The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

The only arts of the Indians are medicine and the use of arms. They are great in the knowledge of simples and tisanes. The leaves of the white willow are the favorite emetic; wounds are dressed with astringent herbs, and inflammations are reduced by scarification and the actual cautery. Among some tribes, the hammam, or Turkish bath, is invariably the appendage to a village. It is an oven sunk in the earth, with room for about a score of persons, and a domed roof of tamped and timber-propped earth—often mistaken for a bulge in the ground—pierced with a little square window for ventilation when not in use. A fire is kindled in the centre, and the patient, after excluding the air, sits quietly in this rude calidarium till half roasted and stifled by the heat and smoke. Finally, like the Russian peasant, he plunges into the burn that runs hard by, and feels his ailments dropping off him with the dead cuticle. The Indians associating with the horse have learned a rude farriery which often succeeds where politer practice would fail. I heard of one who cured the bites of rattlesnakes and copperheads by scarifying the wounded beast’s face, plastering the place with damped gunpowder paste and setting it on fire.

Among the Prairie tribes are now to be found individuals provided not only with the old muskets formerly supplied to them, FIRE-ARMS.—BOWS AND ARROWS.but with yägers,[77] Sharp’s breech-loaders, alias “Beecher’s Bibles,” Colt’s revolvers, and other really good fire-arms. Their shooting has improved with their tools: many of them are now able to “draw a bead” with coolness and certainty. Those who can not afford shooting-irons content themselves with their ancient weapons, the lance and bow. The former is a poor affair, a mere iron spike from two to three inches long, inserted into the end of a staff about as thick as a Hindostanee’s bamboo lance; it is whipped round with sinew for strength, decorated with a few bunches of gaudy feathers, and defended with the usual medicine-bag. The bow varies in dimensions with the different tribes. On the prairies, for convenient use on horseback, it seldom exceeds three feet in length; among the Southern Indians its size doubles, and in parts of South America it is like that of the Andamans, a gigantic weapon with an arrow six feet long, and drawn by bringing the aid of the feet to the hands. The best bows among the Sioux and Yutas are of horn, hickory being unprocurable; an inferior sort is made of a reddish wood, in hue and grain not unlike that called “mountain mahogany.” A strip of raw-hide is fitted to the back for increase of elasticity, and the string is a line of twisted sinew. When not wanted for use the weapon is carried in a skin case slung over the shoulder. It is drawn with the two forefingers—not with the forefinger and thumb, as in the East—and generally the third or ring-finger is extended along the string to give additional purchase. Savage tribes do little in the way of handicraft, but that little they do patiently, slowly, and therefore well. The bow and arrow are admirably adapted to their purpose. The latter is either a reed or a bit of arrow-wood (Viburnum dentatum), whose long, straight, and tough stems are used by the fletcher from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The piles are triangles of iron, agate, flint, chalcedony, opal, or other hard stone: for war purposes they are barbed, and bird-bolts tipped with hard wood are used for killing small game. Some tribes poison their shafts: the material is the juice of a buffalo’s or an antelope’s liver when it has become green and decomposed after the bite of a rattlesnake; at least this is the account which all the hunters and mountaineers give of it. They have also, I believe, vegetable poisons. The feathers are three in number; those preferred are the hawk’s and the raven’s; and some tribes glue, while others whip them on with tendon-thread. The stele is invariably indented from the feathers to the tip with a shallow spiral furrow: this vermiculation is intended, according to the traders, to hasten death by letting air into or letting blood out of the wound. It is probably the remnant of some superstition now obsolete, for every man does it, while no man explains why or wherefore. If the Indian works well, he does not work quickly; he will expend upon half a dozen arrows as many months. Each tribe has its own mark; the Pawnees, for instance, make a bulge below the notch. Individuals also have private signs which enable them to claim a disputed scalp or buffalo robe. In battle or chase the arrows are held in the left hand, and are served out to the right with such rapidity that one long string of them seems to be cleaving the air. A good Sioux archer will, it is said, discharge nine arrows upward before the first has fallen to the ground. He will transfix a bison and find his shaft upon the earth on the other side; and he shows his dexterity by discharging the arrow up to its middle in the quarry and by withdrawing it before the animal falls. Tales are told of a single warrior killing several soldiers; and as a rule, at short distances, the bow is considered by the whites a more effectual weapon than the gun. It is related that when the Sioux first felt the effects of Colt’s revolver, the weapon, after two shots, happened to slip from the owner’s grasp; when he recovered it and fired a third time all fled, declaring that a white was shooting them with buffalo chips. Wonderful tales are told of the Indians’ accuracy with the bow: they hold it no great feat to put the arrow into a keyhole at the distance of forty paces. It is true that I never saw any thing surprising in their performances, but the savage will not take the trouble to waste his skill without an object.

[77] An antiquated sort of German rifle, formerly used by the federal troops.

THE SIOUX LANGUAGE.The Sioux tongue, like the Pawnee, is easily learned; government officials and settlers acquire it as the Anglo-Indian does Hindostanee. They are assisted by the excellent grammar and dictionary of the Dakotah language, collated by the members of the Dakotah Mission, edited by the Rev. S. R. Riggs, M.A., and accepted for publication by the Smithsonian Institution, December, 1851. The Dakotah-English part contains about 16,000 words, and the bibliography (spelling-books, tracts, and translations) numbered ten years ago eighteen small volumes. The work is compiled in a scholar-like manner. The orthography, though rather complicated, is intelligible, and is a great improvement upon the old and unartistic way of writing the polysynthetic Indian tongues, syllable by syllable, as though they were monosyllabic Chinese; the superfluous h (as Dakotah for Dakota), by which the broad sound of the terminal a is denoted, has been justly cast out. The peculiar letters ch, p, and t, are denoted by a dot beneath the simple sound; similarly the k (or Arabic kaf), the gh (the Semitic ghain) and the kh (khá), which, as has happened in Franco-Arabic grammars, was usually expressed by an R. An apostrophe (s’a) denotes the hiatus, which is similar to the Arab’s hamzah.

Vater long ago remarked that the only languages which had a character, if not similar, at any rate analogous to the American, are the Basque and the Congo, that is, the South African or Kaffir family. This is the case in many points: in Dakotah, for instance, as in Kisawahili, almost every word ends in a pure or a nasalized vowel. But the striking novelty of the African tongues, the inflexion of words by an initial, not, as with us, by a terminal change and the complex system of euphony, does not appear in the American, which in its turn possesses a dual unknown to the African. The Dakotah, like the Kaffir, has no gender; it uses the personal and impersonal, which is an older distinction in language. It follows the primitive and natural arrangement of speech: it says, for instance, “aguyapi maku ye,” bread to me give; as in Hindostanee, to quote no other, “roti hamko do.” So in logical argument it begins with the conclusion and proceeds to the premisses, which renders it difficult for a European to think in Dakotah. Like other American tongues, it is polysynthetic, which appears to be the effect of arrested development. Human speech begins with inorganic sounds, which represent symbolism by means of arrows pointed in a certain direction, bent trees, crossed rods, and other similar contrivances. Its first step is monosyllabic, which corresponds with the pictograph, the earliest attempt at writing among the uncivilized.[78] The next advance is polysynthesis, which is apparently built upon monosyllabism, as the idiograph of the Chinese upon a picture or glyph. The last step is the syllabic and inflected, corresponding with the Phœnico-Arabian alphabet, which gave rise to the Greek, the Latin, and their descendants. The complexity of Dakotah grammar is another illustration of the phenomenon that man in most things, in language especially, begins with the most difficult and works on toward the facile. Savages, who have no mental exercise but the cultivation of speech, and semi-barbarous people, who still retain the habit, employ complicated and highly elaborate tongues, e. g., Arabic, Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, Kaffir, and Anglo-Saxon. With time these become more simple; the modus operandi appears to be admixture of race.

[78] A Kaffir girl wishing to give a hint to a friend of mine drew a setting sun, a tree, and two figures standing under it; intelligible enough, yet the Kaffirs ignore a syllabarium.

The Dakotahs have a sacred language, used by medicine-men, and rendered unintelligible to the vulgar by words borrowed from other Indian dialects, and by synonyms, e. g., biped for man, quadruped for wolf. A chief, asking for an ox or cow, calls it a dog, and a horse, moccasins: possibly, like Orientals, he superstitiously avoids direct mention, and speaks of the object wanted by a humbler name. Poetry is hardly required in a language so highly figurative: a hi-hi-hi-hi-hi, occasionally interrupted by a few words, composes their songs. The Rev. Mr. Pond gives the following specimen of “Blackboy’s” Mourning Song for his Grandson, addressed to those of Ghostland:

Friend, pause, and look this way;

Friend, pause, and look this way;

Friend, pause, and look this way;