Acknowledgments are due the officers and members of the Office of Indian Affairs and the War Department for courteous assistance in obtaining documentary information and in replying to letters of inquiry; to Mr De Lancey W. Gill and Mr J. K. Hillers and their assistants of the art and photographic divisions of the United States Geological Survey; to Mr A. R. Spofford, Librarian of Congress; to Mr F. V. Coville, botanist, Agricultural Department; Honorable T. J. Morgan, former Commissioner of Indian Affairs; Major J. W. MacMurray, first artillery, United States Army; Dr Washington Matthews, surgeon, United States Army; Captain H. L. Scott, seventh cavalry, United States Army; Captain J. M. Lee, ninth infantry, United States Army; Captain E. L. Huggins, second cavalry, United States Army, of the staff of General Miles; the late Captain J. G. Bourke, third cavalry, United States Army; Captain H. G. Browne, twelfth infantry, United States Army; Judge James Wickersham, Tacoma, Washington; Dr George Bird Grinnell, editor of “Forest and Stream,” New York city; Mr Thomas V. Keam and the late A. M. Stephen, Keams Canyon, Arizona; Rev. H. R. Voth, Oraibi, Arizona; General L. W. Colby, Washington, District of Columbia; Mr D. B. Dyer, Augusta, Georgia; Rev. Myron Eells, Tacoma, Washington; Mr Emile Berliner and the Berliner Gramophone Company, for recording, and Professors John Philip Sousa and F. W. V. Gaisberg, for arranging the Indian music; W. S. Godbe, Bullionville, Nevada; Miss L. McLain, Washington City; Addison Cooper, Nashville, Tennessee; Miss Emma C. Sickels, Chicago; Professor A. H. Thompson, United States Geological Survey, Washington; Mrs L. B. Arnold, Standing Rock, North Dakota; Mr C. H. Bartlett, South Bend, Indiana; Dr T. P. Martin, Taos, New Mexico, and to the following Indian informants and interpreters: Philip Wells, Louis Menard, Ellis Standing Bear, American Horse, George Sword, and Fire Thunder, of Pine Ridge, South Dakota; Henry Reid, Rev. Sherman Coolidge, Norcok, Sage, and Sharp Nose, of Fort Washakie, Wyoming; Charley Sheep of Walker river, Nevada; Black Coyote, Sitting Bull, Black Short Nose, George Bent, Paul Boynton, Robert Burns, Jesse Bent, Clever Warden, Grant Left-hand, and the Arapaho police at Darlington, Oklahoma; Andres Martinez, Belo Cozad, Paul Setkopti, Henry Poloi, Little Bow, William Tivis, George Parton, Towakoni Jim, Robert Dunlap, Kichai, John Wilson, Tama, Igiagyahona, Deoñ, Mary Zotom, and Eliza Parton of Anadarko, Oklahoma.
THE NARRATIVE
Chapter I
PARADISE LOST
There are hours long departed which memory brings
Like blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart.
Moore.
The wise men tell us that the world is growing happier—that we live longer than did our fathers, have more of comfort and less of toil, fewer wars and discords, and higher hopes and aspirations. So say the wise men; but deep in our own hearts we know they are wrong. For were not we, too, born in Arcadia, and have we not—each one of us—in that May of life when the world was young, started out lightly and airily along the path that led through green meadows to the blue mountains on the distant horizon, beyond which lay the great world we were to conquer? And though others dropped behind, have we not gone on through morning brightness and noonday heat, with eyes always steadily forward, until the fresh grass began to be parched and withered, and the way grew hard and stony, and the blue mountains resolved into gray rocks and thorny cliffs? And when at last we reached the toilsome summits, we found the glory that had lured us onward was only the sunset glow that fades into darkness while we look, and leaves us at the very goal to sink down, tired in body and sick at heart, with strength and courage gone, to close our eyes and dream again, not of the fame and fortune that were to be ours, but only of the old-time happiness that we have left so far behind.
As with men, so is it with nations. The lost paradise is the world’s dreamland of youth. What tribe or people has not had its golden age, before Pandora’s box was loosed, when women were nymphs and dryads and men were gods and heroes? And when the race lies crushed and groaning beneath an alien yoke, how natural is the dream of a redeemer, an Arthur, who shall return from exile or awake from some long sleep to drive out the usurper and win back for his people what they have lost. The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesûnanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity.
Probably every Indian tribe, north and south, had its early hero god, the great doer or teacher of all first things, from the Inskeha and Manabozho of the rude Iroquoian and Algonquian to the Quetzalcoatl, the Bochica, and the Viracocha of the more cultivated Aztecs, Muyscas, and Quichuas of the milder southland. Among the roving tribes of the north this hero is hardly more than an expert magician, frequently degraded to the level of a common trickster, who, after ridding the world of giants and monsters, and teaching his people a few simple arts, retires to the upper world to rest and smoke until some urgent necessity again requires his presence below. Under softer southern skies the myth takes more poetic form and the hero becomes a person of dignified presence, a father and teacher of his children, a very Christ, worthy of all love and reverence, who gathers together the wandering nomads and leads them to their destined country, where he instructs them in agriculture, house building, and the art of government, regulates authority, and inculcates peaceful modes of life. “Under him, the earth teemed with fruits and flowers without the pains of culture. An ear of Indian corn was as much as a single man could carry. The cotton, as it grew, took of its own accord the rich dyes of human art. The air was filled with intoxicating perfumes and the sweet melody of birds. In short, these were the halcyon days, which find a place in the mythic systems of so many nations in the Old World. It was the golden age of Anahuac.” ([Prescott], 1.)[1] When at last his work is well accomplished, he bids farewell to his sorrowing subjects, whom he consoles with the sacred promise that he will one day return and resume his kingdom, steps into his magic boat by the seashore, and sails away out of their sight to the distant land of sunrise.
Such was Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, and such in all essential respects was the culture god of the more southern semicivilized races. Curiously enough, this god, at once a Moses and a messiah, is usually described as a white man with flowing beard. From this and other circumstances it has been argued that the whole story is only another form of the dawn myth, but whether the Indian god be an ancient deified lawgiver of their own race, or some nameless missionary who found his way across the trackless ocean in the early ages of Christianity, or whether we have here only a veiled parable of the morning light bringing life and joy to the world and then vanishing to return again from the east with the dawn, it is sufficient to our purpose that the belief in the coming of a messiah, who should restore them to their original happy condition, was well nigh universal among the American tribes.