It always has seemed strange to me that, in the prodigious interest felt in England for the American Indian, an interest shown in the thronging, gaping sight-seers that surrounded every taciturn red-man who visited the Old World, no fashions of ornament or dress were copied as gay, novel, or becoming. The Indian afforded startling detail to interest the most jaded fashion-seeker. The Works of Captain John Smith, Strachey’s Historie of Travaile into Virginia, the works of Roger Williams, of John Josselyn, the letters of various missionaries, give full accounts of their brilliant attire; and many of these works were illustrated. The beautiful mantles of the Virginia squaws, made of carefully dressed skins, were tastefully fringed and embroidered with tiny white beads and minute disks of copper, like spangles, which, with the buff of the dressed skin, made a charming color-study—copper and buff—picked out with white. Sometimes small brilliant shells or feathers were added to the fringes. An Indian princess, writes one chronicler, wore a fair white deerskin with a frontal of white coral and pendants of “great but imperfect-colored and worse-drilled pearls”—our modern baroque pearls. A chain of linked copper encircled her neck; and her maid brought to her a mantle called a “puttawas” of glossy blue feathers sewed so thickly and evenly that it seemed like heavy purple satin.
A traveller wrote thus of an Indian squaw and brave:—
“His wife was very well favored, of medium stature and very bashful. She had on her back a long cloak of leather, with the fur side next to her body. About her forehead she had a band of white coral. In her ears she had bracelets of pearls hanging down to her waist. The rest of her women of the better sort had pendants of copper hanging in either ear, and some of the children of the King’s brother and other noblemen, had five or six in either ear. He himself had upon his head a broad plate of gold or copper, for being unpolished we knew not which metal it might be, neither would he by any means suffer us to take it off his head. His apparel was like his wife’s, only the women wear their hair long on both sides of the head, and the men on but one side. They are of color yellowish, and their hair black for the most part, and yet we saw children who had very fine auburn and chestnut colored hair.”
John Josselyn wrote of tawny beauties:—
“They are girt about the middle with a Zone wrought with Blue and White Beads into Pretty Works. Of these Beads they have Bracelets for the Neck and Arms, and Links to hang in their Ears, and a Fair Table curiously made up with Beads Likewise to wear before their Breast. Their Hair they combe backward, and tye it up short with a Border about two Handsfull broad, wrought in works as the Other with their Beads.”
Powhatan’s “Habit” still exists. It is in England, in the Tradescant Collection which formed the nucleus of the Ashmolean Collection. It was probably presented by Captain John Smith himself. It is made of two deerskins ornamented with “roanoke” shell-work, about seven feet long by five feet wide. Roanoke is akin to wampum, but this is made of West Indian shells. The figures are circles, a crude human figure and two mythical composite animals. He also wore fine mantles of raccoon skins. A conjurer’s dress was simply a girdle with a single deerskin, while a great blackbird with outstretched wings was fastened to one ear—a striking ornament. I am always delighted to read such proof as this of a fact that I have ever known, namely, that the American Indian is the most accomplished, the most telling poseur the world has ever known. The ear of the Indian man and woman was pierced along the entire outer edge and filled with long drops, a fringe of coral, gold, and pearl. The wives of Powhatan wore triple strings of great pearls close around their throats, and a long string over one shoulder, while their mantles were draped to show their full handsome neck and arms. Altogether, with their carefully dressed hair, they would have made in full dress a fine show in a modern opera-box, and, indeed, the Indian squaws did cause vast exhibition of curiosity and delight when they visited London and were taken sight-seeing and sight-seen.
As early as 1629 an Indian chief with his wife and son came from Nova Scotia to England. Lord Poulet paid them much attention in Somersetshire, and Lady Poulet took Lady Squaw up to London and gave her a necklace and a diamond, which I suppose she wore with her blue and white beads.
Be the story of the saving of John Smith by Pocahontas a myth or the truth, it forever lives a beautiful and tender reality in the hearts of American children. Pocahontas was not the only Indian squaw who played a kindly part in the first colonization of this country. There were many, though their deeds and names are forgotten; and there was one Indian woman whose influence was much greater and more prolonged than was that of Pocahontas, and was haloed with many years of exciting adventure as well as romance. Let me recount a few details of her life, that you may wonder with me that the only trace of Indian life marked indelibly on England was found on the swinging signs of inns known by the name of “The Bell Savage,” “La Belle Sauvage,” and even “The Savage and Bell.”
This second Indian squaw was a South Carolina neighbor of our beloved Pocahontas; she had not, alas, the lovely disposition and noble character of Powhatan’s daughter. She was systematically and constitutionally mischievous, like a rogue elephant, so I call her a rogue squaw. Her name was Coosaponakasee. The name is too long and too hard to say with frequency, so we will do as did her English friends and foes—call her Mary. Indeed, she was baptized Mary, for she was a half-breed, and her white father had her reared like a Christian, had her educated like an English girl as far as could be done in the little primitive settlement of Ponpon, South Carolina. It will be shown that the attempt was not over-successful.
She was a princess, the niece of crafty old Brim, the king of two powerful tribes of Georgia Indians, the Creeks and Uchees. In 1715, when she was about fifteen years old, a fierce Indian war broke out in the early spring, and at the defeat of the Indians she promptly left her school and her church and went out into the wilds, a savage among savages, preferring defeat and a wild summer in the woods with her own people to decorous victory within doors with her fellow Christians.