The occasion when Hannah’s picture was kodaked is fresh in memory. All preparations were being made for the feast, but Billy Ham, Tallahassee’s son, had not been able to get a deer, and so had purchased beef from a market thirty miles away. With pots and kettles in evidence, Hannah was preparing the beef, when the little box-like instrument was gently rested on a rail near by. Hannah’s eye detected the object and she turned away, and began busying herself around the boiling kettle on the ground. The camera was adjusted, finger on button ready to snap, and a masked indifference affected, and an animated conversation begun with one of the Indians near by. When Hannah returned to her work about the table, snap! went the button, and Hannah’s ebony face and twisted, string-tied locks was photographed on the plate, and proud was the owner to possess so good a likeness of Uncle Sam’s one and only unfreed slave.
UNWRITTEN LAWS.
The government among the Seminoles is peculiar, it is remarkable, it is magnificent. There is no lying, no stealing, no murder and yet apparently there is no restraining law. The Seminole has many noble traits; he is proverbially truthful. Pertinent was the reply to the hunter when he asked if it was safe to leave his gun in the wigwam. “Yes,” replied the chief, “there is not a white man within fifty miles of the place.”
Reverence, too, is one of his distinguishing features. His language contains no oath, nor any word to express disrespect to the Supreme Being. A missionary will receive most respectful attention, for their reverence to God will not permit them to laugh at His messenger.
HANNAH, THE ONLY REMAINING SLAVE OF THE SEMINOLES
In Tallahassee’s camp making sofka for dinner.
If the annals of this heroic band were chronicled, they would say, “They are prouder than the proudest Inca, braver than the boldest Saxon knight, fearless and unrelenting as foes, devoted and unflinching in friendship, and the purity of their morals without a parallel in the history of any other race or tribe on the globe.”
Anxiously and carefully have we studied their form of Government, knowing that they leave their money, their trinkets and their garments in the open wigwam. With carefully-framed questions we asked of Billy Bowlegs, while on his recent visit to our home, “Billy, your money, you leave it in your wigwam, you go back, money hi-e-pus (gone), Indians steal it, then what you do?” He answered, “Me don’t know.” “Yes, but, Billy, white man come in my house, my money steal ’em—by-and-by, in jail me put him. Indian, all the same, bad Indian steal. What does Indian do?” Again the answer came, “Me don’t know.” Making the points plainer, illustrating by the theft of his gun, his provisions, showing him that a bad Indian from one of the other settlements might come in his absence and steal his Winchester, with perfect understanding of our meaning, the reply came as before, “Me don’t know, Indian no take ’em—Indian no steal.” In such a socialistic State, where there is no crime, there can be no punishment. Were a crime to be committed, a council of chiefs would meet and decree a punishment, and it would have enough severity to serve as a lesson for all future miscreants.