“Cur moriatur homo cui Salvia crescit in horto.”
Yet it fills the air with a smell that caricatures the odor of the garden-plant, causing the traveler to look round in astonishment; and when used for cooking it taints the food with a taste between camphor and turpentine. It is of two kinds. The smaller or white species (A. filifolia) rarely grows higher than a foot. Its fetor is less rank, and at times of scarcity it forms tolerable fodder for animals. The Western men have made of it, as of the “red root,” a tea, which must be pronounced decidedly inferior to corn coffee. The Indians smoke it, but they are not particular about what they inhale: like that perverse p——n of Ludlow, who smoked the bell-ropes rather than not smoke at all, or like school-boys who break themselves in upon ratan, they use even the larger sage as well as a variety of other graveolent growths. The second kind (A. tridentata) is to the family of shrubs what the prairie cedar is to the trees—a gnarled, crooked, rough-barked deformity. It has no pretensions to beauty except in earliest youth, and in the dewy hours when the breeze turns up its leaves that glitter like silver in the sun; and its constant presence in the worst and most desert tracts teaches one to regard it, like the mangrove in Asia and Africa, with aversion. In size it greatly varies; in some places it is but little larger than the white species; near the Red Buttes its woody stem often attains the height of a man and the thickness of his waist. As many as fifty rings have been counted in one wood, which, according to the normal calculation, would bring its age up to half a century. After its first year, stock will eat it only when threatened with starvation. It has, however, its use; the traveler, despite its ugliness, hails the appearance of its stiff, wiry clumps at the evening halt: it is easily uprooted, and by virtue of its essential oil it makes a hot and lasting fire, and ashes over. According to Colonel Frémont, “it has a small fly accompanying it through every change of elevation and latitude.” The same eminent authority also suggests that the respiration of air so highly impregnated with aromatic plants may partly account for the favorable effect of the climate upon consumption.
At 5 P.M., as the heat began to mitigate, we arrived at Alkali Lake Station, and discovered some “exiles from Erin,” who supplied us with antelope meat and the unusual luxury of ice taken from the Platte. We attempted to bathe in the river, but found it flowing liquid mire. The Alkali Lake was out of sight; the driver, however, consoled me with the reflection that I should “glimpse” alkali lakes till I was sick of them.
Yesterday and to-day we have been in a line of Indian “removes.” The wild people were shifting their quarters for grass; when it becomes a little colder they will seek some winter abode on the banks of a stream which supplies fuel and where they can find meat, so that with warmth and food, song and chat—they are fond of talking nonsense as African negroes—and smoke and sleep, they can while away the dull and dreary winter. Before describing the scene, which might almost serve for a picture of Bedouin or gipsy life—so similar are the customs of all savages—I have something to say about the Red Man.
This is a country of misnomers. America should not, according to the school-books, have been named America, consequently the Americans should not be called Americans. A geographical error, pardonable in the fifteenth century, dubbed the old tenants of these lands Indians,[35] but why we should still call them the THE RED MEN.Red Men can not be conceived. I have now seen them in the north, south, east, and west of the United States, yet never, except under the influence of ochre or vermilion, have I seen the Red Man red. The real color of the skin, as may be seen under the leggins, varies from a dead pale olive to a dark dingy brown. The parts exposed to the sun are slightly burnished, as in a Tartar or an Affghan after a summer march. Between the two extremes above indicated there are, however, a thousand shades of color, and often the skin has been so long grimed in with pigment, grease, and dirt that it suggests a brick-dust tinge which a little soap or soda would readily remove. Indeed, the color and the complexion, combined with the lank hair, scant beard, and similar peculiarities, renders it impossible to see this people for the first time without the strongest impression that they are of that Turanian breed which in prehistoric ages passed down from above the Himalayas as far south as Cape Comorin.
[35] Columbus and Vespucius both died in the conviction that they had only discovered portions of Asia. Indeed, as late as 1533, the astronomer Schöner maintained that Mexico was the Quinsai of Marco Polo. The early navigators called the aborigines of the New World “Indians,” believing that they inhabited the eastern portion of “India,” a term then applied to the extremity of Oriental Asia. Until the present century the Spaniards applied the names India and Indies to their possessions in America.
Another mistake touching the Indian is the present opinion concerning him and his ancestors. He now suffers in public esteem from the reaction following the high-flown descriptions of Cooper and the herd of minor romancers who could not but make their heroes heroes. Moreover, men acquainted only with the degenerate Pawnees or Diggers extend their evil opinions to the noble tribes now extinct—the Iroquois and Algonquins, for instance, whose remnants, the Delawares and Ojibwas, justify the high opinion of the first settlers. The exploits of King Philip, Pontiac, Gurister Sego, Tecumseh, Keokuk, Iatan, Captain J. Brant, Black Hawk, Red Jacket, Osceola, and Billy Bowlegs, are rapidly fading away from memory, while the failures of such men as Little Thunder, and those like him, stand prominently forth in modern days. Besides the injustice to the manes and memories of the dead, this depreciation of the Indians tends to serious practical evils. Those who see the savage lying drunk about stations, or eaten up with disease, expect to beat him out of the field by merely showing their faces; they fail, and pay the penalty with their lives—an event which occurs every year in some parts of America.
The remove of the village presented an interesting sight—an animated shifting scene of bucks and braves, squaws and pappooses, ponies dwarfed by bad breeding and hard living, dogs and puppies struggling over the plains westward. In front, singly or in pairs, rode the men, not gracefully, not according to the rules of Mexican manège, but like the Abyssinian eunuch, as if born upon and bred to become part of the animal. Some went barebacked; others rode, like the ancient chiefs of the Western Islands, upon a saddle-tree, stirrupless, or provided with hollow blocks of wood: in some cases the saddle was adorned with bead hangings, and in all a piece of buffalo hide with the hair on was attached beneath to prevent chafing. The cruel ring-bit of the Arabs is not unknown. A few had iron curbs, probably stolen. For the most part they managed their nags with a hide thong lashed round the lower jaw and attached to the neck. A whip, of various sizes and shapes, sometimes a round and tattooed ferule, more often a handle like a butcher’s tally-stick, flat, notched, one foot long, and provided with two or three thongs, hung at the wrist. Their nags were not shod with parflèche, as among the horse-Indians of the South. Their long, lank, thick, brownish-black hair, ruddy from the effects of weather, was worn parted in the middle, and depended from the temples confined with a long twist of otter or beaver’s skin in two queues, or pig-tails, reaching to the breast: from the poll, and distinct from the remainder of the hair, streamed the scalp-lock. This style of hair-dressing, doubtless, aids in giving to the coronal region that appearance of depression which characterizes the North American Indians as a race of “Flatheads,” and which, probably being considered a beauty, led to the artificial deformities of the Peruvian and the Aztec. The parting in men, as well as in women, was generally colored with vermilion, and plates of brass or tin, with beveled edges, varying in size from a shilling to half a crown, were inserted into the front hair. The scalp-lock—in fops the side-locks also—was decorated with tin or silver plates, often twelve in number, beginning from the head and gradually diminishing in size as they approached the heels; a few had eagle’s, hawk’s, and crow’s feathers stuck in the hair, and sometimes, grotesquely enough, crownless Kossuth hats, felt broadbrims, or old military casquettes, surmounted all this finery. Their scanty beard was removed; they compare the bushy-faced European to a dog running away with a squirrel in its mouth. In their ears were rings of beads, with pendants of tin plates or mother of pearl, or huge circles of brass wire not unlike a Hindoo tailor’s; and their fore-arms, wrists, and fingers were, after an African fashion, adorned with the same metals, which the savage ever prefers to gold or silver. Their other decorations were cravats of white or white and blue, oval beads, and necklaces of plates like those worn in the hair. PRAIRIE-INDIAN DRESS.The body dress was a tight-sleeved waistcoat of dark drugget, over an American cotton shirt; others wore tattered flannels, and the middle was wrapped round with a common blanket, presented by the government agent—scarlet and blue being the colors preferred, white rare: a better stuff is the coarse broadcloth manufactured for the Indian market in the United States. The leggins were a pair of pantaloons without the body part—in their palmy days the Indians laughed to scorn their future conquerors for tightening the hips so as to impede activity—looped up at both haunches with straps to a leathern girdle, and all wore the breech-cloth, which is the common Hindoo languti or T-bandage. The cut of the leggins is a parallelogram, a little too short and much too broad for the limb; it is sewn so as to fit tight, and the projecting edges, for which the light-colored list or bordering is usually preserved, answers the effect of a military stripe. When buckskin leggins are made the outside edges are fringed, producing that feathered appearance which distinguishes in our pictures the nether limbs of the Indian brave. The garb ends with moccasins,[36] the American brogues, which are made in two ways. The simplest are of one piece, a cylinder of skin cut from above and below the hock of some large animal—moose, elk, or buffalo—and drawn on before shrinking, the joint forming the heel, while the smaller end is sewn together for a toe. This rough contrivance is little used but as a pis aller. The other kind is made of tanned hide in two pieces—a sole and an upper leather, sewn together at the junction; the last is a bit of board rounded off at the end. They are open over the instep, where also they can be laced or tied, and they fit as closely as the Egyptian mizz or under-slipper, which they greatly resemble. They are worn by officers in the Far West as the expatriated Anglo-Indian adopts the “Juti.” The greatest inconvenience to the novice is the want of heel; moreover, they render the feet uncomfortably tender, and, unless soled with parflèche or thick leather, they are scant defense against stony ground; during dry weather they will last fairly, but they become, after a single wetting, even worse than Bombay-made Wellingtons. A common pair will cost $2; when handsomely embroidered with bead-work by the squaws they rise to $15.
[36] This Algonquin word is written moccasson or mocasin, and is pronounced moksin.
The braves were armed with small tomahawks or iron hatchets, which they carried with the powder-horn, in the belt, on the right side, while the long tobacco-pouch of antelope skin hung by the left. Over their shoulders were leather targes, bows and arrows, and some few had rifles; both weapons were defended from damp in deer-skin cases, and quivers with the inevitable bead-work, and the fringes which every savage seems to love. These articles reminded me of those in use among the Bedouins of El Hejaz. Their nags were lean and ungroomed; they treat them as cruelly as do the Somal; yet nothing—short of whisky—can persuade the Indian warrior, like the man of Nejd, to part with a favorite steed. It is his all in all, his means of livelihood, his profession, his pride; he is an excellent judge of horse-flesh, though ignoring the mule and ass; and if he offers an animal for which he has once refused to trade, it is for the reason that an Oriental takes to market an adult slave—it has become useless. Like the Arab, he considers it dishonorable to sell a horse; he gives it to you, expecting a large present, and if disappointed he goes away grumbling that you have “swallowed” his property. He is fond of short races—spurts they are called—as we had occasion to see; there is nothing novel nor interesting in the American as there is in the Arabian hippology; the former learned all its arts from Europeans, the latter taught them.