evil influences of liquor. Again and again I have been in Indian councils and heard the old men declaim against the white man’s fire-water. The Havasupais declare it to be han-a-to-op-o-gi, “very bad,” the Navahos da-shon-de, “of the Evil One,” while one and all insist that their young men shall be kept from its demoralizing influence. Yet there is seldom a fiesta at which some vile white wretch is not willing to sell his own soul, and violate the laws of whites and Indians alike, in order to gain a little dirty pelf by providing some abominable decoction which he sells as whisky to those whose moral stamina is not strong enough to withstand the temptation.
A SKILLED HOPI BASKET WEAVER.
And as for perjury in our dealings with Indians: read the records of broken treaties, violated pledges, and disregarded vows noted by Helen Hunt Jackson in her “Century of Dishonor,” and then say whether the charge is not sustained.
Yet, when the Indian has dared to resent the cruel and abominable treatment accorded to him in so many instances and in such fearful variety, he has been called “treacherous, vindictive, fiendish, murderous,” because, in his just and righteous indignation and wrath, he has risen and determined to slay all he could find of the hated white race. No doubt his warfare has not always been civilized. Why should it be? How could it be? He is not civilized. He knows nothing of “christian” principles in a war which “christian” people have forced upon him as an act of self-defense. He is a savage, battling with savage ferocity, savage determination, to keep his home, that of his ancestors, for himself, his children, and their children. Oom Paul Kruger told the British that if they forced a war upon the Boers for the possession of the Transvaal, they would win it at a price that would “stagger humanity.” Yet thousands of good Americans honored Oom Paul for his “bravery,” his “patriotism,” his “god-like determination to stand for the rights of his people.” But if our Indian does the same thing in the defense of his home and slaughters a lot of soldiers sent to drive him away, he is guilty of murderous treachery; his killings are “massacres,” and he must be exterminated as speedily as possible.
Who ever hears any other than the term “massacre” applied to the death of Custer and his soldiers? The “Custer massacre” is as “familiar as household words.” Yet what is a massacre? Webster says: “1. The killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty, or contrary to the usages of civilized people. 2. Murder.” With such definitions in view, look at the facts of the case. I would not have it understood in what I say that I am condemning Custer. He was a general under orders, and as a dutiful servant he was endeavoring to carry them out. (The debatable question as to whether he was obeying or disregarding orders I leave for military men themselves to settle.) It is not Custer, or any other one individual, that I am condemning, but the public, national policy. Custer’s army was ordered to proceed against these men, and forcibly remove them from the place they had chosen as their home—and which had been theirs for centuries before a white man ever trod this continent—and take them to a reservation which they disliked, and in the choice of which their wishes, desires, or comfort had in no way been consulted. The white soldiers were armed, and it is well known that they intended to use these arms. Could they have come upon the Indians by stealth, or by some stratagem, they would have done so without any compunctions of conscience, and no one would ever have thought of administering a rebuke to them, even though in the fight that would undoubtedly have ensued every Indian had been slain. It would have been heralded as a glorious victory, and we should have thanked God for His goodness in directing our soldiers in their “honorable” warfare. But unfortunately, the incident turned in another direction. The would-be captors were the caught; the would-be surprisers were the surprised; the would-be slayers were the slain. Custer and his band of men, brave and gallant as United States soldiers generally are,—and I would resent with heat any slanderous remark to the contrary,—were surrounded, surprised, and slain to a man.
INDIAN BEADWORK OF
INTERESTING DESIGN.
Weep at the grave of Custer; weep at the graves of his men; weep with the widows and orphans of those suddenly surprised and slain soldiers. My own tears have fallen many a time as I have read and reread the details of that awful tragedy; but still, in the weeping do not be dishonest and ungenerous to the victors,—Indians though they were. Upon the testimony of no less an authority than General Charles King, who has known the Sioux personally and intimately for years, they were ever the hospitable friends of the white race, until a post commander,—whose name should be pilloried for the execration of the nation,—imbued with the idea that the only good Indian was the dead Indian, betrayed and slew in cold blood a number of them who had trusted to his promises and placed themselves in his hands. The result was, that the whole tribe took this slaughter to their own hearts, as any true patriots would have done, and from that day to this the major part of the Sioux have hated the white race with the undying, bitter hatred of the vindictive savage.
Again and again when I have visited Indian schools the thoughtful youths and maidens have come to me with complaints about the American history they were compelled to study. In their simple, almost colorless way of expressing themselves, a bystander would never dream of the fierce anger that was raging within, but which I was too experienced in Indian character not to perceive. Listen to what some of them have said: “When we read in the United States history of white men fighting to defend their families, their homes, their corn-fields, their towns, and their hunting-grounds, they are always called ‘patriots,’ and the children are urged to follow the example of these brave, noble, and gallant men. But when Indians—our ancestors, even our own parents—have fought to defend us and our homes, corn-fields, and hunting-grounds they are called vindictive and merciless savages, bloody murderers, and everything else that is vile. You are the Indians’ friend: will you not some time please write for us a United States history that will not teach us such wicked and cruel falsehoods about our forefathers because they loved their homes enough to fight for them—even against such powerful foes as you have been.” And I have vowed that if ever I have time and strength and feel competent to do it, I will write such a history.
INDIAN BEADWORK.
Yet this is by no means all the charge I have to make against my own race in its treatment of the Indian. Not content with depriving him of his worldly possessions, we have added insult to injury, and administered a far deeper and more cutting wound to him by denying to him and his wives and daughters the moral, poetical, and spiritual qualities they possess. To many of the superior (!) race this is utter nonsense. The idea that an Indian has any feelings to be hurt! How ridiculous! Yet I make the assertion, fearless of successful contradiction, that many Indians feel more keenly this ignoring of the good, the poetic, the æsthetic, the religious or spiritual qualities they possess than they do the physical wrongs that have been inflicted upon them. As a race, we are prejudiced, bigoted, and “big-headed” when looking upon any other race. We come by our prejudices naturally. The Englishman looks down upon the “frog-eating Frenchman,” and used to say he could lick ten or a dozen such. The Frenchman and Englishman both scoff at the beer-drinking German and the stolid Dutchman, yet France has to remember Sedan, and England still smarts at the name of Van Tromp. The fact is that no nation can afford to look down upon another, any more than any civilization can afford to crow over another. Each has its own virtues, its own “goods,” its own advantages. France, England, Germany, America, have never equaled, much less surpassed, the architecture of Greece, Egypt, and Rome. The United States, with all its brag and boast, has never had a poet equal to old blind Homer or the Italian Dante. Germany’s Goethe is worthy to stand side by side with England’s Shakspere, and the architecture of the rude and vulgar “Goths” is the supremest crown of all building in the proud and conceited English-speaking “Mother Country.”
And so have I learned to look at the Indian. He has many things that we can take to our advantage and profit, and some of these have been presented in the following pages. In the next chapter I have a few necessary reservations and observations to make which I trust the patience of the reader will permit him carefully to consider.
CHAPTER II
THE WHITE RACE AND ITS CIVILIZATION
I am by no means a blind worshiper of our so-called “higher” and “advanced” civilization. I do not think we have advanced yet as far as the Greeks in some things. Our civilization, in many respects, is sham, shoddy, gingerbread, tinsel, false, showy, meretricious, deceptive. If I were making this book an arraignment of our civilization there would be no lack of counts in the indictment, and a plethora of evidence could be found to justify each charge.
INDIAN BEADWORK
OF RATTLESNAKE DESIGN
As a nation, we do not know how to eat rationally; few people sleep as they should; our drinking habits could not be much worse; our clothing is stiff, formal, conventional, hideous, and unhealthful; our headgear the delirium tremens of silliness. Much of our architecture is weakly imitative, flimsy, without dignity, character, or stability; much of our religion a profession rather than a life; our scholastic system turns out anæmic and half-trained pupils who are forceful demonstrators of the truth that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” And as for our legal system, if a body of lunatics from the nearest asylum could not concoct for us a better hash of jurisprudence than now curses our citizenship I should be surprised. No honest person, whether of the law or out of it, denies that “law”—which Browning so forcefully satirizes as “the patent truth-extracting process,”—has become a system of formalism, of precedent, of convention, of technicality. A case may be tried, and cost the city, county, or state thousands of dollars; a decision rendered, and yet, upon a mere technicality that does not affect the real merits of the case one iota, the decision will be reversed, and either the culprit—whose guilt no one denies—is discharged, or a new trial, with its attendant expense, is ordered. The folly of such a system! The sheer idiocy of men wasting time and strength and energy upon such puerile foolishness. I verily believe the world would be bettered if the whole legal system, from supreme court of the United States down to pettiest justice court, could be abolished at one blow, and a reversion made to the decisions of the old men of each community known for their good common sense, fearlessness, and integrity.
RAMONA AND HER STAR BASKET.
It may be possible that some who read these words will deem me an incontinent and general railer against our civilization. Such a conclusion would be an egregious error. I rail against nothing in it but that which I deem bad,—bad in its effect upon the bodies, minds, or souls of its citizens. I do not rail against the wireless telegraph, the ocean cables, the railway, the telephone, the phonograph, the pianoforte, the automobile, the ice machine, refrigerating machine, gas light, gas for heating and cooking, the electric light and heater, electric railways, newspapers, magazines, books, and the thousand and one things for which this age and civilization of ours is noted. But I do rail against the abuse and perversion of these things. I do rail against the system that permits gamblers to swindle the common people by watering the stock of wireless telegraphy, cable, railway, or other companies. I enjoy some phonographs amazingly, but I rail against my neighbor’s running his phonograph all night. I think coal-oil a good thing, but I rail against the civilization that allows a few men to so control this God-given natural product that they can amass in a few short years fortunes that so far transcend the fortunes of the kings of ancient times that they make the wealth of Crœsus look like “thirty cents.” I believe thoroughly in education; but I rail earnestly, sincerely, and constantly against that so-called education (with which nearly all our present systems are more or less allied) of valuing the embalmed knowledge of books more than the personal, practical, experimental knowledge of the things themselves. I enjoy books, and would have a library as large as that of the British Museum if I could afford it; but I rail persistently against the civilization that leads its members to accept things they find in books more than the things they think out for themselves. Joaquin Miller seemed to say a rude and foolish thing when he answered Elbert Hubbard’s question, “Where are your books?” with a curt, “To hell with books. When I want a book I write one;” and yet he really expressed a deep and profound thought. He wanted to show his absolute contempt for the idea that we read books in order to help thought. The fact is, the reading too much in books, and of too many books, is a definite hindrance to thought—a positive preventive of thought. I do not believe in predigested food for either body, mind, or soul; hence I am opposed to those features of our civilization that give us food that needs only to be swallowed (not masticated and enjoyed) to supply nutriment; that give us thought all ready prepared for us that we must accept or be regarded as uneducated; those crumbs of social customs that a frivolous four hundred condescend to allow to fall from their tables to us, and that we must observe or be ostracized as “boors” and “vulgar”; and those features of our theological system that give us predigested spiritual food that we must accept and follow or be damned. I am willing to go and feed with the Scotch and the horses (vide Johnson’s foolish remark about oatmeal), and be regarded as uneducated and be ostracized both as a boor and a vulgarian, and even be damned in words, which, thank God, is quite as far as He allows any one human being to “damn” another. For I am opposed to these things one and all.
I am not a pessimist about our civilization: I am an optimist. Yet I often find my optimism strongly tinged with pessimistic color. And how can it be otherwise?
Can any thinking man have much respect—any, in fact—for that phase of his civilization which permits the building of colossal fortunes by the monopolization of the sale of necessities, when the poor who are compelled to buy these necessities are growing poorer and poorer each year?
INDIAN BEADWORK OF
GREEK FRET DESIGN.
Can I respect any civilization that for the 125 years of its existence has refused to pass laws for the preservation of the purity of the food of its poor? The rich can buy what and where they choose, but for the whole period of our existence we have been so bound, hand and foot, by the money-makers who have vitiated our food supply that they might add a few more millions to their dirty hoard of ungodly dollars that we have closed our eyes to the physical and spiritual demoralization that has come to the poor by the poisoned concoctions handed out to them—under protection of United States laws—as foods.
Can I respect an educational institution that educates the minds of its children at the expense of their bodies? That has so little common sense and good judgment as to be putting its children through fierce competitive examinations when they should be strengthening their bodies at the critical age of adolescence?
Can I bow down before the civilization whose highest educational establishments—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, New York, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, followed by hosts of others of lesser institutions—every year send out from five to thirty per cent of their students broken down in health? What is the good of all the book-learning that all the ages have amassed unless one has physical health to enjoy it? Only this last year a Harvard graduate came to me who had taken high degree in the study of law and was adjudged eminently prepared to begin to practice his profession. But his health was gone. He was a nervous and physical wreck. His physicians commanded complete rest for a year, and suggested that five years would be none too long for him to spend in recuperation. When this young man asked me to give him my candid expressions upon the matter, I asked him if he thought imbeciles could have made a worse mess of his “education” than had the present system, which had cultivated his intellect, but so disregarded the needs of his body that his intellect was powerless to act.
Let the wails of agony of the uncounted dead who have been hurried to their graves by this idolatrous worship of a senseless, godless, heartless Moloch called “education” answer for me when people ask me to respect this feature of our higher civilization, and to these wails let there be added those of awakened parents who have seen, when too late, into what acts akin to murder their blind worship of this idol had led them. Add to these the cries of pain from ten thousand beds of affliction occupied by those still living, but whose bodies have “broken down” as the result of “over-study.”
A SABOBA INDIAN WITH BASKET IN WHICH IS SYMBOLIZED THE HISTORY OF HIS TRIBE.
Then add to the vast pyramid of woe the heartaches of hopes banished, of ambitions thwarted, of desires and aims completely lost, and one can well understand why I am not a worshiper at this shrine. If I were to choose—as every parent must for his young children who are not yet capable of thought—between a happy, because physically healthy, life, though uneducated by the schools, and an educated and unhappy, because unhealthy, life for children, I would say: Give me ignorance (of books and schools) and health, rather than education (of books and schools) and a broken down, nervous, irritable body. But it is by no means necessary to have uneducated children, even though they should never see a school. While I now write (I am enjoying a few days on the “rim” of the Grand Canyon) I am meeting daily a remarkable family. The man is far above the average in scholastic and book education. He is a distinguished physician, known not only within the bounds of his own large state, but throughout the whole United States and Europe; his methods are largely approved by men at the head of the profession, and his lucrative and enormous practice demonstrates the success of his system, with the complete approval of the most conservative of his rigidly conservative profession. He was until quite recently a professor in one of the largest universities of the United States, and was therefore competent from inside knowledge to pass judgment upon the methods of the highest educational establishments. He has money enough to place his two daughters wherever he chooses, and to spend most of his time near them. Yet he has deliberately (and I think most wisely) kept them out of school, and made the strength and vigor of their bodies his first consideration. Both ride horseback (astride, of course) with the poise and confidence of skilled vaqueros; both can undertake long journeys, horseback or afoot, that would exhaust most young men students; and now at 15 and 17 years of age they are models of physical health and beauty, and at the same time the elder sister is better educated in the practical, sane, useful, living affairs of men and women than any girl of her age I have ever met. I take this object-lesson, therefore, as another demonstration of the truth of my position, and again I refuse to bow down before the great fetich of our modern civilization—“scholastic education.”
There have been wonderful civilizations in the past,—Persia, Asia Minor, Etruria, Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Moors,—and yet they are gone. A few remnants are left to us in desert temples, sand-buried propylæ, dug-up vases and carvings, glorious architecture, sublime marbles, and soul-stirring literature. Where are the peoples who created these things? Why could they not propagate their kind sufficiently well to at least keep their races intact, and hold what they had gained? We know they did not do it. Why? Call it moral or physical deterioration, or both, it is an undeniable fact that physical weakness rendered the descendants of these peoples incapable of living upon their ancestors’ high planes, or made them an easy prey to a stronger and more vigorous race. I am fully inclined to the belief that it was their moral declensions that led to their physical deterioration; yet I also firmly believe that a better and truer morality can be sustained upon a healthy and vigorous body than upon one which is diseased and enervated.
Hence I plead, with intense earnestness, for a better physical life for our growing boys and girls, our young men and women, and especially for our prospective parents. Healthy progeny cannot be expected from diseased stock. The fathers and mothers of the race must be strengthened physically. Every child should be healthily, happily, and cheerfully born, as well as borne. The sunshine of love should smile down from the faces of both parents into the child’s eyes the first moment of its life. Thus the elixir of joy enters its heart, and joy is as essential to the proper development of a child as sunshine is to that of a flower. This is a physical world, even though it be only passing phenomena, and upon its recognition much of our happiness depends. Our Christian Science friends see in physical inharmony only an error of mortal mind, to be demonstrated over by divine mind. That demonstration, however, produces the effect we call physical health. This is what I long for, seek after, strive for, both for myself, my family, my children, my race. Any and all means that can successfully be used to promote that end I believe in and heartily commend. Let us call it what we will, and attain it as how we may, the desirable thing in our national and individual life to-day is health,—health of the whole man, body, mind, soul. Because I firmly believe the Indians have ideas that, if carried out, will aid us to attain this glorious object, I have dared to suggest that this proud and haughty white race may sit at their feet and learn of them.
DAT-SO-LA-LE, THE WASHOE BASKET WEAVER, SOME OF WHOSE BASKETS HAVE SOLD FOR FABULOUS PRICES.
I myself began life handicapped with serious ill health, and for twenty-two years was seldom free from pain. Nervous irritability required constant battling. But when I began to realize the benefit of life spent in God’s great out-of-doors, and devoted much of my time to climbing up and down steep canyon walls, riding over the plains and mountains of Nevada and California, wandering through the aseptic wastes of the deserts of the Southwest, rowing and swimming in the waters of the great Colorado River, sleeping nightly in the open air, and in addition, coming in intimate contact with many tribes of Indians, and learning from them how to live a simple, natural, and therefore healthy life,—these things not only gave to me almost perfect health, but have suggested the material of which this book is made.
CHAPTER III
THE INDIAN AND NASAL AND DEEP BREATHING
The Indian believes absolutely in nasal breathing. Again and again I have seen the Indian mother, as soon as her child was born, watch it to see if it breathed properly. If not, she would at once pinch the child’s lips together and keep them pinched until the breath was taken in and exhaled easily and naturally through the nostrils. If this did not answer, I have watched her as she took a strip of buckskin and tied it as a bandage below the chin and over the crown of the head, forcing the jaws together, and then with another bandage of buckskin she covered the lips of the little one. Thus the habit of nasal breathing was formed immediately the child saw the light, and it knew no other method.
As one walks through the streets of every large city, he sees the dull and vacant eye, the inert face, of the mouth-breather; for, as every physician well knows, the mouth-breather suffers from lack of memory and a general dullness of the intellect. Not only that, but he habitually submits himself to unnecessary risks of disease. In breathing through the nose, the disease germs, which abound in our city streets and are sent floating through the air by every passing wind, are caught by the gluey mucus or the capillaries of the mucous membranes. The wavy air passages of the nose lead one to assume that they are so constructed expressly for this purpose, as the germs, if they escape being caught at one angle, are pretty sure to be trapped in turning another. When this mucus is expelled in the act of “blowing the nose,” the germs go with it, and disease is prevented. But when these germs are taken in through the mouth, they go directly into the throat, the bronchial tubes, and the lungs, and if they are lively and strong, they lodge there and take root and propagate with such fearful rapidity that in a very short time a new patient with tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, or some other disease, is created. Hence, emulate the Indian. Breathe through your nose; do not use it as an organ of speech. At the same time that you care for yourself, watch your children, and even if you have to bandage them up while they are asleep, as the Indians do, compel them to form early this useful and healthful habit of nasal breathing.
INDIAN SHOWING EFFECT OF DEEP BREATHING IN WONDERFUL LUNG DEVELOPMENT.
But not only do the Indians breathe through the nose: they are also experts in the art of deep breathing. The exercises that are given in open-air deep breathing at the Battle Creek sanitarium each morning show that we are learning this useful and beneficial habit from them. When I first began to visit the Hopis, in northern Arizona, I was awakened every morning in the wee sma’ hours, as I slept in my blankets in the open at the foot of the mesa upon which the towns are located, by cow-bells, as if a number of cows were being driven out to pasture. But in the daytime I could see no cows nor any evidence of their existence. When I asked where they were, my questions brought forth nothing but a wondering stare. Cows? They had no cows. What did I mean? Then I explained about the bells, and as I explained, a merry laugh burst upon my ears. “Cows? Those are not cows. To-morrow morning when you hear them, you jump up and watch.” I did so, and to my amazement I saw fleeing through the early morning dusk a score (more or less) of naked youths, on each one of whom a cow-bell was dangling from a rope or strap around his waist. Later I learned this running was done as a matter of religion. Every young man was required to run ten, fifteen, twenty miles, and even double this distance, upon certain allotted mornings, as a matter of religion. This develops a lung capacity that is nothing short of marvelous.
This great lung capacity is in itself a great source of health, vim, energy, and power. It means the power to take in a larger supply of oxygen to purify and vivify the blood. Half the people of our cities do not know what real true life is, because their blood is not well enough oxygenated. The people who are full of life and exuberance and power—the men and women who accomplish things—generally have large lung capacity, or else have the faculty of using all they have to the best advantage.
To a public speaker, a singer, a lawyer, a preacher, or a teacher, this large lung capacity is invaluable; for, all things else being equal, the voice itself will possess a clearer, more resonant quality if the lungs, the abdomen, and the diaphragm are full of, or stretched out by, plenty of air. These act as a resonant sounding-chamber which increases the carrying quality of the voice to a wonderful extent.
For years I have watched with keenest observation all our greatest operatic singers, actors, orators, and public speakers, and those who possess the sweet and resonant voices are the ones who breathe deep and own and control these capacious lungs. Only a few weeks ago I went to hear Sarah Bernhardt, the world’s most wonderful actress, who at sixty-three years of age still entrances thousands, not only by the wonder of her art, but by the marvelous quality of her voice. What did I find? A woman who has learned this lesson of deep breathing as the Indians breathe. She breathes well down, filling the lungs so that they thrust out the ribs. She has no waist-line, her body descending (as does that of the Venus) in an almost straight line from armpit to hips. The result is, that, with such a resonant air cavity, she scarcely raises her voice above the conversational pitch, and yet it is easily heard by two or three thousand people.
It is needless to add that every Indian woman is intelligent enough to value health, lung capacity, and the power to speak with force, vigor, and energy more than she values “fashionable appearance”; hence none of them can be found in their native condition foolish enough to wear corsets.
I never knew an Indian woman who “needed a corset, don’t you know, to brace her up, to sustain her weak back.” Of course, if a white woman is large and fleshy, and values appearance more than health, I suppose she will have her own way anyhow, but this other reason that women give for the use of the corset I never heard fall from the lips of an Indian woman. She is strong and well, and needs no artificial support. I regret very much to see that while sensible women are giving up the corset, or at least materially loosening its strings, men are beginning to wear belts in place of suspenders. It is just as injurious to a man to encircle his waist and squeeze together the vital organs as it is to a woman. It is bad, absolutely, completely, thoroughly bad, at all times, in all circumstances, for all people. The wasp-like waist, whether in men or women, is a sign either of recklessness, gross ignorance, or deliberate preference for a false figure over a normal one and health. The hips are a most important part of a human being’s anatomy. As Dr. Kellogg has well said:
“No physical endowment is of more importance for a long and a vigorous life than capacious lungs. The intensity and efficiency of an individual’s life depend very largely upon the amount of air he habitually passes in and out of his lungs, just as the intensity of a fire, granting plenty of fuel, depends upon the rate at which the air is brought in contact with the fuel. It has been found that lung capacity depends very largely upon the height; thus, the taller a person the greater his lung capacity, other things being equal. The following table shows the lung capacity, or rather the amount of air which can be forced out of the lungs, the so-called vital capacity, for men of different heights:
| Height Inches | Weight Pounds | Vital Capacity Cubic Inches |
|---|---|---|
| 64 | 115 | 205 |
| 65 | 126 | 228 |
| 66 | 126 | 230 |
| 67 | 133 | 244 |
| 68 | 134 | 248 |
| 69 | 140 | 254 |
| 70 | 141 | 256 |
| 71 | 150 | 272 |
| 72 | 151 | 287 |
“The proper time for the development of the chest is in childhood and in youth. The best of all means for increasing the chest capacity is running and active sports of all sorts. Mountain climbing, going up and down stairs, and all kinds of exercises which produce strong breathing movements are effective means of chest development. Exercises of this nature are far superior to breathing exercises, so-called, of whatever sort. Breathing exercises in which the lungs are forcibly compelled to take in more than the ordinary amount of air very soon become tiresome. The effort is wholly voluntary, and the muscles soon weary. When, however, a thirst for air is created by some active exercise which fills the blood with carbonic-acid gas, so that deeper and more rapid breathing is necessary to rid the body of this poisonous gas and to take in a supply of oxygen in its place, the act of breathing is no longer difficult, embarrassing, or tiresome, but is, on the other hand, a pleasure and a gratification. The impulse which comes from within, from the so-called respiratory centers, so excites the respiratory muscles that they cause the chest to execute the strongest breathing movements with the greatest ease, ventilating every portion of the lungs, filling every air-cell to its utmost capacity.
ONE OF THE
TRAILS UP WHICH THE HOPIS CLIMB AT FULL SPEED.
“Runners always have large and active chests, whereas sedentary persons have chests of limited capacity and rigid walls. When a chest is not stretched to its utmost capacity many times daily, it rapidly loses its flexibility. This is especially true after the age of thirty. In persons who have passed middle life, the rigidity of the chest is so great that there can be no very considerable increase in size. By development of the respiratory muscles the chest capacity may be to some degree increased, but the proper time for chest development is in childhood and youth. At this period, also, the integrity of the heart renders possible without injury those vigorous exercises which are essential to secure the highest degree of chest development.
“Probably the best of all exercises for the development of the chest and breathing powers is swimming. The position of the body, the head held well back and the chest well forward, and the active movements of the arms and limbs render swimming a most efficient breathing exercise. The contact of cold water with the skin also actively stimulates the movement of the chest, while at the same time it renders possible prolonged and vigorous muscular movements by increasing the energy and activity of the muscles.
“Special breathing exercises, as well as those active muscular movements which induce a thirst for air, are beneficial to the lungs by maintaining the flexibility of the chest, strengthening the respiratory muscles, and ventilating the lungs. These movements also exercise a most extraordinary beneficial effect upon the stomach, liver, and other organs which lie below the diaphragm. Each time the diaphragm contracts, it gives the liver, stomach, and adjacent organs a hearty squeeze, so to speak, emptying out the blood contained in these parts as one may by compression empty a moist sponge. All movements which increase the strength of the abdominal muscles are an important means of aiding and improving the breathing function.”
From this it will be seen, therefore, that everything that prevents the full and free exercise of the lungs, especially in the lower portions, is of direct injury to the body. Men need all the lung capacity and power they can gain in order to sustain their energy in the battle of life; and women, especially young women, who are to become the future mothers of the race, should be taught that the art of healthy, deep breathing is one of the fine arts, and the most important one that they can learn.
NAVAHO BLANKET WEAVER IN HER OPEN AIR WORK-SHOP.
CHAPTER IV
THE INDIAN AND OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE
The Indian is an absolute believer in the virtue of the outdoor life, not as an occasional thing, but as his regular, set, uniform habit. He lives out of doors; not only does his body remain in the open, but his mind, his soul, are ever also there. Except in the very cold weather his house is free to every breeze that blows. He laughs at “drafts.” “Catching cold” is a something of which he knows absolutely nothing. When he learns of white people shutting themselves up in houses into which the fresh, pure, free air of the plains and deserts, often laden with the healthful odors of the pines, firs, balsams of the forest, cannot come, he shakes his head at the folly, and feels as one would if he saw a man slamming his door in the face of his best friend. Virtually he sleeps out of doors, eats out of doors, works out of doors. When the women make their baskets and pottery, it is always out of doors, and their best beadwork is always done in the open. The men make their bows and arrows, dress their buckskin, make their moccasins and buckskin clothes, and perform nearly all their ceremonials out of doors.
Our greatest scientific fighters against tuberculosis are emulating the Indian in the fact that even in the winter of the East they advocate that their patients sleep out of doors. Pure air, and abundance of it, is their cry.
“Taking cold” comes, not from breathing “night air,” but generally from inflammation of the mucous membranes caused by impure air,—the air of a heated room from which all the pure air has been exhausted by being breathed again and again into the lungs of its deluded occupants, each exhalation sending with it a fresh amount of poison to vitiate the little good that remains.
Men often go to gymnasiums in the city to get exercise. The air is vitiated by the presence of others, and as respiration is increased by the exercise, impure air is taken into the lungs, and the prime object of the exercise is defeated. For it is not so much to develop muscles as it is to stimulate the general action of the whole body that gymnastics should be indulged in. Vigorous exercise demands deep breathing; if the air breathed is pure, the blood thereby becomes more oxygenated or vivified. As this vitalized blood circulates, it carries its life-giving new strength and energy to every part of the body, so that the whole man feels the increased vigor. But let the air be impure, death instead of life is given to the blood. Hence, where possible, all vigorous exercise should be taken out of doors in the pure air and sunlight, and if this is not possible, every door, window, and avenue through which outside air can be brought inside should be placed wide open, and kept open during the whole time of the exercises. If spectators come, and on their account windows and doors are closed, a positive injury is being done to the exercisers. Far better turn out the spectators than shut out God’s pure air.
What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health. Think of the vigor and strength, the robustness and power, the joy and the health, that are the possession of men and women of outdoor life. Let any one who wishes to know what this means read John Muir’s Mountains of California. In it he tells of his years of experiences climbing the terribly difficult peaks of the Sierras, the exploring of glaciers, the sleeping out at night during snow-storms in the depth of winter without either an overcoat or a single blanket. One of the most thrilling of experiences is told as simply as the narrative of a child. He was out during a terrific wind-storm. Says he: “When the storm began to sound I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.”
Think of a city-bred man, a society man, deliberately walking out into a storm to enjoy it.
“It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills.... I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young sugar-pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and singing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond.
“I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,—spruce and fir and pine and leafless oak,—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own song and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen.
“Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of the topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
HAVASUPAI DRESSING BUCKSKIN.
“In its wildest sweeps my treetop described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried—bent almost to the ground, indeed, in heavy snows—without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook....
“I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.”
What an experience, and what a joy to feel one’s self able to enjoy it! I know what it is. Years before I had read this, I had had a similar experience when driving over the high Sierras from the borders of Oregon, Nevada, and California down into southern California. Imagine the ordinary business man, or clerk, or banker, or preacher, or lawyer, or doctor, daring to climb so high a tree, and especially during such a storm. Yet such a day so spent is worth more than a year of any ordinary man’s life.
Edward Robeson Taylor, the poet-mayor of San Francisco, once expressed his keen appreciation of what Nature gives to the man who loves her enough to test her. And he has made the test many a time, in the Sierras, in the forests, in the deserts, in the Grand Canyon, as well as on the Bay of San Francisco. He wrote:
“In him that on the rugged breast of mountain
Finds his joy and his repose,
Who makes the pine his fellow, and with zest
Treads the great glaciers and their kindred snows,
A strength is planted that in direst test
Dares all the devils of Danger to oppose.”
Then, too, there are marvelous healing powers in God’s great out-of-doors. The vis medicatrix Naturæ is no fiction of the imagination. If sick people knew enough, were wise enough, to go out into the open and discard all civilized modes of life, climbing mountains, sleeping on pine boughs, swimming in the streams, working in the soil, dabbling in the hot or cold springs, eating the ripe fruits and nuts, and bathing the whole body daily in bright sunshine, they would be brought to a health and vigor they had never before known.
I have often wondered why thoughtful white people have not observed that insanity is practically unknown amongst the Indians. Why? Our own great Emerson once wrote a clear answer.
“It was,” said he, “the practice of the Orientals, especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild animals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was quieted and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theaters, card-tables, the speculators who rush for investment at ten per cent, twenty per cent, cent per cent, are all more or less mad—these point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the fields the health of the mind.”
But not only does healing come to the mind in Nature: the diseased soul there finds medicine and health.
The well-beloved Robert Louis Stevenson was well aware of this out-of-door joy. Among many other fine things on the subject he once wrote the following which fully expresses my idea:
“To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.”
AN APACHE GRANDMOTHER AND SOME BASKETS OF HER OWN DESIGN AND WEAVE. ALL MADE IN THE OPEN AIR.
One of our great artists and writers, whose life went out a few years ago in sad eclipse, wrote with a clarity of vision that his awful experiences had taught him: “I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the land for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy, that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots; and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men. ... I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.”
How literally true to fact is this assurance of purification out in the great elemental forces and places of Nature, and how the Indian daily demonstrates it. Thousands can testify to it. Here one becomes soothed. The grinning faces of hate do not pursue him here. Nature is passionless to the hunted man. She is willing to be wooed and won, and then opens up her rich treasures to the guiltiest and vilest of men, until they regain the right angle of vision, then the desire for purification, then repentance, then assurance of forgiveness, and finally their self-respect. Then they are able to return (if necessity compels) to civilization and bear any punishment that may be awarded, for in the rugged arms of Nature they have absorbed strength and power,—strength of will and power of soul to dare and do that which the highest within them compels.
Who that has read the De Profundis of that erratic and brilliant genius, Oscar Wilde, has not felt the sad pathos and yet intense truth of his concluding words? They are Indian-like in their direct truth and native strength.
“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times I have been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt. She will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
This is one of the great wonders of the out-of-door life that the weary and sinful of the white race would do well to learn.
But not only does health of mind and soul return to the sinful in God’s great out-of-doors: the most vigorous and pure, healthy and perfect, minds and souls are expanded and strengthened with such contact. Buddha, Mahomet, Moses, David, Elijah, Christ, were all lovers of out-of-doors. Washington, Lincoln, and Garfield were all out-of-door men. One learns in the solitude and primitive frankness of the free life of the out doors to do his own thinking, untrammeled by convention or prejudice. He sees things as they are. His soul is unclothed, and there can no longer be any deception or pretense. So he becomes an individual; not a mere rote thinker of other’s thoughts, and not a mere parrot of other men’s ideas. Edwin Markham could never have written The Man with the Hoe had he lived only in the city. He would never have seen deeply enough, and he would never have dared brave the conventional prejudices of the civilized (?) world as he did in his poem, had he been city-bred. But because he thought nakedly before God and his own soul he was compelled to see the monstrousness of making a man—a son of God, created in His image—a mere clod of clay. The idea that this poem is a reflection upon labor is utter nonsense. It is merely a protest, strong, vigorous, forceful as a thunder-storm, against compelling some men to labor so hard that they have neither time nor opportunity for mental and spiritual occupation, and have thus even lost the desire for or hope of gaining it. Labor is ennobling, but man is made for more than mere physical labor. The unequal distribution of affairs in this life causes some men to have no physical labor, to their vast disadvantage, while others have nothing but physical labor, equally to their disadvantage. The finding of a just equilibrium between these two extremes, and then aiding the men of both extremes to see the need of each helping the other, or of taking some of the burden of the other, would result in the immediate benefiting of the race to an incalculable extent, both in body, mind, and soul. And it is this for which I plead, earnestly calling upon my fellows to so adjust their own lives that they will strike the happy mean, thus living (not merely talking about) the dignity of labor as well as the joy of mental and spiritual occupation.
Another important thing must not be overlooked. As a result of this out-of-door life the Indian is an early riser and an early retirer to bed. The civilized habit of turning night into day, living in the glare of gas and electric light, is, on the face of it, artificial, unnatural, and unhealthful. It is indefensible from every standpoint. There is not one word of good can be said of it. The day is made for work, the night for rest and sleep. The use of artificial light to the extent we indulge it in civilization is gradually rendering normal eyesight a rarity. Children are born with myoptic and other eye-diseased tendencies. Sometimes it seems as if more people, of all ages, wear glasses than use their natural eyesight, and this is but one of many sad consequences accruing in part from our reversal of the natural use of the day and night times.
HAPPY AND HEALTHY HOPI CHILDREN, ASKING THE AUTHOR FOR CANDY.
Many men, literary and others, wait until the quiet of evening to do their work. They often stimulate themselves with coffee, and even stronger beverages, and then work until the “wee sma’ hours,” by artificial light, after they have already done a fair day’s work. We used to hear a great many words of commendation of the youths in school and college who “burned the midnight oil.” If I had my way I would “use the leather strap” upon all these burners-up of their physical and mental forces at the time God intended they should be abed and asleep. The time for mental work is in the early morning after a hearty, healthy, good night’s sleep. The body is strengthened, the mind refreshed, and thought flows easily and readily, because all weariness has disappeared under the influence of “tired nature’s sweet restorer.” Mental work done at such time is not only a pleasure, but is well done, properly done, because the conditions are right for its doing.
Nor is this all. There is a mental and spiritual pleasure given to the early riser that the late sleeper knows nothing of. One of the most beautiful baskets in my historic collection of Indian baskets is one made by a Coahuila woman who depicted thereon the white light of the morning shining through the dark silhouettes of the sharp points of the giant cactus. Her æsthetic enjoyment was thus made the inspiration of a real work of art.
How much white people lose by not seeing and knowing the beauty of the early morning hours,—the hours just preceding dawn, and during the first outburst of the sun! A friend and I stood out the other morning before sunrise, looking at the exquisite delicate lights over the mountain peaks, and she gave expression to the above thought, and only a few days before I had said it to a friend as we had wended our way from El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon out to O’Neill Point to see the sunrise. Elisha Safford eloquently speaks as follows of this: