The half-breed has a bad name in the land. Like the negro, the Indian belongs to a species, sub-species, or variety—whichever the reader pleases—that has diverged widely enough from the Indo-European type to cause degeneracy, physical as well as moral, and often, too, sterility in the offspring. These half-breeds are, therefore, like the mulatto, quasi-mules. The men combine the features of both races; the skin soon becomes coarse and wrinkled, and the eye is black, snaky, and glittering like the Indian’s. The mongrels are short-lived, peculiarly subject to infectious diseases, untrustworthy, and disposed to every villainy. The half-breed women, in early youth, are sometimes attractive enough, uniting the figure of the mother to the more delicate American face; a few years, however, deprive them of all litheness, grace, and agility. They are often married by whites, who hold them to be more modest and humble, less capricious and less exacting, than those of the higher type: they make good wives and affectionate mothers, and, like the Quadroons, they are more “ambitious”—that is to say, of warmer temperaments—than either of the races from which they are derived. The so-called red is a higher ethnic type than the black man; so, in the United States, where all admixture of African blood is deemed impure, the aboriginal American entails no disgrace—some of the noblest of the land are descended from “Indian princesses.” The half-breed girls resemble their mothers in point of industry, and they barter their embroidered robes and moccasins, and mats and baskets, made of bark and bulrush, in exchange for blankets, calicoes, glass beads—an indispensable article of dress—mirrors, needles, rings, vermilion, and other luxuries. The children, with their large black eyes, wide mouths, and glittering teeth, flattened heads, and remarkable agility of motion, suggest the idea of little serpents.
The day had been fatiguing, and our eyes ached with the wind and dust. We lost no time in spreading on the floor the buffalo robes borrowed from the house, and in defying the smaller tenants of the ranch. Our host, M. Reynal, was a study, but we deferred the lesson till the next morning.
To Fort Laramie. 14th August.
M. REYNAL.M. Reynal had been an Indian trader in his youth. Of this race there were in his day two varieties: the regular trader and the coureur des bois, or unlicensed peddler, who was subject to certain pains and penalties. The former had some regard for his future; he had a permanent interest in the Indians, and looked to the horses, arms, and accoutrements of his protégés, so that hunting might not flag. The bois brûlé peddler, having—like an English advertising firm—no hope of dealing twice with the same person, got all he could for what he could. These men soon sapped the foundation of the Indian’s discipline. One of them, for instance, would take protection with the chief, pay presents, and by increasing the wealth, enhance the importance of his protector. Another would place himself under the charge of some ambitious aspirant to power, who was thus raised to a position of direct rivalry. A split would ensue; the weaker would secede with his family and friends, and declare independence; a murder or two would be the result, and a blood-feud would be bequeathed from generation to generation. The licensed traders have ever strenuously opposed the introduction of alcohol, a keg of which will purchase from the Indian every thing that is his, his arms, lodge, horses, children, and wives. In olden times, however, the Maine Liquor Law was not, as now, in force through the territories. The coureur des bois, therefore, entered the country through various avenues, from the United States and from Mexico, without other stock in trade but some kegs of whisky, which he retailed at the modest price of $36 per gallon. He usually mixed one part of fire with five of pure water, and then sold a pint-canful for a buffalo robe. “Indian liquor” became a proverbial term. According to some travelers, a barrel of “pure Cincinnati,” even after running the gauntlet of railroad and lake travel, has afforded a hundred barrels of “good Indian liquor.” A small bucketful is poured into a wash-tub of water; a large quantity of “dog-leg” tobacco and red pepper is then added, next a bitter root common in the country is cut up into it, and finally it is colored with burnt sugar—a nice recipe for a morning’s headache! The only drawback to this traffic is its danger. The Indian, when intoxicated, is ready for any outrageous act of violence or cruelty; vinosity brings out the destructiveness and the utter barbarity of his character; it makes him thirst tiger-like for blood. The coureur des bois, therefore, who in those days was highly respected, was placed in the Trader’s Lodge, a kind of public house, like the Iwanza of Central Africa, and the village chief took care to station at the door a guard of sober youths, sometimes habited like Europeans, ready to check the unauthorized attempts of ambitious clansmen upon the whisky-vendor’s scalp. The Western men, who will frequently be alluded to in these pages, may be divided, like the traders, into two classes. The first is the true mountaineer, whom the platitude and tame monotony of civilized republican life has in early youth driven, often from an honored and wealthy family, to the wilds and wolds, to become the forlorn hope in the march of civilization. The second is the offscouring and refuse of the Eastern cities, compelled by want, fatuity, or crime to exile himself from all he most loves. The former, after passing through the preliminary stage greenhorn, is a man in every sense of the term: to more than Indian bravery and fortitude, he unites the softness of woman, and a child-like simplicity, which is the very essence of a chivalrous character; you can read his nature in his clear blue eyes, his sun-tanned countenance, his merry smile, and his frank, fearless manner. The latter is a knave or a fool; it would make “bad blood,” as the Frenchman says, to describe him.
M. Reynal’s history had to be received with many grains of salt. The Western man has been worked by climate and its consequences, by the huge magnificence of nature and the violent contrasts of scenery, into a remarkable resemblance to the wild Indian. He hates labor—which poet and divine combine to deify in the settled states—as the dire effect of a primeval curse; “loaf” he must and will; to him one hour out of the twenty-four spent in honest industry is satis superque. His imagination is inflamed by scenery and climate, difficulty and danger; he is as superstitious as an old man-o’-war’s-man of the olden school; and he is a transcendental liar, like his prototype the aborigine, who in this point yields nothing to the African negro. I have heard of a man riding eighty miles—forty into camp and forty out—in order to enjoy the sweet delights of a lie. His yarns and stories about the land he lives in have become a proverbial ridicule; he will tell you that the sun rises north of what it did se puero; he has seen mountains of diamonds and gold nuggets scattered like rocks over the surface of our general mother. I have been gravely told of a herd of bison which arrested the course of the Platte River, causing its waters, like those of the Red Sea, to stand up, wall fashion, while the animals were crossing. Of this Western order is the well-known account of a ride on a buffalo’s horns, delivered for the benefit of a gaping world by a popular author of the yellow-binding category. In this age, however, the Western man has become sensitive to the operation of “smoking.” A popular Joe Miller anent him is this: A traveler, informed of what he might educe by “querying,” asked an old mountaineer, who shall be nameless, what difference he observed in the country since he had first settled in it.
“Wal, stranger, not much!” was the reply; “only when I fust come here, that ’ere mountain,” pointing to the tall Uinta range, “was a hole!”
Disembarrassing M. Reynal’s recital of its mask of improbabilities and impossibilities, remained obvious the naked fact that he had led the life of a confirmed coureur des bois. The French Canadian and Creole both, like the true Français de France, is loth to stir beyond the devil-dispelling sound of his chapel-bell; once torn from his chez lui, he apparently cares little to return, and, like the Englishman, to die at home in his own land. The adventurous Canadians—in whom extremes meet—have wandered through the length and breadth of the continent; they have left their mark even upon the rocks in Utah Territory. M. Reynal had quitted St. Louis at an early age as trader, trapper, every thing in short, provided with a little outfit of powder, ball, and whisky. At first he was unfortunate. In a war between the Sioux and the Pawnees, he was taken prisoner by the latter, and with much ado preserved, by the good aid of his squaw, that useful article his scalp. Then fickle fortune turned in his favor. He married several wives, identified himself with the braves, and became a little brother of the tribe, while his whisky brought him in an abundance of furs and peltries. After many years, waxing weary of a wandering life, he settled down into the somewhat prosaic position in which we had the pleasure of finding him. He was garrulous as a veteran soldier upon the subject of his old friends the trappers, that gallant advance guard who, sixty years ago, unconsciously fought the fight of civilization for the pure love of fighting; who battled with the Indian in his own way, surpassing him in tracking, surprising, ambuscading, and shooting, and never failing to raise the enemy’s hair. They are well-nigh extinct, those old pioneers, wild, reckless, and brave as the British tar of a century past; they live but in story; their place knows them no longer; it is now filled by the “prospector.” Civilization and the silk hat have exterminated them. How many deeds of stern fight and heroic endurance have been ignored by this world, which knows nothing of its greatest men, carent quia vale sacro! We talk of Thermopylæ and ignore Texas; we have all thrilled at the account of the Mameluke Bey’s leap; but how many of us have heard of Major Macculloch’s spring from the cliff?
Our breakfast was prepared in the usual prairie style. First the coffee—three parts burnt beans, which had been duly ground to a fine powder and exposed to the air, lest the aroma should prove too strong for us—was placed on the stove to simmer till every noxious principle was duly extracted from it. Then the rusty bacon, cut into thick slices, was thrown into the fry-pan: here the gridiron is unknown, and if known would be little appreciated, because it wastes the “drippings,” which form with the staff of life a luxurious sop. Thirdly, antelope steak, cut off a corpse suspended for the benefit of flies outside, was placed to stew within influence of the bacon’s aroma. Lastly came the bread, which of course should have been “cooked” first. The meal is kneaded with water and a pinch of salt; the raising is done by means of a little sour milk, or more generally by the deleterious yeast-powders of the trade. The carbonic acid gas evolved by the addition of water must be corrected, and the dough must be expanded by saleratus or prepared carbonate of soda or alkali, and other vile stuff, which communicates to the food the green-yellow tinge, and suggests many of the properties of poison. A hundred-fold better, the unpretending chapati, flapjack, scone, or, as the Mexicans prettily called it, “tortilla!” The dough, after being sufficiently manipulated upon a long, narrow, smooth board, is divided into “biscuits” and “dough-nuts,”[56] and finally it is placed to be half cooked under the immediate influence of the rusty bacon and graveolent antelope. “Uncle Sam’s stove,” be it said with every reverence for the honored name it bears, is a triumph of convenience, cheapness, unwholesomeness, and nastiness—excuse the word, nice reader. This travelers’ bane has exterminated the spit and gridiron, and makes every thing taste like its neighbor: by virtue of it, mutton borrows the flavor of salmon trout, tomatoes resolve themselves into greens. I shall lose my temper if the subject is not dropped.
[56] The Western “biscuit” is English roll; “cracker” is English biscuit. The “dough-nut” is, properly speaking, a “small roundish cake, made of flour, eggs, and sugar, moistened with milk and boiled in lard” (Webster). On the prairies, where so many different materials are unprocurable, it is simply a diminutive loaf, like the hot roll of the English passenger steamer.
We set out at 6 A.M. over a sandy bottom, from which the musquetoes rose in swarms. After a twelve-mile stretch the driver pointed out on the right of the road, which here runs between high earth-banks, a spot still infamous in local story. At this place, in 1854, five Indians, concealing themselves in the bed of a dwarf arroyo, fired upon the mail-wagon, killing two drivers and one passenger, and then plundered it of 20,000 dollars. “Long-chin,” the leader, and the other murderers, when given up by the tribe, were carried to Washington, D. C., where—with the ultra-philanthropy which has of modern days distinguished the “Great Father’s” government of his “Poor Children of the Plains”—the villains were liberally rewarded and restored to their homes.[57] To cut off a bend of the Platte we once more left the valley, ascended sundry slopes of sand and clay deeply cut by dry creeks, and from the summit enjoyed a pretty view. A little to the left rose the aerial blue cone of that noble landmark, LARAMIE PEAK.Laramie Peak, based like a mass of solidified air upon a dark wall, the Black Hills, and lit up with the roseate hues of the morning. The distance was about sixty miles; you would have guessed twenty. On the right lay a broad valley, bounded by brown rocks and a plain-colored distance, with the stream winding through it like a thread of quicksilver; in places it was hidden from sight by thickets of red willow, cypress clumps, and dense cool cotton-woods. All was not still life; close below us rose the white lodges of the Ogalala tribe.