EFFECT OF INDIANS ON AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. mercial Company and more recent developments in that isolated portion of the United States. The effect of all this upon the topography of the country has been very great. All history shows that one of the most important contributions of a primitive people to the civilization of those who dispossess them is the trails and camping-places, water-ways and trade-routes they have known and used themselves for ages. The campsites and Indian villages became trading-posts and these later developed into important towns and cities, eminently well situated for the purposes of modern civilization (Albany, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburg, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Spokane, Kansas City, and many more). The Indian trails and traderoutes, many of which had before been but paths of the buffalo, became turnpikes and then railroad lines. The Crow's Nest Branch of the Canadian Pacific climbs the Rockies by an Indian trail, as did its predecessors, and the towns springing up beside it occupy the abandoned campsites of the disappearing red man. Miss Yawger well quotes the words of a Cayuga chief, who in 1847 appealed to the white man for generous treatment: "The Empire State, as you love to call it, was once laced by our trails from Albany to Buffalo; trails that we had trodden for centuries; trails worn so deep by the feet of the Iroquois, that they became your roads of travel, as your possessions gradually ate into those of my people. Your roads still traverse the same lines of commerce which bound one part of the Long House 67 to the other. Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history?" This aspect of race-contact in North America has been considered by Professor Turner, and especially by A. B. Hulbert, in his Red Men's Roads (1900) and Historical Highways of America (1902-1905). Among notable routes and trails, paths, etc., may be mentioned the Old Bay Path (in New England), the Albany and Buffalo trail, the Cherokee trading path, the Warriors' path (from Cumberland Gap to the mouth of the Scioto), the Indian road (from Virginia to Philadelphia), the Santa Fé trail, the Oregon trail, the Wabash trade-route, etc. In the opening up and developing of North America under European auspices, the collaboration and coöperation of the Indian himself were important factors, wherever possible. Exploration and occupation of the New World were all the easier, because almost everywhere adventurer, missionary, trader, trapper and hunter, pioneer and settler were so often led by Indian guides, to one of the earliest of whom Roger Williams paid eloquent tribute. The list of such guides, pathfinders, and succourers" is a long one, from the Algonkian Squanto, the friend of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1621, to the Shoshonian woman, Sacagawea, whose statue in bronze (erected in 1905) adorns City Park in Portland, Ore*Indian and Pioneer, p. 92. 66 gon, as a worthy memorial of her services to the Lewis and Clark exploring expedition in the beginning of the Nineteenth century, and those who come after her in American history. Another lasting memorial of the Indian, to be mentioned here, consists in the innumerable names with which, in the words of Walt Whitman, he has 66 charged the water and the land." Although, unlike Canada, the United States as a whole bears no Indian name, she has kept such by the thousand in her geographical and topographical nomenclature. States, rivers, lakes, mountains, and hills, cities, towns, and villages are perpetual remembrancers of the aborigines. Many other place-names are translations, good or bad, of Indian appellations; and, to make the score full, other hundreds of places in all parts of the country owe the same debt by the prefix "Indian," as do many other things like "Indian file," "Indian gift," "Indian ladder," "Indian corn," and "Indian summer." And, hidden in the local topography (wards, streets, and the like), a good many Indian names have been lost for more general use; in such fashion, Manhattan in New York, Shawmut in Boston, etc., have failed to appear as names for their respective cities. Hundreds of other Indian names are preserved in the appellations of clubs of all sorts and kindred social institutions among the whites; they appear also in the desig nations of vessels of all kinds from motor-boats to men-of-war and ocean grey-hounds, and after the Indian, and in words taken from his various languages, have been named great numbers of public parks and private estates, summer cottages and hotels by the sea-side or up in the mountains, camps " for children and youth, etc. But our language owes to the Indian much more than all this, the significance of which may be estimated from such a recent work as Mr. W. W. Tooker's Indian Place Names on Long Island, etc. (1911). The fact that monarchy was at a high premium in Europe when the discovery and colonization of a great part of North America took place, led to a decided over-appreciation of the chiefs and petty leaders of Indian tribes, whose position and authority often did not at all correspond to those of the kings and princes of the Old World. This conferring of "royal dignity" upon Indian chiefs and their immediate family connections was a policy, necessary, perhaps, according to the ideas of the age, but one which disturbed and complicated sometimes the existing political and social conditions of the aborigines, exaggerating and extending the powers of the chiefs recognized by the whites, as against all others with equal claims. Products of this of this "royal idea" royal idea" were "King Philip ", the "Emperor Powhatan ", the "Emperor of the Creeks", etc. INFLUENCE OF INDIANS UPON LANGUAGE. 66 Queen Elizabeth, it is said, was much offended because a common Englishman "had married the "Princess Pocahontas ", daughter of Powhatan. In the reign of Queen Anne England was visited by the "Four Kings of Canada." In Europe, both in England and in France, Indian" Kings were received as royal guests and shown honors worthy of their supposed high station. The institutions of the whites had to bend many times for their service. How European ideas and institutions were really more or less diverted for the benefit (sometimes, alas! for the spoliation) of the Indians has been shown by J. A. James, in his monograph on English Institutions and the American Indian (1894). Other interesting Other interesting facts illustrating how the presence of the aborigines influenced law, institutions and governmental procedure on the part of the European colonists, I will be found in the various articles in the Handbook of American Indians dealing with the Department of Indian Affairs, the Reservation System, Treaties, the history of the "Indian Territory," etc. In connection with the "Indian Territory" and its recent development, it should be noted that a Congressional Commission in 1778 proposed that the Delawares and certain other Indian tribes be formed into a separate state and admitted into the Union. The laws passed by the colonies and subsequently (as in 1795, when the President was empowered to establish trading-posts) 69 by Congress are of interest here. Things Indian, or supposedly such, were from time to time recognized by colonial statutes, etc. As Mr. Weeden informs us, the necessities of commerce made the people of the middle and eastern States adopt wampum, the shell-money of the Indians (manufactured also by the Europeans) as a sort of legal tender. And prizemoney for Indian scalps seems more than once to have been approved by the whites. Several of the educational institutions of the country, including some now famous - Harvard, Dartmouth, William and Marywere founded wholly or in part for the Indians. The charter of Harvard stated that it was for the "education of the English and Indian youth in knowledge and godliness"; that of Dartmouth specifically provided" for the education and instruction of Indian tribes in the land." To be sure, the Indians who have taken degrees at these institutions are few in number, but the fact remains, nevertheless, that the oldest and greatest of our American Universities, included in its inception both red man and white man. Influence of the Indians upon Language, Etc, Race-contact of the kind experienced by the red man and the white man in North America could never have occurred without the languages of the European colonists being noticeably influenced by those of the aborigines. This influence would begin earliest and make itself felt most easily, e. g., in certain parts of Canada, where the French and Indians, as the existence of so large an amount of native blood in the veins of the white population indicates, to say nothing of the great numbers of unmistakable métis, mingled very freely, and where no serious obstacles to such borrowings were present. The Indian element in the Canadian French language has been discussed in detail by the author of this article and by the late Professor A. M. Elliott. The corresponding element in the language of English-speaking North America is considerably larger than is generally believed. woodchuck, wyandotte. What a wide Upon the literary and the colloquial speech of the European settlers and their descendants, the Indian tribes have made a marked impression. The Indians of the United States and Canada have furnished to "American English" about 300 words (at a rough count) deserving record in our dictionaries. One stock alone, the Algonkian, is responsible for nearly 200 of these loan-words from the aborigines. A few only of the most interesting and most important can be cited here: Bayou, caribou, chautauqua, chipmunk, hickory, hominy, moose, klondike, manito, mocassin, mugwump, opossum, papoose, pemmican, persimmon, powow, raccoon, saratoga, sequoia, shoe-pack, skunk, squash, squaw, Tammany, tarpon, terrapin, toboggan, tomahawk, totem, tuxedo, wampum, wigwam, hunting-grounds," "Great Father," Into the colloquial speech of English America, and even sometimes into the literary language as well, have crept phrases and expressions also, which are translations, or attempts at such, of aboriginal turns and tricks of thought, often but very imperfectly understood. Such, e. g., brave," "sun," 66 moon,' "fire-water," "pale-face," " squawman, "medicine," "medicineman,” "Great Spirit," happy are 66 FISHING AND HUNTING. "to bury the hatchet," "to smoke the pipe of peace." Taken altogether these data indicate clearly that the influence of the Indian upon the language of the Europeans in North America has been both great and lasting. Fishing and Hunting. At the period of European discovery and colonization, the seas, lakes, and rivers of North America teemed with fish of innumerable species, with the capture of which and their utilization for food the Indians were already familiar and often very skillful, besides, in the art of preserving them. The forests also abounded in all sorts of game, large and small, in the tracking, trapping, and the killing of which they had developed great cunning and dexterity, as may be seen from the late Prof. O. T. Mason's exhaustive studies on the subject. Regarding the numerous strange animals of his new environment, the white man had much to learn, and much was taught him by the Indian. It has been said, with truth, that "in methods of capturing sea-food the native had little to learn from the white man;" the latter, however, was not an indifferent pupil in the piscatorial arts of the former, and from the very beginnings of European settlement certain devices of the Indian fisherman were adopted by the newcomers, some of which have continued in use down to the present day. 71 Such names as "The Weirs " (e. g., in New Hampshire), the "Lac aux Claies" (one of the early French names of Lake Simcoe, in the Canadian Province of Ontario), etc., bear witness to the fact that the Algonkian and other Indian peoples of northeastern North America, and the same thing may be said of the tribes of the Southeast and those of the great river-valleys of West and Northwest, constructed "fences," "hurdles," "weirs," and other similar obstructions in streams, ponds, lakes, and even the sea itself, for the detention and capture of fish. The wattle-work fish-traps and weirs of the Indians of the Virginia-Carolina region are figured and described in the writings. of the early historians and chroniclers, such as Hariot and others, who report them as adept in their con struction. The European settlers profited much by these devices of the natives, and as late as the time of the Revolution the Virginians, as Mr. Edward Eggleston* tells us, were still using what was practically the Indian fish-weir. In several other parts of the country the same thing happened. Even to-day the tidal creeks and rivers of Maine contain many fish-traps of great size, constructed in the Indian fashion of sticks and branches- sometimes sim ply of brushwood. Locally all over the country, doubtless, methods of taking fish, of Indian origin, survive, such as Transit of European Civilization, p. 100. |
