The origin of the trouble was this. In 1817 the eastern half of the Mississippi Territory became the Territory of Alabama, and—in those days events had wings—the 14th of Dec., 1819, witnessed the birth of Alabama as a free sovereign and independent slave state. The South, strong in wealth and numbers, thereupon moved toward legalizing slavery in the newly-acquired Territory of Missouri, and when Missouri claimed to be admitted as a state, demanded that it should be admitted as a slave state. The Free-soilers, or opposite party, urged two reasons why Missouri should be a free state. Firstly, since the date of the union eight new states had been admitted, four slave and four free. Alabama, the last, was a slave state, therefore it was the turn for a free state. Secondly—and here was the rub—that “slavery ought not to be permitted in any state or territory where it could be prohibited.” This very broad principle involved, it is manifest, the ruin of the slave-ocracy. From the days of Mr. Washington to those of Mr. Lincoln, the northern or labor states have ever aimed at the ultimate abolition of servitude by means of non-extension. The contest about Missouri began in 1818, and raged for three years, complicated by a new feature, namely, Maine separating herself from Massachusetts, and balancing the admission of Alabama by becoming a free state. The Lower House several times voted to exclude the “peculiar institution” from the new state, and the conservative Senate—in which the Southern element was ever predominant—as often restored it. Great was the war of words among the rival legislators; at length, after repeated conferences, both Senate and House agreed upon a bill admitting Missouri, after her Constitution should be formed, free of restriction, but prohibiting slavery north of 36° 30′. Missouri acknowledged the boon by adopting a Constitution which denied the rights of citizens even to free negroes. She was not finally admitted until the 10th of August, 1821, when her Legislature had solemnly covenanted to guarantee the rights of citizenship to “the citizens of either of the states.” Such is an outline of the far-famed “Missouri Compromise.” The influence of the Southern slaveholders caused it to be repealed, as a slip of Texas happened to lie north of the prohibitative latitude, and the late Mr. S. A. Douglas did it to death in 1854. The Free-soilers, of course, fought hard against the “sad repeal,” and what they now fight about, forty years afterward, is to run still farther south the original line of limitation. Hinc illæ lachrymæ!
Upon the whole, however, the philanthropic schemes of the government have not met with brilliant success. The chiefs are still bribed, and the people cheated by white traders, and poverty, disease, and debauchery rapidly thin the tribesmen. Sensible heads have proposed many schemes for preserving the race. Apparently the best of these projects is to introduce the Moravian discipline. MISSIONARIES. Of all missionary systems, I may observe, none have hitherto been crowned with important results, despite the blood and gold so profusely expended upon them, except two—those of the Jesuits and the United Brethren. The fraternity of Jesus spread the Gospel by assimilating themselves to the heathen; the Unitas Fratrum by assimilating the heathen to themselves. The day of Jesuitism, like that of protection, is going by. The advance of Moravianism, it may safely be prophesied, is to come. These civilization societies have as yet been little appreciated, because they will not minister to that ignorant enthusiasm which extracts money from the pockets of the many. Their necessarily slow progress is irksome to ardent propagandists. We naturally wish to reap as well as to sow; and man rarely invests capital in schemes of which only his grandson will see the results.
The American philanthropist proposes to wean the Indian savage from his nomad life by turning his lodge into a log tent, and by providing him with cattle instead of buffalo, and the domestic fowl instead of grasshoppers. The hunter become a herdsman would thus be strengthened for another step—the agricultural life, which necessarily follows the pastoral. Factors would be appointed instead of vicious traders—coureurs des bois, as the Canadians call them; titles to land would be granted in fee-simple, practically teaching the value of property in severalty, alienation into white hands would be forbidden, and, if possible, a cordon militaire would be stretched between the races. The agricultural would lead to the mechanical stage of society. Agents and assistant craftsmen would teach the tribes to raise mills and smithies (at present there are mills without millers, stock without breeders, and similar attempts to make civilization run before she can walk), and a growing appreciation for the peace, the comfort, and the luxuries of settled life would lay the nomad instinct forever.
The project labors only under one difficulty—the one common to philanthropic schemes. In many details it is somewhat visionary—utopian. It is, like peace on earth, a “dream of the wise.” Under the present system of Indian agencies, as will in a future page appear, it is simply impossible. It has terrible obstacles in the westward gravitation of the white race, which, after sweeping away the aborigines—as the gray rat in Europe expelled the black rat—from the east of the Mississippi in two centuries and a half, threatens, before a quarter of that time shall have elapsed, to drive in its advance toward the Pacific the few survivors of now populous tribes, either into the inhospitable regions north of the 49th parallel, or into the anarchical countries south of the 32d. And where, I may ask, in the history of the world do we read of a people learning civilization from strangers instead of working it out for themselves, through its several degrees of barbarism, feudalism, monarchy, republicanism, despotism? Still it is a noble project; mankind would not willingly see it die.
THE PAWNEES.The Pawnees were called by the French and Canadian traders Les Loups, that animal being their totem, and the sign of the tribe being an imitation of the wolf’s ears, the two fore fingers of the right hand being stuck up on the side of the head. They were in the last generation a large nation, containing many clans—Minnikajus, the Sans Arc, the Loup Fork, and others. Their territory embraced both sides of the Platte River, especially the northern lands; and they rendered these grounds terrible to the trapper, trader, and traveler. They were always well mounted. Old Mexico was then, and partially is still, their stable, and a small band has driven off horses by hundreds. Of late years they have become powerless. The influenza acts as a plague among them, killing off 400 or 500 in a single season, and the nation now numbers little more than 300 braves, or rather warriors, the latter, in correct parlance, being inferior to the former, as the former are subservient to the chief. A treaty concluded between them and the United States in the winter of 1857 sent them to a reserve on the Loup Fork, where their villages were destroyed by the Sioux. They are Ishmaelites, whose hand is against every man. They have attempted, after the fashion of declining tribes, to strengthen themselves by alliances with their neighbors, but have always failed in consequence of their propensity to plunder developing itself even before the powwow was concluded. They and the northern Dakotahs can never be trusted. Most Indian races, like the Bedouin Arabs, will show hospitality to the stranger who rides into their villages, though no point of honor deters them from robbing him after he has left the lodge-shade. The Pawnees, African-like, will cut the throat of a sleeping guest. They are easily distinguished from their neighbors by the scalp-lock protruding from a shaven head. After killing white men, they have insulted the corpse in a manner familiar to those who served in the Affghan war. They have given up the practice of torturing prisoners, saying that the “Great Spirit,” or rather, as the expression should be translated, the “Great Father” no longer wills it. The tradition is, that a few years ago a squaw of a hostile tribe was snatched from the stake by a white trader, and the action was interpreted as a decree of heaven. It is probably a corruption of the well-known story of the rescue of the Itean woman by Petalesharoo, the son of the “Knife Chief.” Like the Southern and Western Indians generally, as is truly remarked by Captain Mayne Reid,[27] “They possess more of that cold continence and chivalrous delicacy than characterize the Red Men of the forest.” They are too treacherous to be used as soldiers. Like most pedestrian Indians, their arms and bodies are light and thin, and their legs are muscular and well developed. They are great in endurance. I have heard of a Pawnee, who, when thoroughly “stampeded” by his enemies, “loped” from Fort Laramie to Kearney—300 miles—making the distance as fast as the mail. This bad tribe is ever at war with their hereditary enemies the Sioux. They do not extend westward of Fort Kearney. The principal sub-tribe is the Arickaree, or Ree, called Pedani by the Dakotah, who attacked and conquered them. Their large villages, near the mouth of the Grand River, were destroyed by the expedition sent in 1825-26, under Colonel Leavenworth, to chastise the attack upon the trading party of General Ashley.
[27] The Scalp-hunters, chap. xlii.
THE DELAWARES.A more interesting people than the Pawnee is the Delaware, whose oldest tradition derives him from the region west of the Mississippi. Thence the tribe migrated to the Atlantic shores, where they took the title of Lenne Lenape, or men, and the neighboring races in respect called them “uncle.” William Penn and his followers found this remnant of the great Algonquin confederacy in a depressed state: subjugated by the Five Nations, they had been compelled to take the name of “Iroquois Squaws.” In those days they felt an awe of the white man, and looked upon him as a something godlike. Since their return to the West their spirit has revived, their war-path has reached through Utah to the Pacific Ocean, to Hudson’s Bay on the north, and southward to the heart of Mexico. Their present abodes are principally near Fort Leavenworth upon the Missouri, and in the Choctaw territory near Fort Arbuckle, upon the eastern Colorado or Canadian River. They are familiar with the languages, manners, and customs of their pale-faced neighbors; they are so feared as rifle shots that a host of enemies will fly from a few of their warriors, and they mostly lead a vagrant life, the wandering Jews of the West, as traders, hunters, and trappers, among the other Indian tribes. For 185 years the Shawnees have been associated with them in intermarriage, yet they are declining in numbers; here and there some are lost, one by one, in travel or battle; they have now dwindled to about a hundred warriors, and the extinction of the tribe appears imminent. As hunters and guides, they are preferred to all others by the whites, and it is believed that they would make as formidable partisan soldiers as any on this continent. When the government of the United States, after the fashion of France and England, begins to raise “Irregular Native Corps,” the loss of the Delawares will be regretted.
Changing mules at Kiowa about 10 A.M., we pushed forward through the sun, which presently was mitigated by heavy nimbi, to Liberty Farm, where a station supplied us with the eternal eggs and bacon of these mangeurs de lard. It is a dish constant in the great West, as the omelet and pigeon in the vetturini days of Italy, when, prompted by the instincts of self-preservation, the inmates of the dove-cot, unless prevented in time, are said to have fled their homes at the sight of Milordo’s traveling carriage, not to return until the portent had disappeared. The Little Blue ran hard by, about fifty feet wide by three or four deep, fringed with emerald-green oak groves, cotton-wood, and long-leaved willow: its waters supply catfish, suckers, and a soft-shelled turtle, but the fish are full of bones, and taste, as might be imagined, much like mud. The country showed vestiges of animal life, the prairie bore signs of hare and antelope; in the valley, coyotes, wolves, and foxes, attracted by the carcasses of cattle, stared us in the face, and near the stream, plovers, jays, the bluebird (sialia), and a kind of starling, called the swamp or redwinged blackbird, twittered a song of satisfaction. We then resumed our journey over a desert, waterless save after rain, for twenty-three miles; it is the divide between the Little Blue and the Platte rivers, a broken table-land rising gradually toward the west, with, at this season, a barren soil of sand and clay. As the evening approached, a smile from above lit up into absolute beauty the homely features of the world below. The sweet commune with nature in her fairest hours denied to the sons of cities—who must contemplate her charms through a vista of brick wall, or over a foreground of chimney-pots—consoled us amply for all the little hardships of travel. Strata upon strata of cloud-banks, burnished to golden red in the vicinity of the setting sun, and polished to dazzling silvery white above, lay piled half way from the horizon to the zenith, with a distinct strike toward a vanishing point in the west, and dipping into a gateway through which the orb of day slowly retired. Overhead floated in a sea of amber and yellow, pink and green, heavy purple nimbi, apparently turned upside down—their convex bulges below, and their horizontal lines high in the air—while in the east black and blue were so curiously blended that the eye could not distinguish whether it rested upon darkening air or upon a lowering thunder-cloud. We enjoyed these beauties in silence; not a soul said, “Look there!” or “How pretty!”
At 9 P.M., reaching “Thirty-two-mile Creek,” we were pleasantly surprised to find an utter absence of the Irishry. The station-master was the head of a neat-handed and thrifty family from Vermont; the rooms, such as they were, looked cosy and clean—and the chickens and peaches were plump and well “fixed.” Soldiers from Fort Kearney loitered about the adjoining store, and from them we heard past fights and rumors of future wars which were confirmed on the morrow. Remounting at 10 30 P.M., and before moonrise, we threaded the gloom without other accident than the loss of a mule that was being led to the next station. The amiable animal, after breaking loose, coquetted with its pursuers for a while, according to the fashion of its kind, and when the cerne or surround was judged complete, it dashed through the circle and gave leg-bail, its hoofs ringing over the stones till the sound died away in the distant shades.
The Platte River and Fort Kearney, August 10.