“They make their shoes for common use, out of the skins of the bear and elk, well dressed and smoked to prevent hardening; and those for ornament, out of deer-skins, done in the like manner: but they chiefly go bare-footed, and always bare-headed. The men fasten several different sorts off beautiful feathers, frequently in tufts, or the wing of a red bird, or the skin of a small hawk, to a lock of hair on the crown of their heads. And every different nation when at war, trim their hair after a different manner, through contempt of each other; thus they can distinguish an enemy in the woods so far off as they can see him.
“The Indians flatten their heads in divers forms; but it is chiefly the crown of the head they depress, in order to beautify themselves, as their wild fancy terms it; for they call us long heads by way of contempt. The Choktah Indians flatten their foreheads from the top of the head to the eyebrows with a small bag of sand; which gives them a hideous appearance; as the forehead naturally shoots upwards according as it is flattened: thus the rising of the nose instead of being equidistant from the beginning of the chin to that of the hair, is, by their wild mechanism, placed a great deal nearer to the one and further from the other. The Indian nations round South Carolina, and all the way to New Mexico, to effect this, fix the tender infant on a kind of cradle, where his feet are tilted, above a foot higher than a horizontal position, his head bends back into a hole, made on purpose to receive it; where he bears the chief part of his weight on the crown of the head, upon a small bag of sand without being in the least able to move himself. The skull, resembling a fine cartilaginous substance, in its infant state, is capable of taking any impression. By this pressure, and their thus flattening the crown of the head, they consequently make their heads thick and their faces broad. May we not to this custom and as a necessary effect of this cause attribute their fickle, wild, and cruel tempers? Especially when we connect therewith, both a false education and great exercise to agitate their animal spirits. When the brain, in cooler people, is disturbed, it neither reasons nor determines with proper judgment. The Indians thus look on every thing around them through their own false medium; and vilify our heads because they have given a wrong turn to their own.”
The preceding description of Indian character is more deserving of attention on account of its simplicity, correctness, and the information it affords, than on account of the beauty of its style. Adair is indeed a harsh writer; yet he narrates facts and occurrences which fell beneath his own observation; and therefore his testimony is of considerable value. His history of the American Indians, whatever value we may attach to his theory respecting their origin affords many striking confirmations of the position we have assumed, namely, that the American Indians are not naturally and essentially inferior in physical capacity to any other race of men. Nor is Adair the only author who either adopts this opinion, or furnishes the facts from which it may be inferred. These facts may be found in the narratives of missionaries, traders, and almost all writers who have visited the Indian tribes.
James Buchanan, formerly his Britannic Majesty’s Consul for the State of New York, has some excellent observations on the evidences of general capacity among the Indians, in the first volume of his Sketches of their History and Customs. After describing the hospitable and polite reception which he met with from the children of the celebrated Mohawk Indian Chief, Captain Brandt, he observes:—“My thus becoming acquainted with this young lady and her brother, fully establishes in my mind all I was anxious to prove by the education of a young Indian: and many such instances might be adduced which would evince that wisdom, science, and exaltation of character, are not the exclusive property of any colour, tribe, or nation. The bravery, political sagacity, and knowledge of government, manifested by the negroes who now govern in St. Domingo, (not to mention other well known instances,) are calculated to allay the doubts which used to prevail as to the capacity of the African. But between the Indian of North America, and the African, there is a remarkable difference. The former never can be bowed to become the slave of man, to pay tribute, or to submit, by any hope of reward to live in vassalage. Free, like the son of Ishmael, he will die rather than yield his liberty; and he is, therefore, hunted down by the people who boast of civilisation and christianity, and who, while they value their own freedom, do not hesitate to extend their lands and property by the merciless destruction of the unoffending proprietor. But let not those who still claim the British name, nor the citizens of the United States deceive themselves in the belief that because the poor Indians, whose lands they possess, and whose rivers they navigate, have no powerful voice to blazon their wrongs, and hold them up to the abhorence of mankind, they will always rest unavenged; or that the civilization, which is pompously carried on, but which is in fact a slow consuming system of extinction, will avert the retributive justice which God will assuredly render. The poor Indians confess that for their crimes they are now placed by the Great Spirit under the feet of the white men, and in the midst of their sufferings, they pathetically warn their cruel oppressors that the time may come when the Lord will have pity on them, and in turn punish the Europeans. Truly the ways of the Almighty are wonderful! The apparent prosperity of the wicked are among the most unaccountable features of the will of our creator, and would be utterly without a solution had we not the Bible to guide us into a right understanding of his designs. However the Deist may scoff, or the philosopher doubt, yet therein we see that, though the wrath of God may be long delayed, the punishment of iniquity will assuredly come to pass. The reaction of crime and punishment is to be seen in the history of all nations. Let the European oppressors of the Indian savage, as he is called, look to it in time; and while the diffusion of the true principles of Christianity throughout the British Empire, is followed by clemency and mercy to the African, it is to be hoped the same benevolent spirit will extend itself to the noble-minded Aborigines of North America; and that instead of supplying arms, ammunition, blankets and rum, we may lead them to the arts and blessings of peace, and to the improvement of their admirable native talent.”[4]
Mr. Buchanan displays in this passage more of the piety of the saint, than of the wisdom of the philosopher. In our opinion, the Lord has but little to do with the oppression and gradual extirpation of the Indian tribes. These are the natural results of that peculiar system of policy pursued by the white people towards the Aborigines of America. As the tide of white population rolls on and extends itself inwards, the native tribes must disappear before it by retiring into the inaccessible forests and waste territories of the transatlantic world. Nor can they hope to successfully assert their rights until they become more highly civilized and more skillfully warlike than their oppressors. Then indeed, the Lord, aided by the puissant arms of thousands of Indian warriors, might inflict that retributive justice on Europeans, which Mr. Buchanan speaks of. The ample possession of the munitions of war, the diffusion of intelligence, and the union of all the Indian tribes, would more effectually curb the rapacity of white Christians than all the aid which the Lord affords.
Nor is it to be expected, that religion, as it is found in the Old and New Testaments, will effect the melioration of their condition. The chosen people of the Lord made slaves of some of the nations they conquered; and those they did not enslave they destroyed with a cruelty as relentless as it was atrocious. What more natural than for those who believe in the same God and draw their religion from the same source, to act in the same manner? The examples of murder, pillage, bloodshed, profligacy, and abominations of all kinds to be found in the Old Testament, would rather tend to deteriorate the character of the Indians than improve it, were the contents of that book made known to them. Bad as the Indians are, they have some nobility of mind among them. They do not betray the person with whom they have smoked the calumet, or pipe of peace, or the man to whom they have plighted their friendship. But in the Old Testament we find this done, as in the case of Jael and Sisera, and the action attributed to divine prompting. What good end can be answered by teaching the North American Indians a religion which has ever been followed by destruction, pillage, rapacity and bloodshed, persecution for opinion, and a long catalogue of evils? and which, however good it may be in some of its precepts, is nevertheless utterly unable to restrain the avarice and cruelty of its followers.
The celebrated French Essayist, Montaigne, between two or three hundred years ago, wrote as follows:—
“I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything I can gather, excepting that every one gives the title of barbarity to every thing that is not in use in his own country: as indeed we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live. There is always the true religion; there the perfect government, and the most exact and accomplished usance of things. They (the Indians) are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order.… These nations, then, seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not, as yet, much vitiated with any mixture of ours; but in such purity that I am sometimes troubled we were no sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in those natives, does not only surpass all the images with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy estate of man; but moreover the fancy and even the wish of philosophy itself. So native and so pure a simplicity, as we, by experience, see to be in them, could never enter into the imagination of the ancient philosophers, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice. Should I tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate nor political superiority, no use of service, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no proprieties, no employments but those of leisure, no respect of kindred but of common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine, and where so much as the very words which signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, destruction, and pardon were never heard of,—how much would he find his imaginary Republic short of this perfection.”[5]
This description is too highly coloured, and is in many respects incorrect. The savages of America are not in such a blissful state as Montaigne would leave the reader to infer; neither can it be said with truth that they are free from deceit, treachery, and avarice. It is true they exhibit many noble traits of character which might be copied with profit by their more civilized brethren; but these traits are generally associated with the vices peculiar to the savage state. In conducting our researches respecting them, therefore, we should carefully ascertain what amount of credibility is due to the statements of those writers who affirm their condition to be almost paradisiacal. Extremes ought to be avoided in most cases, especially with regard to the American Indians. Some authors have represented them as the vilest of men; cruel, blood-thirsty, and rapacious, and incapable of being civilized; while others have depicted them as a noble, high-minded, virtuous race, with scarcely a single vice in their character, or evil in their physical condition. If we adopt the mean of these extremes, we shall not be far from the truth.