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GAMES, RECREATIONS, ETC.

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English and other Europeans in the United States and Canada, whence, in the wake of its great popularity as a public athletic performance during the last quarter of the Nineteenth century, it made its way to the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, and even South Africa, in all of which countries "international games have taken place from time to time. It is now one of the games played by certain American universities, of both the East and the West. Lacrosse is recognized more or less as the "national game 99 of Canada. In Louisiana raquette is still played (the "stick" or racket is of the Choctaw type, differing in the shape and quantity of the netting from that employed by the whites further north) by both whites and negroes. Here two rackets are used, one in each hand, instead of a single racket manipulated by both hands, as in the game of lacrosse in Canada, etc. Other things about the game in Louisiana make it certain that it has been adopted from the Indians of the locality, and not imported by French settlers from the North, as some have supposed. Mr. Culin reports witnessing a game of raquette played on Sunday afternoon, in the summer of 1901, between two clubs of Frenchspeaking negroes, the Bayous " and "La Villes," on a vacant lot, east of the city of New Orleans. In "old Creole days" such games were very common. An interesting example of the persistence of Indian influence

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is seen in the fact mentioned by Mr. Culin (p. 605): Play usually continues until dark, and, at the close, the winners sing Creole songs, reminding one of the custom at the close of the Choctaw game." In the North the game has not, apparently, been able to carry with it any corresponding ceremonial observances, owing to some extent to the more practical disposition of the players in lacrosse-clubs among English-speaking peoples, and to the fact that this side of athletics had in great measure already been provided for. In the South the game is still played by a large number of men on each side (50 or more were quite common with the Indians), while in the North, a certain fixed number (usually 12) is now agreed upon. Taken altogether, the adoption of this ball-game by the whites, in two different sections of the country, its modification by the borrowers, and its spread through them over a large portion of the civilized globe, is a most striking instance of the peaceful influence sometimes exerted upon the European inhabitants of the New World by the savages whom they conquered and dispossessed. As J. G. Kohl (p. 88) says, in his suggestive book of wanderings about Lake Superior, called Kitchi Gami (London, 1860): "The name of the ball-play is immortalized both in the geography and history of the country. There is a prairie, and now a town, on the Mississippi known as the Prairie de la

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Crosse.'"' The town in question is now the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its site was the spot on which, after the winter's hunt, the Winnebago Indians used to meet for the purpose of playing their favorite game, as a sort of spring festival. Mr. R. G. Thwaites (cited by Culin, p. 616), writing in 1892, states that the Wisconsin Winnebagoes are not known to play it nowadays, and styles it "the vigorous game of lacrosse nowadays familiar to patrons of state and county fairs of this section at which professional bands of Chippewas exhibit their skill." Canada, too, has her Indian lacrosse-clubs serving the pleasure of the white population in similar fashion. Lacrosse has also figured in the history of the wars between the races, for it was under the guise of a ball-game that the Indians concerned in the famous "conspiracy of Pontiac " in 1763 sought entrance into Fort Mackinaw for the purpose of exterminating the English.

In various sections of the country the intermingling of the children of the Indians and the European settlers in plays and games was common at times, and, doubtless, the young whites carried on from generation to generation many things, which, with the gradual disappearance of the Indian population, found no permanent lodgment in the final stock of American culture. But, while playing with the Indian ceased, "playing Indian " is still common with white children,

and has even been given exaggeratedpedagogical significance by a certain educational school of the day. In the games and songs of our children, the Indian is occasionally remembered, as, e. g., in one version of the counting-out or daisy rhyme:

"Rich man, poor man, Beggar man, thief, Lawyer, doctor, Indian chief."

A number of the most character. istic sports and recreations of the white population of North America would have been impossible but for the previous existence of Indian inventions and activities out of which, directly or indirectly, they arose. Here belongs the interesting and invigorating exercise of snow-shoeing, which, in Canada and some parts of the United States, has now become a pastime of great social importance. The canoe and the toboggan also enter largely into American sports and pleasures in summer and winter respectively; and to the aboriginal ideas have recently been added the "water-toboggan " and light canoes for women only. And for the leisured classes in general, the summer and winter outings, " camps," " hunting and fishing trips, denominated "rest and recreation," owe not a little of their pleasures and their satisfactions to ideas that hark back to the original possessors of the soil. After centuries of European civilization, "turning Indian for health's sake " is not at all uncommon.

THE INDIAN IN LITERATURE, ART, ETC.

It can hardly be said that the white man has done as much for the Indian in the matter of games and recreations, in making him acquainted with horse-racing, a few varieties of baseball (e. g., among the Navahos), a few games played on boards or diagrams, playing-cards, etc. The Navaho game of base-ball" is cited by Culin as an excellent example of "absorbed European ideas, which have in time become difficult of recognition as foreign in origin" (p. 789).

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The Indian as a Subject and an Inspiration in Literature, Art, Etc.

Of necessity, a race that to-day, north of the Rio Grande, still numbers several hundred thousand, after all the vicissitudes of four centuries of contact and conflict with the whites; a race that has produced during that period, in the United States and Canada alone, such interesting and remarkable figures as Popé (the Pueblos leader), Pocahontas, Hiawatha (the Iroquoian statesman and reformer), "King Philip," Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Jacket, Black Hawk, Nez Percé Joseph (whose skill as a warrior and a general and whose faithfulness in peace alike won admiration), Joseph Brant, and many more; a race that has mingled so freely with our own—a race of this kind must appeal to the historian, the poet, the painter, and the sculptor. The romance of Pocahontas, the campaigns of Philip, the conspiracy of Pontiac, the retreat of Joseph, the

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dreams of Hiawatha, and other events and situations real or imagined, in the history of the Indians, could not fail to be of literary and artistic value. The list of novels and other works of fiction dealing with the Indian is now very long; and there are many dramas and some operas of which he is also the theme, the last of which to be presented in Europe, Nevin's "Poia," is based upon a legend of the Algonkian Blackfeet. Many of our poets have treated of the American Indian, and in Longfellow's Hiawatha we have what has been called his epic in English. But in it, through uncertain knowledge, the poet has mingled the myths of Manabozho, the herogod and the trickster of the Algonkian tribes of the Great Lakes, and the deeds of Hiawatha, a celebrated Iroquoian reformer and statesmana feat almost equivalent to a Chinese poet confusing the legendary Jove with the real King Alfred in an Oriental composition. The beginnings of more accurate things are to be discerned in such works as Miss E. D. Proctor's Song of the Ancient People, wherein is related the story of the Pueblos Indians.

To the artist, the physical perfection of some of the Indians appealed in most striking fashion. Parkman, in his Oregon Trail, tells us that he could almost see in Mad Wolf," the Pythian Apollo" himself; and Ben

* In America, Victor Herbert's Indian opera, "Natoma," was produced in 1910.

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