The Iroquois; or, the bright side of Indian character

by Anna C. Johnson

When the white men first came, the Indians looked upon them as superior beings. They were ready to worship Columbus and his little party, and all along on the coast, until their simple trust was outraged beyond endurance they welcomed the strangers—gave them food when they were hungry, and sheltered them when they were cold. It was not till their encroachments became alarming, that the Indian asserted his rights, and if in all cases he had been as justly and kindly dealt with as by the Quakers of Pennsylvania, there would not have been so dark a record of sin [[137]]and wrong, and torture. If none but men of principle had made treaties with them, and all whose duty it was to observe them, had kept their faith, revenge would not have come out so prominently in Indian character.

But it was not in obedience to national policy that those who were taken in battle were put to the torture, and burned and flayed. The Six Nations had never found it necessary to build prisons and dig dungeons for their own people. If a man committed murder, they sometimes decided that he should die, and sometimes bade him flee far away where none who knew him could ever look upon his face. But crimes were so rare that they had no criminal code, and when they overcame their enemies, they either adopted them and treated them as friends, or put them immediately to death.

White people have sometimes put Indians to death, and oftener put them in dungeons to waste and starve, but it was no part of their practice to adopt them and call them brethren! Had they sometimes done this, or sent them freely back to their friends unharmed, they might have conciliated where they only made more desperate.

When families were bereaved, they sought to be revenged on those who had bereaved them; and when warriors returned from battle, the prisoners were given up to the friends who were afflicted. With them alone it remained to decide the fate of those who fell into their hands. If they chose, they adopted them in place of the husbands and brothers who were slain; and if they so decided, they were put to death, and in any way they decreed.

If the manner in which their friends had been killed was aggravating and greatly enraged them, they were very likely to decide upon torture, and inflicted it in a manner to produce the greatest suffering. But even in such cases [[138]]they sometimes showed great magnanimity, and “returned good for evil.”

Children were very often adopted, and by a solemn ceremony received into a particular tribe, and evermore treated as one of their own people. We have been in the habit of listening to heart-rending stories of cruelties to captives, but captives who were adopted were never cruelly treated. Those who were immediately put to death experienced great suffering for a few hours, and those who were preserved were subject to hardships which seemed to them unspeakable, but they were such as are necessarily incident to Indian life. They had no written chronicles to tell to all future generations the wrongs and tortures to which they were subjected, but one who sits with them by their firesides, may have his blood frozen with horror at recitals of civilized barbarity.

And there is one species of wrong, of which no captive woman of any nation had to complain when she was thrown upon the tender mercies of Indian warriors. Not among all the dark and terrible records which their enemies have delighted to emblazon, is there a single instance of the outrage of that delicacy which a pure-minded woman cherishes at the expense of life, and sacrifices not to any species of mere animal suffering. Of what other nation can it be written, that their soldiers were not more terrible at the firesides of their enemies than on the battle field, with all the fierce engines of war at their command? To whatever motive it is to be ascribed, let this at least stand out on the pages of Indian history as an ever enduring monument to their honor. A little book, which professes to have been written for the sole purpose of recording and perpetuating Indian atrocities, and dwells upon them with infinite delight, alludes to this redeeming trait in Indian character, but attempts to ascribe it to the influence [[139]]of superstition, as if it were necessary to find some evil or deteriorating motive for every thing noble or pleasing in Indian character. I have no doubt that it was quite revolting to the general sentiment in an Indian community, to mingle their blood with that of a nation whom they looked up on as a race of evil spirits let loose, and I wonder that they should ever have received them, as they often did, into their families, and to their bosom friendships and confidences. But this hatred in other nations prompts to the very manifestation of which an Indian was never guilty. Their treatment of captives from among Indian nations was the same, and I know not that there has been any satisfactory solution of a characteristic which has been found among only one other civilized, Christian or barbarous nation. A wanderer among the western tribes once asked an Indian why they thus honored their women, and he said, “The Great Spirit taught them, and would punish them if they did not.” Among the Germans there existed the same respect for woman, till they became civilized. There may have been some superstitious fear, mingled with a strong governing and controlling principle, but it is not on this account the less marvellous that whole nations, consisting of millions, should have been so trained religiously or domestically, that no degree of beauty or fascination placed under their care, though hundreds of miles in the solitudes of the wilderness, should have tempted them from the strictest honor and the most delicate kindness.

Mary Jewison was eighty years a resident among the Senecas, and in the early part of the time the forests had few clearings, and the comforts and the vices of white men prevailed but little among them. She was born on the ocean, with the billowy sea for her cradle and the tempest for her lullaby. Her parents emigrated from England to this country in 1742, and settled in the unfortunate vale [[140]]of Wyoming, where date her first remembrances, which were of the woes that fell upon her family—the wail of the sorrow-stricken and the breaking of heart-strings.

The last meal they took together was a breakfast, after which the father and three eldest brothers went into the field, and Mary, with the other little children, were playing not far from the house. They were suddenly startled by a shriek, and knew it must be from their mother. On running in, they found her in the hands of two Indians, who were holding her fast. A little boy ran to call his father, and found him also bound by another of the party, and his eldest brother lying dead upon the earth. The two others fled to Virginia, where they had an uncle, as Mary afterwards learned, and those who remained were made captive and hurried into the woods.

All day they were obliged to march in single file over the rough, cold soil, with no time or permission for conversation, and the lash often applied to quicken their steps. Night found them in the heart of the wilderness, surrounded by their strange captors, and all the horrors of Indian life or Indian death staring them in the face. They had no hope of mercy, whether permitted to live or condemned to die.