Deer, antelope, and other skins are beautifully prepared for clothing, the hair being always removed. Some of these skins are so worked down that they are almost as thin and white as cotton cloth.
But all this is the mere commencement of the long and patient labor which the loving wife bestows on the robe which the husband is to use on dress occasions. The whole inner surface is frequently covered with designs beautifully worked with porcupine-quills, or grasses dyed in various colors. Sometimes the embellishments are paintings. Many elegant robes have taken a year to finish.
Every animal brought into the camp brings work for the squaw. The buck comes in with a deer and drops it at the door. The squaw skins it, cuts up and preserves the meat, dresses the skin and fashions it into garments for some member of the family. Until within a very few years the needle was a piece of sharpened bone; the thread a fiber of sinew. These are yet used in the ornamentation of robes, but almost all the ordinary sewing is done with civilized appliances.
All Indians are excessively fond of bead-work, and not only the clothing, moccasins, gun-covers, quivers, knife-sheaths, and tobacco-pouches, but every little bag or ornament, is covered with this work. Many of the designs are pretty and artistic. In stringing the beads for this work an ordinary needle is used; but in every case, except for articles made for sale, the thread is sinew.
The life in the winter encampment has scarcely been changed in any particular, but with the earliest spring come evidences of activity, a desire to get away; not attributable, as in the “good old time,” to plans of forays for scalps and plunder, but to the desire of each head of a lodge or band to reach, before any one else does, the particular spot on which he has fixed for his location for the summer. No sooner has he reached it than all hands, men, women, and children, fall to work as if the whole thing were a delightful frolic.
The last five years, more than any twenty preceding them, have convinced the wild Indians of the utter futility of their warfare against the United States Government. One and all, they are thoroughly whipped; and their contests, in the future, will be the acts of predatory parties (for which the Indians at large are no more responsible than is the Government of the United States for the acts of highwaymen in the Black Hills, or train-robbers in Missouri), or a deliberate determination of the bands and tribes to die fighting rather than by the slow torture of starvation to which the Government condemns them.
But the buffalo is gone; so also nearly all the other large game on which the Indians depended for food. They are confined to comparatively restricted reservations, and completely surrounded by whites. They are more perfectly aware of the stringency of their situation than any white man can possibly be, for they daily feel its pressure.
With no chance of success in war, with no possibility of providing food for themselves, they thoroughly comprehend that their only hope for the future is in Government aid, grazing cattle, and tilling the soil.
They do not like it, of course; it would be unnatural if they did. They accept it as the dire alternative against starvation.
Basing arguments on the Indian contempt for work, many men in and out of Congress talk eloquent nonsense of the impossibility of ever bringing them to agricultural pursuits. The average Indian has no more hatred of labor, as such, than the average white man. Neither will labor unless an object is to be attained. Both will labor rather than starve. Heretofore the Indian could comfortably support himself in his usual and preferred life without labor; and there being no other incentive he would have only proved himself an idiot had he worked without an object.