Bill Nye's Sparks

by Bill Nye

He told us the thrilling story of the Spanish Sylph and how she was wrecked many years ago on the coast near his house, and how the Spanish dollars burst out of her gaping side and fell with a low, mellow plunk into the raging main.

How and then the sea has given up one of these "sand-dollars" as the years went by, and not over two years ago one was found along the shore near by. What I blame the Shinnecock Indians for is their fatal yearning to subsist solely on this precarious income.

But with the decline of the whaling industry, due somewhat to the great popularity of natural and acquired gas as a lubricant, together with the cheap methods of picking up electricity and preserving it for illuminating purposes, and also to the fact that whales are more skittish than they used to be, the Shinnecock whaler is left high and dry.

It is, indeed, a pathetic picture. Here on the stern and rock-bound coast, where their ancestors greeted Columbus and other excursionists as they landed on the new dock and at once had their pictures taken in a group for the illustration on the greenbacks, now the surviving relic of a brave people, with bowed heads and frosting locks, are waiting a few days only for the long, dark night of merciful oblivion.

So he walks in the night-time, all through the long fly time, he walks by the sorrowful sea, and he yearns to wake never, but lie there forever in the arms of the sheltering sea, to lie in the lap of the sea.

At least that is my idea of the way the Shinnecock feels about it.

The Indian race, wherever we find it, gives us a wonderful illustration of the great, inherent power of rum as a human leveler. The Indian has, perhaps, greater powers of endurance than the white man, and enters into the great unequal fight with rum almost hilariously, but he loses his presence of mind and forgets to call a cab at the proper moment. This is a matter that has never been fully understood even by the pale face, and of course the Indian is a perfect child in the great conflict with rum. The result is that the Indian is passing away under our very eyes, and the time will soon come when the Indian agent will have to seek some other healthful, outdoor exercise.

So the consumptive Shinnecock, the author of "Shinny on Your Own Ground and Other Games," is soon to live only in the flea-bitten records of a great nation. Once he wrote pieces for the boys to speak in school, and contributed largely to McGuffy's and Sander's periodicals, but now you never hear of an Indian who is a good extemporaneous public speaker, or who can write for sour apples.

He no longer makes the statement that he is an aged hemlock, that his limbs are withered and his trunk attached by the constable. He has ceased to tell through the columns of the Fifth Reader how swift he used to be as a warrior and that the war-path is now overgrown with grass. He very seldom writes anything for the papers except over the signature of Veritas, and the able young stenographer who used to report his speeches at the council fire seems to have moved away.

Two hundred and fifty years ago the Shinnecock Hills were covered by a dense forest, but in that brief period, as if by magic, two and one-half acres of that ground have been cleared, which is an average of an entire acre for every hundred years. When we stop to consider that very little of this work was done by the women and that the men have to attend to the cleaning of the whales in order to prepare them for the table, and also write their contributions for the school-books and sign treaties with the White Father at Washington, we are forced to admit that had the Indian's life been spared for a few thousand years more he would have been alive at the end of that time.