the gum of trees.

INDIAN IDEALS

5

The women sometimes made crude pottery and clay pipes, ornamenting their work with stripes of color. All the tribes wandered about their own huntinggrounds as fancy or necessity led them.

The extent of the religion of the Indians has been a theme of much discussion. The wind, the thunder, the lightning, the clouds, the rain, the stars, even the streams and forests, the bear, the fox, and the buffalo, were in some vague sense gods to them. The idea of a supreme God, a moral Being, such as is depicted in the Bible, never occurred to them. No Indian language ever contained a word which conveyed to an Indian the meaning of the English word "God." The French priests, who were the first to establish missions among the Indians, soon discovered that the Indian languages did not contain words that would express Christian, or even moral, ideas. Of course this was also true of the incapacity of these languages to express ideas of civilization in general.

An Indian's ideal was to become a famous hunter and warrior. He was bred from infancy to be a master of woodcraft. He could imitate any bird or beast; he could outwit the fox, outrun the wolf, take the moose by surprise, and entrap the wildest animal. As a warrior, he was a wild beast that could think and plan. It is doubtful that two tribes, or even two Indians, ever met in a fair open fight. To ambush the enemy, to kill him in his sleepthis was valor. To wear a scalp at the belt was a certificate of the skill of a veteran-a title to the chieftainship. No promise could hold or treaty bind such a people.

The Indians may be said to have welcomed Europeans. The Hurons at once took Champlain into their confidence, made him their ally, and had him turn his guns upon their ancient foes, the Five Nations. The next acquisition was of guns, powder, ball, and scalping-knives. Then the Indians were ready to follow their old foes and destroy the new-comers. But the whites brought with them a weapon that cut off the Indians more quickly than war. This was rum, which the Indians called "firewater." They speedily practiced all the vices of civilization. They did not take to its virtues.

During the seventeenth century, the settlers were usually on friendly terms with their Indian neighbors, who with few exceptions were the remnants of once strong tribes. They were enfeebled by decay, broken in spirits, and quite ready to receive the protection and help of the whites. This condition of affairs continued till the Franco-English struggle began, in 1689. There were exceptions, however, as the war with the Pequots in Connecticut, in 1636; with the Mohicans in Massachusetts, in 1637; with King Philip in 1675, and with the Tuscaroras at the close of the seventeenth century. But with the opening of the seventy years' war between France and England for the possession of the continent, the Indian tribes suddenly became important military factors. The ancient feud between Algonquin and Iroquois was resumed; the Five Nations kept pretty steadily with the English; all the other tribes, sooner or later, joined the French. These alliances greatly affected all the tribes from the Hudson to the Mississippi, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. The bow and arrow gave place to the rifle; the tribes were greatly decreased in numbers by drunkenness, endless broils, and smallpox.

The Indians gained nothing by the French and Indian wars. When in 1763 the country east of the Mississippi became English soil, it seemed, for a time, that the Indians west of the Allegheny were to be left forever undisturbed within their vast domain. This was the plan of the British government. It was also the plan of Pontiac, "king and lord of all the Northwest," and in a famous conspiracy he planned, in 1763, to drive the English into the sea; but in spite of King George and Pontiac, the settlers pressed over the mountains and sought homes in the Mississippi Valley. For the first time the English government and the colonies were united against the Indians, and the year that witnessed the imposition of the stamp tax (1765) witnessed the utter overthrow of Pontiac.

The war for the independence of the United States again divided the Indian tribes, and this time by a new division: allegiance to Congress or to the king. In the Declaration of Independence the king was accused of endeavoring "to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian

1763]

RESERVATIONS

7

savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." With the establishment of a national government, all the Indians within the United States became subject to its authority; and their history is best told in connection with the acquisition and settlement of the south and west.

There is probably not a county in the United States which does not show vestiges of this vanished and vanquished race. Streams, mountains, rivers, states, cities, preserve many Indian names. In some places, as in Ohio and Missouri, curious mounds and earthworks in rude order attest the antiquity of this strange people.. Museums are now filled with Indian collections, gathered to preserve some relic of their language, their customs, and their traditions. The dead Indian, like the Egyptian mummy, is treasured as a vestige of an ancient world. But no one should confound fact with fiction by reading into Indian life and character qualities which the race never possessed. For four hundred years it has resisted civilization. During the three centuries of its close contact with Europeans, it has preserved all its ancient character, except in those limited areas, called reservations, where the compulsion of civilization has forced a change. In the course of our narrative we shall meet with great Indians-eloquent, like Red Jacket, or politic, like Tecumseh. But even these have displayed only the characteristics of their race and remained intellectual barbarians.

The history of the Indians is that of a vanishing race. We know that they completely possessed the country at the time when the colonies were first settled. A century and a half later, at the close of the French and Indian war (1763), the Proclamation Line was the frontier. Westward lay the Indian Country. Up to this time the tribes had figured as allies of the English or of the French in the long struggle for the continent. England won, and the Indian Country was set apart by the king as a western and permanent Indian reservation. Pontiac then made a league of the tribes to exterminate the whites. His conspiracy failed. Soon after the war for independence broke out, and the tribes divided, some fighting for Congress, others for

the king. Congress took up the Indian question when it made treaties of peace with the Six Nations, and secured their neutrality during the Revolution.

With the organization of the United States, the national government was given sole power to make treaties with the Indians, and from 1789 to the present time they have been the subject of a vast amount of legislation by Congress. The policy of the government has been to treat each Indian tribe as a nation; to remove the tribes east of the Mississippi to the Indian Country west of it; to establish Indian reservations and keep the tribes within them; to purchase the reservations, or parts of them, and open them to white settlers; to consolidate the tribes in new, smaller, and more remote reservations; to pay the Indians annuities for their lands, and thus to make most of the tribes dependent upon the government for food and clothes, and to allow churches and schools among them.

The effect of this policy has been the disappearance of the Indians almost entirely east of the Mississippi, and the concentration of the remaining tribes on the reservations. Thus the Indian of to-day is wholly dependent on the United States government for all his supplies. There are exceptions, as the five civilized tribes of the Indian Territory practice all the trades and follow the usual occupations of white men, and have a government organized much like that of white territories. They have their laws, books, and newspapers in their own language. But most of the Indians on the western reservations are degraded. On reservations east of the Mississippi, few pure blooded Indians can now be found. A map of Indian reservations to-day shows at a glance the striking contrast between the Indian Country now and its extent just before the American Revolution. Then it stretched an unbroken wilderness westward from the Alleghanies; now it consists of a few dozen reservations scattered from Maine to Oregon.

CHAPTER II

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

986-1520

To this vast wilderness, "the under-half of the world," sparsely inhabited by barbarous tribes and savage clans, the people of Europe were bound, eventually, to find their way and to extend civilization, as, ages ago, the people of Asia spread civilization over Europe. We do not know how the native races of America came here. This continent may once have been a peninsula of Asia, as Europe now is, and its original inhabitants may have wandered eastward from Asia to this country about the time when the first inhabitants of Europe wandered from Asia westward. The study of primitive speech, of ancient ruins, and of folk-lore throws a dim light on the subject, but nothing is known to which an exact date can be given till the tenth century. Adventurous Northmen, of whom one Eric the Red is most famous, in the year 986, having passed westward over the Sea of Darkness, as the Atlantic was then called, sighted the coast of Labrador, sailed along the Grand Banks and visited portions of the New England coast, which from the abundance of its wild grapes they called Vinland. This may have been the shores of Long Island Sound. These voyages were sung in the Norse poems, called the sagas, but were soon forgotten. It has been said that some tradition of these adventures was known to Columbus, but this is doubtful.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, geographical knowledge of the world was greatly extended. Trade and commerce then centered around the Mediterranean. Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Lisbon were the commercial centers of Europe. A rich overland trade with Asia had been carried on uninterruptedly for centuries. The chief commercial center in the East was Constantinople, but in