To the American Indian

by Lucy Thompson

Another system is the “half married” one, the woman taking her husband to her house to live with her. By this marriage she is the absolute boss of the man and has complete control of all the children. She has the power to correct her husband in all his actions and can send him out to hunt, fish or work just as she deems proper, he being a slave to her, as they usually both belong to the class that are slaves. It amuses one to hear them use the term against white men that marry white women, the man having no home of his own, and the woman taking him to her home. They say that white man is half married just the same as our people are half married and that the white man can not walk out at any time as he is not boss for the woman owns everything. They have a third form of marriage that belongs to the middle class. These marriages are considered by the whole tribe as good marriages and the children born by these marriages have a good standing in all walks of life. The marriage is performed by a part barter and trade, such as giving in exchange a boat or fishing place or any other property of a personal nature. This ceremony is more of the common than the imposing way. Since the coming of the white man he has brought this marriage around to a simple form of buying outright by giving a price as one would for a horse, cow or any other purchase. The old Indian law was an exchange of valuable articles and often the woman did not go to the man she married and live with him in his own home until they had been married one, two or three years.

The Klamath Indians were, at the coming of the white man, a very large tribe, there being several thousand of them. It taxed every resource of the country in which they lived for all of them to obtain a subsistence, therefore everything was owned in the same way that it is now owned by the white man. The land was divided up by the boundaries of the creeks, ridges and the river. All open prairies for gathering grass seeds, such as Indian wheat, which looks similar to rye, besides other kinds of seed; the oak timber for gathering acorns, the sugar pine for gathering pine nuts, the hazel flats for gathering hazel nuts and the fishing places for catching salmon.

The most frugal and saving of the families had become the owners of these places and their ownership undisputed and these ownerships were handed down from one generation to another by will. In time this left a great many of them owning no property by which they could make a living and many of their own people became slaves to the wealthy class. They made the slaves work and kept them from starving, and by this there came about the “half married” system. There are some of these Indians that were born slaves living yet, and they are the ones that are always ready to tell the white man all of the Indian legends in a way to fit their own cases. They cannot tell the true legends at all, as they are ignorant of such facts. The wealthy ones would see that the men got wives and that the girls got husbands, build them houses and some families were very kind to their slaves. When they were sick they saw that they had doctors and the proper care. Some families were mean and over-bearing to their slaves, giving no care to the sick, letting them die and going so far as to throw them into a hole, leaving them there to suffer and starve until they died. This sort of treatment was looked down upon by the ones that had better humane feelings and they sometimes prevented such inhuman actions. The most of the doctors are women and they exercised great power, especially those who had a high standing as to family, and the art of curing most all diseases or cases of sickness. A few of the doctors were men and they used roots and herbs of different kinds and they are hard to beat as doctors in a great many kinds of sickness. They can cure the bite of a rattle snake, not one of them ever dying from the bite. I knew many of the people that were bitten by the rattle snake at different times and they were cured and lived to be very old. For this cure they use salt water out of the ocean and the root or the onion of what you call kelp and which is taken out of the ocean. They pound the onion of the kelp and make a poultice out of it, place it over the wound and keep it wet with the salt water, at the same time letting the patient drink all he can of the salt water. The patient is kept perfectly still and not allowed to move about more than is necessary. They bind the limb or place where the part is bitten to prevent the free circulation of the blood through these parts.

In other things they are equally as good. In child-birth they prepare a woman for giving birth to her child and at the birth of the child they have an old woman to take care of the mother and child. After the birth of the child the cord is cut and tied, then they take the black part of a large snail, which has an oily substance, and place it over the navel. They put a bandage around the child which is kept there for some time. I have never known an Indian of the old tribe to be ruptured and yet they do not know anything about surgery. If anything of a serious nature happens to a woman during child-birth they are at a loss to know what to do to save her. If the woman gives birth to twins and they are a boy and girl, they try to raise them both, but if it be two boys or girls they pick one of them and raise it while the other one is neglected and starved to death, and when it died they went through all the forms of sorrow by crying and mourning over the loss of the child just the same as if they tried to raise it. If anything happens to the mother that causes her death at child-birth or after and the child is yet an infant, they take sugar-pine nuts or hazel nuts and pound them into fine flower and mix this in warm water, making a milky substance out of it. They can raise a child on this preparation as well as if it was nursed at the mother’s breast. Every family in the olden times was very careful to keep a good supply of pine and hazel nuts on hand.

The Indians were preservers of the sugar-pine timber which grew on the high ranges of mountains on the north side of the river and there was a very heavy fine and also death to the Indian that willfully destroyed any of this timber. The sugar from these trees was also used by them as a medicine in different cases of sickness. The salt water mussels that they gather which cling to the rocks close to the sea-shore, is an article of food for them and they gather and eat them while fresh by boiling them. They also dry them and take them up the river to their homes for winter use. In the month of August and a part of September these mussels become poisoned, in some years worse than in others, with phosphorus. Sometimes whole families would get poisoned by eating them out of season and in this case they use the sugar which is taken from the sugar-pine tree and which is a sure cure if taken in time. This made the Indian prize the sugar-pine tree very highly and putting to death even a member of their own tribe who harmed a tree in any way.

In the early days when a white man arrived among the Indians, he took an Indian woman, and in the fall of the year she would want to gather some pine nuts, the white man would go with her, taking his axe, and cut down the tree, as he could not climb it, and told the woman there they are, what are you going to do about it? At first the woman complained and finally said that the white man would spoil everything. Then the Indians began to cut the trees. In the last few years these trees have become very valuable in the eyes of the white man, and it has become the complaint of the white man that the Indians ought to be arrested and punished. Some of them have gone so far as to say that the Indians ought to be shot for cutting down this fine timber for the nuts. I leave the reader to decide which one ought to be punished for the cutting of the great number of these fine sugar-pine trees.

The Indians also took the greatest of care of the hazel nut flats as the nuts are used in many ways. The nuts were gathered and stored away as they could be kept for a long time and could be pounded into flour, put into warm water and made a good substitute for milk which could be used for weak, sickly children, also in some cases for sick persons that needed nourishment and had weak stomachs. The hazel is used in all of their basket making, as the frame of all the baskets are made of the hazel sticks. In taking care of the hazel flats they got out in the dry summer or early in the fall months and burn the hazel brush, then the next spring the young shoots started up from the old roots. On the following spring in the month of May, when the sap rises and the shoots start to grow, the women go forth and gather these young shoots which are from one to two feet in length. Some of these sticks grow up to a height of three feet and are gathered for making the large baskets and also the wood baskets. They gather these sticks by the thousands and take them home where the women, children and men all join in peeling the bark off the sticks. They take up a handful in the right hand, then place the butt end of one of them in their mouth, taking hold of it with their teeth and the left hand, giving it a twist so as to peel the bark around the end, and as they get the bark started they give the stick one quick jerk and the bark peels off at one effort. After they are peeled they are laid out in the sun, on a smooth place, in thin layers and allowed to bleach and dry and when they are dried they gather them up and assort them out according to their size and length, and tie the different sizes in bundles and lay them away for use, sometimes three or four years later, before they are made up into baskets. The small sticks are used for making up the very fine baskets. The reader can easily see by this why the hazel was preserved and not destroyed as it had a great value to them in many ways. They made withes of it for tying their boats and other things. The oak timber they were very careful to preserve as they gathered the acorns from it late in the fall, October and November. The oak tree furnished them with the staff of life, as it was from the acorn they made all their bread and mush and this bread they could take for use on long journeys on their hunting trips. They would wrap up a large lump of dough and placing it in a cool place, keep it for several days before it would begin to spoil or sour. From this dough they made their mush by taking a piece about the size of a tea cup and put it into one of the baskets, fill it nearly full with water, then take some wash stones taken from the river or creek and put them in the fire until they were hot and often red-hot when they would take two sticks and lift them out, drop them into the basket and stir the whole briskly with a paddle, made for this purpose, they would soon have it boiling and by putting in another stone and with a little more stirring they would soon have the basket of mush cooked. They call this mush Ka-go and it is very nutritious and gives great power of endurance. After the basket of mush has been set aside for thirty or forty minutes it is then dipped out into small baskets made for the purpose and of size to fit the stomach. One person serves, handing out the mush together with a piece of dry salmon or venison or different things that may be prepared for eating. The acorn furnishes the bread to all the Klamath river Indians.

All the oak timber was owned by the well-to-do families and was divided off by lines and boundaries as carefully as the whites have got it surveyed today. It can easily be seen by this that the Indians have carefully preserved the oak timber and have never at any time destroyed it.

The Douglas fir timber they say has always encroached on the open prairies and crowded out the other timber, therefore they have continuously burned it and have done all they could to keep it from covering all the open lands. Our legends tell when they arrived in the Klamath river country that there were thousands of acres of prairie lands and with all the burning that they could do the country has been growing up to timber more and more.

The redwood timber they use for making their canoes and building their houses. In making a canoe they took a redwood log in length and size to suit the canoe they wanted to make, and split the log in half, shaping the bottom of the canoe first, then turning it over and chipping off the top until they get it down to the right place when they would start shaping the guards; after this they dug out the inside, leaving it a certain thickness and this they gauged by placing one hand outside and the other inside, moving both hands slowly along—and it is surprising how even the thickness is in all parts. They cut out the seat in the stern with a place to put each foot on the side in front of the seat so one can brace himself while paddling it with a long and narrow paddle, pointed at the end, so they can paddle or push the canoe with it. They are certainly expert in the Klamath river with a canoe, either the men or women. They have no keel on their canoes, just a round smooth bottom, with a rounded bow and stern. A large hazel withe is put through holes in the corners of the bow and drawn very tight across it so as to keep the canoe from splitting in case it strikes the rocks very hard, which often happens, as they grind upon the rocks in the rough places in the river. These canoes will carry heavy loads, much larger than they would seem to carry; sometimes from forty to one hundred and fifty sacks of flour at a load. In making a canoe, the Indians always leave in the bottom and some two feet back from the front or bow, a knob some three inches across and about two inches high, with a hole about one inch deep dug into it, and this they call the heart of the canoe and without this the canoe would be dead. When I was a young woman no Indian would use a canoe unless it had the heart left in it to make it alive, as it was not safe to use if not thus fixed, something after the fashion or notion of the sailors as to a vessel being christened. The redwood canoes are being used for a distance of one hundred miles up the Klamath river but the redwood is used only for a distance of about thirty miles up the river, for houses, after this distance they use red fir for houses. The redwood is a soft, easy timber for working and not susceptible to being sun cracked and is an ideal wood for making a canoe. After they have finished making the canoe they take the shavings and some dry brush and burn it both inside and outside and then brush off the dry parts which leaves it very light and dry. After using the canoe for a few days and if any light cracks start in it they take it out, dry it perfectly and go over it with pitch taken from the fir tree. In doing this they first put the pitch on the cracks then put hot rocks on the pitch which melts it and it fills up the cracks. After this treatment the canoe will last for years.