Retaliation for a Supposed Insult.
If there is a class that deserves severe treatment among the Indians it is these miserable reprobates, who still are busy preying upon the credulity of the people and working incalculable mischief.
At the present time there are several of these imposters among the bands in the Lower Fraser Valley. They have been for years a nuisance, the priests of paganism and the prophets of evil.
Their miserable pretensions we have ignored, and have left them out, as far as possible, in our social gatherings among the people.
Several years ago invitations to the wedding of two of our young people were sent to many of the Indians of the community, these witch doctors alone being purposely left out.
This enraged them so much that they announced that they would kill three persons who were at the gathering before a year was gone.
Shortly after one of the little pupils at the Institute, who had been ill for some time, died, and they immediately claimed credit for the child’s death. A little later a woman who attended was taken sick and also died, and according to the statements of the conjurers she was victim number two.
During the following summer a number of our Indians, as usual, went down to the salmon fishing at the mouth of the river, among whom was a middle-aged chief, one of our most intelligent Indians, and, we considered, one of our truest Christians.
Typhoid was epidemic that year at Steveston, and this chief was taken down with the fever.
Dr. Large, our energetic and successful medical missionary at Bella Bella, was then at the Fraser River for the summer season, and visited and gave the chief medical attention. He appeared to improve under treatment and bade fair speedily to recover, but in an unexplainable manner to the medical man the recovery was delayed. He found, on inquiry, that the chief was not taking the medicine prescribed, and had said that he did not think he would ever get well. When pressed for his reasons, he confessed the belief that he was the third victim of the witch-doctors’ rage, and that he could not live. The missionary reasoned with him, pleaded with him, prayed with him, but without avail, and finally the poor fellow died, the victim of his own superstitious fears, upon which the conjurers had worked all too successfully.
We were grieved beyond measure that such a noble life had been thus cut short, and that the power of superstition and ignorance was still so manifest.
This power of the medicine-man is coupled with the Indian’s belief in witchcraft. No heathen Indian ever dies a natural death, for every sickness or accident is due, according to their superstitious view, to the evil eye or malign spell of someone who is evilly disposed towards them. When calamity or sickness comes they immediately apply to the witch-doctor to perform his incantations and discover the witch. Sometimes it is an old woman of the tribe, whose term of life is now necessarily short; sometimes it is a slave or a bright girl or boy, and sometimes a whole family are pointed out as the “guilty ones” and doomed to death. The atrocities committed by the natives, moved by this dreadful superstition, are numberless and in many cases too dreadful to relate. How fervently we pray that the enlightening influence of the Holy Spirit may penetrate the gloom of heathen darkness and forever drive out all the nameless horrors which belong to paganism.
CHAPTER XIII.
STRUGGLES WITH WHISKEY, AND THE RAVAGES OF FIRE-WATER.
“Mourn for the lost,—but pray,
Pray to our God above,
To break the fell destroyer’s sway,
And show His saving love.”
For hundreds of years the natives of the Pacific Coast of British Columbia have been exposed to the temptations of the white man’s whiskey. The traders on ships in those early years thought it to their advantage to take a good supply of rum with them in the traffic for furs, and the poor people became so infatuated with it that while it lasted they would not even go out after the pelts. Whether it was the awful effects of the whiskey traffic upon the natives, or the risk that the Company’s servants ran in dealing with drunken Indians, or the loss to the Company’s business due to the condition of the natives, we cannot say—perhaps it was all of these—but finally Sir George Simpson, the Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, forbade the sale of liquor at any of the trading posts.
Strong drink has been the greatest enemy to the Indians of the Coast and one of the greatest difficulties in the way of Christianizing and civilizing them.
At our first mission station, history has it, a coal mine was sold for a bottle of rum. We are not sure just how this occurred, but it is stated that an old Indian who made discovery of the first vein of coal was promised a bottle of rum and repairs to his old flint-lock musket if he would bring to Victoria, seventy-five miles away, a sample of the mineral, and afterwards show where the vein was located. The old man loaded his canoe with coal and paddled away for days until he reached the place, and delivered it to the party, who gave him the bottle of rum as agreed. The Indian was always afterwards known as “Coal Tyee.”
In our first work among the natives hardly a day passed but they had liquor, procured either from the miners or sailors, or from those contemptible characters who spent their time in vending the accursed “fire-water” among these deluded people. Many a score of bottles of whiskey had to be destroyed in those days. Sometimes, of course, the owners became terribly exasperated at our action, and we were always, while living right among them, exposed to danger from wild, drunken men. Two men followed me one night for some distance, and said they were determined to break my head with a bottle. Sometimes for whole nights together it would seem as if all of the people of the village were intoxicated, and often I have been called up at the midnight hour to settle some trouble, or possibly to prevent bloodshed, due to the presence of whiskey.
On a trip along the coast, near where Ladysmith now stands, a young man under the frenzy of whiskey had shot down his own father. A council of the chiefs and people was being held, and I was called in to witness and hear the speeches and the talk of vengeance on the white man who had given them the liquor. One after another spoke, and finally one chief directed a most appealing address to me.
“Oh, Missionary,” he said, “you bring us good words, the Book tells of good things, but look at that dead chief. Are you not ashamed of your white brother? Why don’t you convert him? He has the Book, why don’t he stop making and selling whiskey? Why don’t you convert the man who gave the liquor to that man who shot his own father?” And as the old orator poured forth his eloquent address in his own language, I felt, for the first time, ashamed that I was a white man.