The Western World / Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North / and South America

by William Henry Giles Kingston

Though the men assume a grave and dignified air when a stranger approaches, they often indulge in practical jokes and laughter among themselves; and in seasons of prosperity, appear good-humoured and merry. The women, however, are doomed to lives of unremitting toil, from the time they become wives. They are compelled to carry the burdens, and to cultivate the ground, when any ground is cultivated, for the production of potatoes, maize, and tobacco. The men condescend merely to manufacture their arms and canoes, and to hunt; or they engage in what they consider the noblest of employments, waging war on their neighbours. The women, indeed, are often compelled to paddle the canoes, sometimes to go fishing, and to carry the portable property from place to place, or an overload of game when captured.

Intelligent as the Indian appears, it is evident that he has cultivated his perceptive powers to the neglect of his spiritual and moral qualities. His senses are remarkably acute. His memory is good; and when aroused, his imagination is vivid, though wild in the extreme. He is warmly attached to hereditary customs and manners. Naturally indolent and slothful, he detests labour, and looks upon it as a disgrace, though he will go through great fatigue when hunting or engaged in warfare.

Wood Indians.

The northern tribes are known as Wood Indians, in contradistinction to the inhabitants of the open country, the Prairie Indians, who differ greatly from the former in their habits and customs. All the tribes of the Athabascas, as well as those to the south of them, known as the Algonquins, are Wood Indians. They are nearly always engaged in hunting the wild animals of the region they inhabit, for the sake of their furs, which they dispose of to the agents of the Hudson Bay Company and other traders, in exchange for blankets,

firearms, hatchets, and numerous other articles, as well as too often for the pernicious fire-water, to obtain even small quantities of which they will frequently dispose of the skins which it has cost them many weeks to obtain with much hardship and danger. These Wood Indians are peaceably-disposed, and can always escape the attacks of their enemies of the prairies by retreating among their forest or lake fastnesses. They obtain their game by various devices, sometimes using traps of ingenious construction, or shooting the creatures with bows and arrows, and of later years with firearms. They spear the fish which abound in their waters, or catch them with scoop and other nets. Although their ordinary wigwams are of the shape already described, some are considerably larger, somewhat of a bee-hive form, covered thickly with birch-bark, and have a raised daïs in the interior capable of holding a considerable number of people. The best-known of these Forest Indians are the Chippeways, who range from the banks of Lake Huron almost to the Rocky Mountains, throughout the British territory.

The Prairie Indians.

To the south of the tribes already mentioned, are the large family of the Dakotahs, who number among them the Sioux, Assiniboines, and Blackfeet, and are the hereditary enemies of the Chippeways, especially of their nearer neighbours, the Crees and Ojibbeways. These Dakotahs occupy the open prairie country to the south of the Saskatchewan, and are the most northern of the Prairie Indians. In summer, they wear little or no clothing; and possessing numerous horses, hunt the buffaloes, or rather bisons, on horseback, armed with spears and bows and arrows. They are fiercer and more warlike than their northern neighbours, and have long set the whites at defiance. The buffalo supplies them with their chief support. The flesh of the animal dried in the sun, or pounded with its fat into pemmican, is their chief article of food; while its skin serves as a covering for their tents, a couch at night, or for clothing by day, and is manufactured into bags for carrying their provisions, and numerous other articles. Physically, they are superior to the Wood Indians. They are both hunters and warriors; and though they may occasionally exchange the buffalo robes—as the skins are called—for firearms; they seldom employ themselves as trappers, or attend to the cultivation of the ground.

The greater number of the tribes further to the south possess horses, and hunt the buffalo and deer. Some are even more savage than the Dakotahs, while others, again, have made slight progress towards civilisation, and live in settled villages, while they rudely cultivate the ground, and possess herds of cattle.

Although the Indian languages differ greatly from each other, a great similarity in grammatical structure and form has been found to exist among them, denoting a common, though remote origin. They differ, however, so greatly from any known language of the Old World, as to afford conclusive proof that their ancestors must have left its shores at an early period of the world’s history.