The descendants of the men who gave these “bounties” and “encouragements,” have, in our own day, caressed, and wept and lamented over the tawny murderer, Black-Hawk, and his “wrongs” and “misfortunes;” but the theatre of Indian warfare was then removed a little farther west; and the atrocities of Haverhill and Deerfield were perpetrated on the western prairies, and not amid the forests of the east! Yet I do not mean, by referring to this passage of history—or to the rivers of wasted sentiment poured out a few years ago—so much to condemn our forefathers, or to draw invidious comparisons between them and others, as to show, that the war of extermination, sometimes waged by western rangers, was not without example—that the cruelty and hatred of the pioneer to the barbarous Indian, might originate in exasperation, which even moved the puritans; and that the lamentations, over the fictitious “wrongs” of a turbulent and bloody savage, might have run in a channel nearer home.
Hatred of the Indian, among the pioneers, was hereditary; there was scarcely a man on the frontier, who had not lost a father, a mother, or a brother, by the tomahawk; and not a few of them had suffered in their own persons. The child, who learned the rudiments of his scanty education at his mother's knee, must decipher the strange characters by the straggling light which penetrated the crevices between the logs; for, while the father was absent, in the field or on the war-path, the mother was obliged to bar the doors and barricade the windows against the savages. Thus, if he did not literally imbibe it with his mother's milk, one of the first things the pioneer learned, was dread, and consequently hatred, of the Indian. That feeling grew with his growth, strengthened with his strength—for a life upon the western border left but few days free from sights of blood or mementoes of the savage. The pioneer might go to the field in the morning, unsuspecting; and, at noon, returning, find his wife murdered and scalped, and the brains of his little ones dashed out against his own doorpost! And if a deadly hatred of the Indian took possession of his heart, who shall blame him? It may be said, the pioneer was an intruder, seeking to take forcible possession of the Indian's lands—and that it was natural that the Indian should resent the wrong after the manner of his race. Granted: and it was quite as natural that the pioneer should return the enmity, after the manner of his race!
But the pioneer was not an intruder.
For all the purposes, for which reason and the order of Providence authorize us to say, God made the earth, this continent was vacant—uninhabited. And—granting that the savage was in possession—for this is his only ground of title, as, indeed, it is the foundation of all primary title—there were at the period of the first landing of white men on the continent, between Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico, east of the Mississippi, about one hundred and eighty thousand Indians.[72] That region now supports at least twenty millions of civilized people, and is capable of containing quite ten times that number, without crowding! Now, if God made the earth for any purpose, it certainly was not that it should be monopolized by a horde of nomad savages!
But an argument on this subject, would not be worth ink and paper; and I am, moreover, aware, that this reasoning may be abused. Any attempt to construe the purposes of Deity must be liable to the same misapplication. And, besides, it is not my design to go so far back; I seek not so much to excuse as to account for—less to justify than to analyze—the characteristics of the class before me. I wish to establish that the pioneer hatred of the Indian was not an unprovoked or groundless hatred, that the severity of his warfare was not a mere gratuitous and bloody-minded cruelty. There are a thousand actions, of which we are hearing every day, that are indefensible in morals: and yet we are conscious while we condemn the actors, that, in like circumstances, we could not have acted differently. So is it with the fierce and violent reprisals, sometimes made by frontier rangers. Their best defence lies in the statement that they were men, and that their manhood prompted them to vengeance. When they deemed themselves injured, they demanded reparation, in such sort as that demand could then be made—at the muzzle of a rifle or the point of a knife. They were equal to the times in which they lived.—Had they not been so, how many steamboats would now be floating on the Mississippi?
There was no romance in the composition of the pioneer—whatever there may have been in his environment. His life was altogether too serious a matter for poetry, and the only music he took pleasure in, was the sound of a violin, sending forth notes remarkable only for their liveliness. Even this, he could enjoy but at rare periods, when his cares were forcibly dismissed. He was, in truth, a very matter-of-fact sort of person. It was principally with facts that he had to deal—and most of them were very “stubborn facts.” Indeed, it may be doubted—notwithstanding much good poetry has been written (in cities chiefly), on solitude and the wilderness—whether a life in the woods is, after all, very suggestive of poetical thoughts. The perils of the frontier must borrow most of their “enchantment” from the “distance;” and its sufferings and hardships are certainly more likely to evoke pleasant fancies to him who sits beside a good coal fire, than to one whose lot it is to bear them. Even the (so-called) “varied imagery” of the Indian's eloquence—about which so much nonsense has been written—is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. An Indian, as we have said before, has no humor—he never understands a jest—his wife is a beast of burthen—heaven is a hunting-ground—his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, or sentiments. And yet he lives in the wilderness all the days of his life! The only trait he has, in common with the poetical character, is his laziness.
But the pioneer was not indolent, in any sense. He had no dreaminess—meditation was no part of his mental habit—a poetical fancy would, in him, have been an indication of insanity. If he reclined at the foot of a tree, on a still summer day, it was to sleep: if he gazed out over the waving prairie, it was to search for the column of smoke which told of his enemy's approach: if he turned his eyes toward the blue heaven, it was to prognosticate to-morrow's storm or sunshine: if he bent his gaze upon the green earth, it was to look for “Indian sign” or buffalo trail. His wife was only a help-mate—he never thought of making a divinity of her—she cooked his dinner, made and washed his clothes, bore his children, and took care of his household. His children were never “little cherubs,”—“angels sent from heaven”—but generally “tow-headed” and very earthly responsibilities. He looked forward anxiously, to the day when the boys should be able to assist him in the field, or fight the Indian, and the girls to help their mother make and mend. When one of the latter took it into her head to be married—as they usually did quite early in life; for beaux were plenty and belles were “scarce”—he only made one condition, that the man of her choice should be brave and healthy. He never made a “parade” about anything—marriage, least of all. He usually gave the bride—not the “blushing” bride—a bed, a lean horse, and some good advice: and, having thus discharged his duty in the premises, returned to his work, and the business was done.
The marriage ceremony, in those days, was a very unceremonious affair. The parade and drill which now attend it, would then have been as ridiculous as a Chinese dance; and the finery and ornament, at present understood to be indispensable on such occasions, then bore no sway in fashion. Bridal wreaths and dresses were not known; and white kid gloves and satin slippers never heard of. Orange blossoms—natural and artificial—were as pretty then as now; but the people were more occupied with substance, than with emblem.
The ancients decked their victims for the sacrifice with gaudy colors, flags, and streamers; the moderns do the same, and the offerings are sometimes made to quite as barbarous deities.
But the bride of the pioneer was clothed in linsey-wolsey, with hose of woollen yarn; and moccasins of deer-skin—or as an extra piece of finery, high-quartered shoes of calf-skin—preceded satin slippers. The bridegroom came in copperas-colored jeans—domestic manufacture—as a holiday suit; or, perhaps, a hunting-shirt of buckskin, all fringed around the skirt and cape, and a “coon-skin” cap, with moccasins. Instead of a dainty walking-stick, with an opera-dancer's leg, in ivory, for head, he always brought his rifle, with a solid maple stock; and never, during the whole ceremony, did he divest himself of powder-horn and bullet-pouch.