117. HUNTING BISON IN THE SNOW.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CREE INDIANS, OR EYTHINYUWUK.
The various Tribes of the Crees.—Their Conquests and subsequent Defeat.—Their Wars with the Blackfeet.—Their Character.—Tattooing.—Their Dress.—Fondness for their Children.—The Cree Cradle.—Vapor Baths.—Games.—Their religious Ideas.—The Cree Tartarus and Elysium.
The various tribes of the Crees, or Eythinyuwuk, range from the Rocky Mountains and the plains of the Saskatchewan to the swampy shores of Hudson’s Bay. Towards the west and north they border on the Tinné, towards the east and south, on the Ojibbeway or Sauteurs, who belong like them to the great family of the Lenni-lenape Indians, and inhabit the lands between Lake Winipeg and Lake Superior.
About sixty years since, at the time when Napoleon was deluging Europe with blood, the Crees likewise played the part of conquerors, and subdued even more extensive, though less valuable domains.
Provided with fire-arms, which at that time were unknown to their northern and western neighbors, they advanced as far as the Arctic Circle, imposing tribute on the various tribes of the Tinné. But their triumphs were not more durable than those of the great European conqueror.
The small-pox broke out among them and swept them away by thousands. Meanwhile the Tinné tribes had remained untouched by this terrible scourge; and as the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company, advancing farther and farther to the west and north, had likewise made them acquainted with the use of fire-arms, they in their turn became the aggressors, and drove the Crees before them. Their former conquerors now partly migrated to the south, and leaving the forest region, where they had hunted the reindeer and the elk, spread over the prairies of the Saskatchewan, where they now pursued the herds of bison, sometimes driving them over a precipice, or chasing them on foot through the snow. But in their new abodes they became engaged in constant feuds with their new neighbors the Assiniboins and Blackfeet, who of course resented their intrusion.
The romance in which the manners and character of the Indians are portrayed might lead us to attribute to these people a loftiness of soul for which it would be vain to look in the present day, and which without much skepticism we may assert they never really possessed. Actions prompted only by the caprice of a barbarous people have been considered as the results of refined sentiment; and savage cunning, seen through the false medium of prejudice, assumed the nobler proportions of a far-sighted policy. But though the history of the wars of the Indians among themselves and with the Europeans affords but few instances of heroism, it abounds in traits of revolting cruelty, and in pictures of indescribable wretchedness.
