213.—A SIOUX CHIEF.
During a journey to the north-east of America in 1867, M. L. Simonin had an opportunity of visiting a Sioux village, and we avail ourselves of a few of his descriptions. It consisted of about a hundred huts, made with poles and bison skins, or pieces of stitched cloth. The entrance to them was by a low narrow hole covered over with a beaver skin. A fire blazed in the centre of each hovel, and around it were pots and kettles for the repast. The smoke which escaped at the top rendered this abode intolerable. Beds, mattresses, cooking utensils, quarters of wild bison, some raw, others dried and smoked, were scattered here and there. Half-naked children, girls and boys, scampered about outside, as well as troops of dogs that constituted at once their protectors, their vigilant sentinels, and their food.
M. Simonin went inside many of the huts, where warriors were silently playing cards, using leaden balls for stakes. Others, accompanied by the noise of discordant singing and tambourines, were playing at a game resembling the Italian “mora,” the score of which was marked with arrows stuck in the ground. Some tents, in which sorcery, or “great medicine,” was being practised, were prohibited to the visitor. The women were sitting in a ring round some of the wigwams, doing needle-work, ornamenting necklaces or mocassins with beads, or tracing patterns on bison skins.
Some old matrons were preparing hides stretched on stakes, by rubbing them with freestone and steel chisels set in bone handles. The squaws of the Sioux, on whom, moreover, all domestic cares fall, are far from handsome. They are the slaves of the man who purchases them for a horse or the skin of a bison. The great Sioux nation numbers about thirty-five thousand individuals.
The same gentleman from whom we have just been quoting, was enabled to make some observations among the Crows, a tribe of Prairie Indians who are neighbours of the Sioux. Their features are broadly marked, their stature gigantic, and their frames athletic, while, according to M. Simonin, their majestic countenances recall the types of the Roman Cæsars as we see them delineated on antique medals.
The traveller was admitted into the hut of the chiefs, where the “Sachems” were seated in a circle, and as he touched their hands successively, they uttered a guttural “a hou,” a sound which serves as a salutation among the Red Skins. He smoked the calumet.
These men had their cheeks tattooed in vermilion. They were scarcely covered; one had a woollen blanket, the next a buffalo hide or the incomplete uniform of an officer, while the upper part of another’s body was naked. Several wore collars or eardrops of shells or animals’ teeth. Hanging from the neck of one was a silver medal bearing the effigy of a President of the United States, which he had received when he went on a mission to Washington in 1853; and a horse, rudely carved in the same metal, adorned the breast of another of their number.
M. Simonin was afterwards present at a council of the Crow Indians, but we do not intend to give any report of this conference of savages, of which, however, the reader may form some idea by casting a glance at [fig. 214].
In dealing with the relations existing between the wild Indians of North America and the civilized inhabitants, that is to say, the Americans of the United States, M. Simonin enters into some interesting reflections which we believe we ought to reproduce.
“A singular race,” says M. Simonin, “is that of the Red Skins, among whom Nature has so lavishly apportioned the finest land existing on the globe, a rich alluvial soil, deep, level, and well watered; still this race has not yet emerged from the primitive stage which must be everywhere traversed by humanity at the outset—the stage of hunters and nomads, the age of stone! If the Whites had not brought them iron, the Indians would still use flint weapons, like man before the Deluge, who sheltered himself in caverns and was contemporary in Europe with the mammoth. Beyond the chase and war, the wild tribes of North America shun work; women, among them, perform all labour. What a contrast to the toiling, busy population around them, whose respect for women is so profound! This population hems them in, completely surrounds them at the present day, and all is over with the Red Skins if they do not consent to retire into the land reserved for them.