The Valley of the Little Blue, 9th August.
LITTLE BLUE RIVER VALLEY.A little after midnight we resumed our way, and in the state which Mohammed described when he made his famous night journey to heaven—bayni ’l naumi wa ’l yakzán—we crossed the deep shingles, the shallow streams, and the heavy vegetation of the Little Sandy, and five miles beyond it we forded the Big Sandy. About early dawn we found ourselves at another station, better than the last only as the hour was more propitious. The colony of Patlanders rose from their beds without a dream of ablution, and clearing the while their lungs of Cork brogue, prepared a neat déjeûner à la fourchette by hacking “fids” off half a sheep suspended from the ceiling, and frying them in melted tallow. Had the action occurred in Central Africa, among the Esquimaux, or the Araucanians, it would not have excited my attention: mere barbarism rarely disgusts; it is the unnatural cohabitation of civilization with savagery that makes the traveler’s gorge rise.
Issuing from Big Sandy Station at 6 30 A.M., and resuming our route over the divide that still separated the valleys of the Big Blue and the Little Blue, we presently fell into the line of the latter, and were called upon by the conductor to admire it. It is pretty, but its beauties require the cosmetic which is said to act unfailingly in the case of fairer things—the viewer should have lately spent three months at sea, out of sight of rivers and women. Averaging two miles in width, which shrinks to one quarter as you ascend, the valley is hedged on both sides by low rolling bluffs or terraces, the boundaries of its ancient bed and modern debordements. As the hills break off near the river, they show a diluvial formation; in places they are washed into a variety of forms, and being white, they stand out in bold relief. In other parts they are sand mixed with soil enough to support a last-year’s growth of wheat-like grass, weed-stubble, and dead trees, that look like old corn-fields in new clearings. One could not have recognized at this season Colonel Frémont’s description written in the month of June—the “hills with graceful slopes looking uncommonly green and beautiful.” Along the bluffs the road winds, crossing at times a rough projecting spur, or dipping into some gully washed out by the rains of ages. All is barren beyond the garden-reach which runs along the stream; there is not a tree to a square mile—in these regions the tree, like the bird in Arabia and the monkey in Africa, signifies water—and animal life seems well-nigh extinct. As the land sinks toward the river bottom, it becomes less barren. The wild sunflower (Helianthus)—it seldom, however, turns toward the sun—now becomes abundant; it was sparse near the Missouri; it will wax even more plentiful around Great Salt Lake City, till walking through the beds becomes difficult. In size it greatly varies according to the quality of the soil; six feet is perhaps the maximum. It is a growth of some value. The oleaginous seeds form the principal food of half-starved Indians, while the stalks supply them with a scanty fuel: being of rapid growth, it has been used in the States to arrest the flow of malaria, and it serves as house and home to the rattlesnake. Conspicuous by its side is the sumach, whose leaf, mixed with kinnikinik, the peel of the red willow, forms the immemorial smoking material of the Wild Man of the North. Equally remarkable for their strong odor are large beds of wild onions; they are superlatively wholesome, but they effect the eater like those of Tibet. The predominant colors are pink and yellow, the former a lupine, the latter a shrub, locally called the rabbit-bush. The blue lupine also appears with the white mallow, the eccentric putoria, and the taraxacum (dandelion), so much used as salad in France and in the Eastern States. This land appears excellently adapted for the growth of manioc or cassava. In the centre of the bottom flows the brownish stream, about twenty yards wide, between two dense lines of tall sweet cotton-wood. The tree which was fated to become familiar to us during our wanderings is a species of poplar (P. monilifera), called by the Americo-Spaniards, and by the people of Texas and New Mexico, “Alamo:” resembling the European aspen, without its silver lining, the color of the leaf, in places, appears of a dull burnished hue, in others bright and refreshingly green. Its trivial name is derived, according to some, from the fibrous quality of the bark, which, as in Norway, is converted into food for cattle and even man; according to others, from the cotton-like substance surrounding the seeds. It is termed “sweet” to distinguish it from a different tree with a bitter bark, also called a cotton-wood or narrow-leaved cotton-wood (Populus angustifolia), and by the Canadians liard amère. The timber is soft and easily cut; it is in many places the only material for building and burning, and the recklessness of the squatters has already shortened the supply.
This valley is the Belgium of the adjoining tribes, the once terrible Pawnees, who here met their enemies, the Dakotahs and the Delawares: it was then a great buffalo ground; and even twenty years ago it was well stocked with droves of wild horses, turkeys, and herds of antelope, deer, and elk. The animals have of late migrated westward, carrying off with them the “bones of contention.” Some details concerning the present condition of these bands and their neighbors may not be uninteresting—these poor remnants of nations which once kept the power of North America at bay, and are now barely able to struggle for existence.
In 1853, the government of the United States, which has ever acted paternally toward the Indians, treating with them—Great Britain did the same with the East Indians—as though they were a civilized people, availed itself of the savages’ desire to sell lands encroached upon by the whites, and set apart for a general reservation 181,171 square miles. Here, in the Far West, were collected into what was then believed to be a permanent habitation, the indigenes of the land, and the various bands once lying east of the Mississippi. This “Indian’s home” was bounded, in 1853, on the north by the Northwestern Territory and Minnesota; on the south by Texas and New Mexico; to the east lay Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas; and to the west, Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico.
The savages’ reservation was then thus distributed. The eastern portion nearest the river was stocked with tribes removed to it from the Eastern States, namely, the Iowas, Sacs and Foxes, Kickapoos, Delawares, Potawotomies, Wyandottes, Quapaws, Senecas, Cherokees, Seminoles, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Miamis, and Ottawas. The west and part of the northeast—poor and barren lands—were retained by the aboriginal tribes, Ponkahs, Omahas or Mahas, Pawnees, Ottoes, Kansas or Konzas, and Osages. The central and the remainder of the western portion—wild countries abounding in buffalo—were granted to the Western Pawnees, the Arickarees, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Comanches, Utahs, Grosventres, and other nomads.
It was somewhat a confusion of races. For instance, the Pawnees form an independent family, to which some authors join the Arickaree; the Sacs (Sauk) and Foxes, Winnebagoes, Ottoes, Kaws, Omahas, Cheyennes, Mississippi Dakotahs, and Missouri Dakotahs, belong to the Dakotan family; the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles are Appalachians; the Wyandottes, like the Iroquois, are Hodesaunians; and the Ottawas, Delawares, Shawnees, Potawotomies, Peorians, Mohekuneuks, Kaskaskias, Piankeshaws, Weaws, Miamis, Kickapoos, and the Menomenes, are, like the Ojibwas, Algonquins.
The total number of Indians on the prairies and the Rocky Mountains was estimated roughly at 63,000.
Still the resistless tide of emigration swept westward: the federal government was as powerless to stem it as was General Fitzroy of New South Wales to prevent, in 1852, his subjects flocking to the “gold diggings.” Despite all orders, reckless whites would squat upon, and thoughtless reds, bribed by whisky, tobacco, and gunpowder, would sell off the lands. On the 20th of May, 1854, was passed the celebrated “Kansas-Nebraska Bill,” an act converting the greater portion of the “Indian Territory,”THE INDIAN TERRITORY. and all the “Northwestern Territory,” into two new territories—Kansas, north of the 37th parallel, and Nebraska, north of the 40th. In the passage of this bill, the celebrated “Missouri Compromise” of 1828, prohibiting negro slavery north of 36° 30′, was repealed, under the presidency of General Pierce.[26] It provided that the rights and properties of the Indians, within their shrunken possessions, should be respected. By degrees the Indians sold their lands for whisky, as of old, and retired to smaller reservations. Of course, they suffered in the bargain; the savage ever parts with his birthright for the well-known mess of pottage. The Osages, for instance, canceled $4000, claimed by unscrupulous traders, by a cession of two million acres of arable land. The Potawotomies fared even worse; under the influence of liquor, ὡς λεγουσι, their chiefs sold 100,000 acres of the best soil on the banks of the Missouri for a mere song. The tribe was removed to a bald smooth prairie, sans timber and consequently sans game; many fled to the extreme wilds, and the others, like the Acadians of yore, were marched about till they found homes—many of them six feet by two—in Fever Patch, on the Kaw or Kansas River. Others were more fortunate. The Ottoes, Omahas, and Kansas had permanent villages near the Missouri and its two tributaries, the Platte and the Kansas. The Osages, formerly a large nation in Arkansas, after ceding 10,000,000 of acres for a stipend of $52,000 for thirty years, were settled in a district on the west bank of the Neosho or Whitewater—the Grand River. They are described as the finest and largest men of the semi-nomad races, with well-formed heads and symmetrical figures, brave, warlike, and well disposed to the whites. Early in June, after planting their maize, they move in mounted bands to the prairies, feast upon the buffalo for months, and bring home stores of smoked and jerked meat. When the corn is in milk they husk and sundry it; it is then boiled, and is said to be better flavored and more nutritious than the East Indian “butah” or the American hominy. After the harvest in October they return to the game country, and then pass the winter under huts or skin lodges. Their chief scourge is small-pox: apparently, all the tribes carry some cross. Of the settled races the best types are the Choctaws and the Cherokees; the latter have shown a degree of improvability, which may still preserve them from destruction; they have a form of government, churches, theatres, and schools; they read and write English; and George Guess, a well-known chief, like the negro inventor of the Vai syllabarium in West Africa, produced an alphabet of sixty-eight characters, which, improved and simplified by the missionaries, is found useful in teaching the vernacular.
[26] The “Missouri Compromise” is an important event in Anglo-American history; it must be regarded as the great parent of the jangles and heart-burnings which have disunited the United States. The great Jefferson prophesied in these words: “the Missouri question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more God only knows. From the battle of Bunker’s Hill to the treaty of Paris, we never had so ominous a question.”