The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

INDIAN BOY AND PINTO PONY

The Indian children around this encampment were the brightest spot in my entire Western trip. They are the prettiest and most beautifully barbaric little children I have ever seen. They grow out of it very soon, but that is no reason why one should not make the most of it while it lasts. And they are as wild and fearful of the white visitor, unless he happens to be Lieutenant Scott or Second Lieutenant Quay, as the antelope in the prairie around him. It required a corporal’s guard, two lieutenants, and three squaws to persuade one of them to stand still and be photographed, and whenever my camera and I appeared together there was a wild stampede of Indian children, which no number of looking-glasses or dimes or strings of beads could allay. Not that they would not take the bribes, but they would run as soon as they had snatched them. It was very distressing, for I did not mean to hurt them very much. The older people were kinder, and would let me sit inside the tepees, which were very warm on the coldest days, and watch them cook, and play their queer games, and work moccasins, and gamble at monte for brass rings if they were women, or for cartridges if they were men. And for ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, I think the Indian monte-dealer can instruct a Chinese poker-player in many things. What was so fine about them was their dignity, hospitality, and strict suppression of all curiosity. They always received a present as though they were doing you a favor, and you felt that you were paying tribute. This makes them difficult to deal with as soldiers. They cannot be treated as white men, and put in the guard-house for every slight offence. Lieutenant Scott has to explain things to them, and praise them, and excite a spirit of emulation among them by commending those publicly who have done well. For instance, they hate to lose their long hair, and Lieutenant Scott did not order them to have it cut, but told them it would please him if they did; and so one by one, and in bunches of three and four, they tramped up the hill to the post barber, and back again with their locks in their hands, to barter them for tobacco with the post trader. The Indians at Fort Sill were a temperate lot, and Lieutenant Harris, who has charge of the canteen, growled because they did not drink enough to pay for their share of the dividend which is returned to each troop at the end of the month.

Lieutenant Scott obtained his ascendency over his troop in several ways—first, by climbing a face of rock, and, with the assistance of Lieutenant Quay, taking an eagle from the nest it had built there. Every Indian in the reservation knew of that nest, and had long wanted the eagle’s feathers for a war-bonnet, but none of them had ever dared to climb the mirrorlike surface of the cliff, with the rocks below. The fame of this exploit spread, by what means it is hard to understand among people who have no newspapers or letters, but at beef issues, perhaps, or Messiah dances, or casual meetings on the prairie, which help to build up reputations and make the prowess of one chief known to those of all the other tribes, or the beauty of an Indian girl familiar. Then, following this exploit, three little Indian children ran away from school because they had been flogged, and tried to reach their father’s tent fifteen miles off on the reservation, and were found half-buried in the snow and frozen to death. One of them was without his heavier garments, which he had wrapped around his younger brother. The terrified school-teacher sent a message to the fort begging for two troops of cavalry to protect him from the wrath of the older Indians, and the post commander sent out Lieutenant Scott alone to treat with them. His words were much more effective than two troops of cavalry would have been, and the threatened outbreak was stopped. The school-master fled to the woods, and never came back. What the Indians saw of Lieutenant Scott at this crisis made them trust him for the future, and this and the robbery of the eagle’s nest explain partly, as do his gentleness and consideration, the remarkable hold he has over them. Some one was trying to tell one of the chiefs how the white man could bring lightning down from the sky, and make it talk for him from one end of the country to the other.

“Oh yes,” the Indian said, simply, “that is quite true. Lieutenant Scott says so.”

But what has chiefly contributed to make the lieutenant’s work easy for him is his knowledge of the sign language, with which the different tribes, though speaking different languages, can communicate one with the other. He is said to speak this more correctly and fluently than any other officer in the army, and perhaps any other white man. It is a very curious language. It is not at all like the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which is an alphabet, and is not pretty to watch. It is just what its name implies—a language of signs. The first time I saw the lieutenant speaking it, I confess I thought, having heard of his skill at Fort Reno, that he was only doing it because he could do it, as young men who speak French prefer to order their American dinners in that language when the waiter can understand English quite as well as themselves. I regarded it as a pleasing weakness, and was quite sure that the lieutenant was going to meet the Indian back of the canteen and say it over again in plain every-day words. In this I wronged him; but it was not until I had watched his Irish sergeant converse in this silent language for two long hours with half a dozen Indians of different tribes, and had seen them all laugh heartily at his witticisms delivered in semaphoric gestures, that I really believed in it. It seems that what the lieutenant said was, “Tell the first sergeant that I wish to see the soldiers drill at one o’clock, and, after that, go to the store and ask Madeira if there is to be a beef issue to-day.” It is very difficult to describe in writing how he did this; and as it is a really pretty thing to watch, it seems a pity to spoil it. As well as I remember it, he did something like this. He first drew his hand over his sleeve to mark the sergeant’s stripes; then he held his fingers upright in front of him, and moved them forward to signify soldiers; by holding them in still another position, he represented soldiers drilling; then he made a spy-glass out of his thumb and first finger, and looked up through it at the sky—this represented the sun at one o’clock. “After that” was a quick cut in the air; the “store” was an interlacing of the fingers, to signify a place where one thing met or was exchanged for another; “Madeira” he named; beef was a turning up of the fingers, to represent horns; and how he represented issue I have no idea. It is a most curious thing to watch, for they change from one sign to the other with the greatest rapidity. I always regarded it with great interest as a sort of game, and tried to guess what the different gestures might mean. Some of the signs are very old, and their origin is as much in dispute as some of the lines in the first folios of Shakespeare, and have nearly as many commentators. All the Indians know these signs, but very few of them can tell how they came to mean what they do. “To go to war,” for instance, is shown by sweeping the right arm out with the thumb and first finger at right angles; this comes from an early custom among the Indians of carrying a lighted pipe before them when going on the war-path. The thumb and finger in that position are supposed to represent the angle of the bowl of the pipe and the stem.

I visited a few of the Indian schools when I was in the Territory, and found the pupils quite learned. The teachers are not permitted to study the Indian languages, and their charges in consequence hear nothing but English, and so pick it up the more quickly. The young women who teach them seem to labor under certain disadvantages; one of them was reading the English lesson from a United States history intended for much older children—grown-up children, in fact—and explained that she had to order and select the school-books she used from a list furnished by the Government, and could form no opinion of its appropriateness until it arrived.

A KIOWA MAIDEN

Some of the Indian parents are very proud of their children’s progress, and on beef-issue days visit the schools, and listen with great satisfaction to their children speaking in the unknown tongue. There were several in one of the school-rooms while I was there, and the teacher turned them out of their chairs to make room for us, remarking pleasantly that the Indians were accustomed to sitting around on the ground. She afterwards added to this by telling us that there was no sentiment in her, and that she taught Indians for the fifty dollars there was in it. The mother of one of the little boys was already crouching on the floor as we came in, or squatting on her heels, as they seem to be able to do without fatigue for any length of time. During the half-hour we were there, she never changed her position or turned her head to look at us, but kept her eyes fixed only on her son sitting on the bench above her. He was a very plump, clean, and excited little Indian, with his hair cut short, and dressed in a very fine pair of trousers and jacket, and with shoes and stockings. He was very keen to show the white visitors how well he knew their talk, and read his book with a masterful shaking of the head, as though it had no terrors for him. His mother, kneeling at his side on the floor, wore a single garment, and over that a dirty blanket strapped around her waist with a beaded belt. Her feet were bare, and her coarse hair hung down over her face and down her back almost to her waist in an unkempt mass. She supported her chin on one hand, and with the other hand, black and wrinkled, and with nails broken by cutting wood and harnessing horses and ploughing in the fields, brushed her hair back from before her eyes, and then touched her son’s arm wistfully, as a dog tries to draw his master’s eyes, and as though he were something fragile and fine. But he paid no attention to her whatsoever; he was very much interested in the lesson. She was the only thing I saw in the school-room. I wondered if she was thinking of the days when she carried his weight on her back as she went about her cooking or foraging for wood, or swung him from a limb of a tree, and of the first leather leggings she made for him when he was able to walk, and of the necklace of elk teeth, and the arrows which he used to fire bravely at the prairie-dogs. He was a very different child now, and very far away from the doglike figure crouching by his side and gazing up patiently into his face, as if looking for something she had lost.

It is quite too presumptuous to suggest any opinion on the Indian question when one has only lived with them for three weeks, but the experience of others who have lived with them for thirty years is worth repeating. You will find that the individual point of view regarding the Indian is much biassed by the individual interests. A man told me that in his eyes no one under heaven was better than a white man, and if the white man had to work for his living, he could not see why the Indian should not work for his. I asked him if he thought of taking up Indian land in the Territory when it was open in the spring, and he said that was his intention, “and why?”