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[1610 A.D.]

were not contemplated in his schemes. He started two immense industries, the Spitzbergen whale fisheries and the Hudson Bay fur trade; and he brought the Dutch to Manhattan Island. No realisation of his dreams could have approached the astonishing reality which would have greeted him could he have looked through the coming centuries and caught a glimpse of what the voyager now beholds in sailing up the bay of New York. But what perhaps would have surprised him most of all would have been to learn that his name was to become part of the folk-lore of the beautiful river to which it is attached, that he was to figure as a Dutchman, in spite of himself, in legend and on the stage; that when it is thunder weather on the Catskills the children should say it is Hendrik Hudson playing at skittles with his goblin crew. Perhaps it is not an unkindly fate. Even as Milton wished for his dead friend Lycidas that he might become the genius of the shore, so the memory of the great Arctic navigator will remain a familiar presence among the hillsides which the gentle fancy of Irving has clothed with undying romance."

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To recognise the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent- that is, to consider the dozen squalid savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thousand square miles as owning it outright-necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horsethief, or wandering cattle-man. Take as an example the country round the Little Missouri. When the cattle-men, the first actual settlers, came into this land in 1882, it was already scantily peopled by a few white hunters and trappers. Like the Indians, they felt that their having hunted over the soil gave them a vague prescriptive right to its sole occupation, and they did their best to keep actual settlers In some cases, to avoid difficulty, their nominal claims were bought up; generally, and rightly, they were disregarded. In fact, the mere statement of the case is sufficient to show the absurdity of asserting that the land really belonged to the Indians. The different tribes have always been utterly unable to define their own boundaries. Thus the Delawares and Wyandots, in 1785, though entirely separate nations, claimed and, in a certain sense, occupied almost exactly the same territory. - THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

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THE common belief in "the gradual extinction of the noble red Indian,' perpetuates at least four fallacies. The being referred to is not an Indian; he is red only when he paints himself so; he is not often noble; and he is not being extinguished.

Everyone knows, of course, that Columbus named the aborigines as he did, because he thought he had found India. The mistake was soon discovered to the disappointment of the Spanish and the ruin of Columbus, but the word Indian has stuck till the real Indians are now commonly dubbed Hindus or East Indians. The epithet "red" is due to pure carelessness, or wish for brevity, as the Indian is usually of a cinnamon brown tone. As Columbus' contemporary, Gomarac said, they "were neither white, black, nor grey, but like men with the jaundice or of the colour of boiled quinces. The

nobility of the Indian is credited to him on various grounds; first, the picturesqueness of certain features of his life, the romance that always attaches to the woods and to the outlaw, to the freedom from many of those restrictions and oppressions of European law and custom previous to the nineteenth century which so irritated men like Rousseau; also to the persistent feeling that in a contest where both sides use cruelty and treachery freely, the onc who loses must have lost because he could not stoop to certain weapons, and finally, to the poetic belief in the majesty of the vanquished. On the other hand, the other extreme of belief that no Indian is trustworthy or worthy at all, is equally to be shunned, for history is full of evidences of tribal and individual fidelity, scrupulousness, compassion and honour.

THE INDIAN NOT BECOMING EXTINCT

The theory that the Indian race is waning into limbo along with the dodo and the bison is a theory that will die even harder than the Indian. It is impossible that the race should ever expect much influence again on American life; it is probable that it will gradually be absorbed into the national life by intermarriage and education. But for the present, the Indian population is generally accepted as at worst stationary.

There are many grounds for believing that there are more Indians living in America to-day than there were when Columbus landed. The wild exaggerations natural to the excited and terrified pioneers were too long accepted as truth. As a matter of fact there were vast tracts of territory which the Indians never travelled. The very necessities of the hunt made a crowded civilisation impossible. They lived in small and widely isolated tribes. Famine was their bitterest foe, and their legends are full of the ravages it made in their numbers. Starvation, pestilence, and inter-tribal war kept down their numbers long before the white man's gun startled the forests.

With this view Theodore Roosevelt differs somewhat: "Formerly writers greatly overestimated their original numbers, counting them by millions. Now it is the fashion to go to the other extreme, and even to maintain that they have not decreased at all. This last is a theory that can only be upheld on the supposition that the whole does not consist of the sum of the parts; for whereas we can check off on our fingers the tribes that have slightly increased, we can enumerate scores that have died out almost before our eyes. Speaking broadly, they have mixed but little with the English (as distinguished from the French and Spanish) invaders. They are driven back, or die out, or retire to their own reservations; but they are not often assimilated. Still, on every frontier, there is always a certain amount of assimilation going on, much more than is commonly admitted; and whenever a French or Spanish community has been absorbed by the energetic Americans, a certain amount of Indian blood has been absorbed also."

Opposed to the theory that the Indian is a creature of profound nobility, is the theory that he is the degenerate relic of a former high civilisation. This belief has been shown to be false. In Central America, Mexico and Peru, as is shown in our history of those regions, there was indeed a life in cities, where stone architecture, hieroglyphic writing and sculpture were employed, and where luxury reached a high point of lavishness, but this civilisation was in force at the time the Spanish came; it was in many respects only a barbarism with mitigations, and it was doubtless only the beginning of a progress which was smothered, as smaller billows by a tidal wave, under the sudden shock of European culture which for all its cruelty was centuries

ahead of that in America. The condition of these advanced Indian races is discussed more fully in the Mexican, Central and South American sections of our history.

As the southern Indians were emerging into civilisation, so the northern were well lifted up above the lowest degrees of savagery. Early explorers like De Soto found some Indians devoted to agriculture and unused to war. Others led a sort of Bedouin existence. Their forest life seemed to be that, not of ignorance, but of conscious choice and pride; they had tribal government with a high and valued degree of personal liberty. They had languages

too many in fact, four hundred being the highest and one hundred and twenty-six the lowest estimate of the number of American languages. The Indian had pottery, implements of peace and war, and a currency. He had a superb system of warfare.

THE INDIAN AS A MILITARY GENIUS

As a soldier the Indian may be said to have revolutionised war. The approved tactics of to-day are those which the Indians developed and which the white learned from him at great cost in frequent lessons. The essentials of discipline were rigidly preserved yet with the fuiest development of personal initiative. Coöperation and signal service were well understood too, and they had beautifully attained the tactics of swift attack at a carefully selected moment and retreat with a minimum loss at a maximum speed. The Indian took the horse and gun from the white man and soon almost equalled him in their management. As for finding and using cover, scouting and the general service of information, of keeping in touch with the enemy and learning as much as possible of him without self-betrayal-the world never before knew what the words meant, in comparison with the Indian perfection.

The white man had to learn to fight Indian fashion or be driven back to the sea that brought him over. He learned the lesson well and by having an inexhaustible base of supplies and recruits, and by virtue of his religious love of a fixed home and established industry, he gradually established white civilisation behind a stockade which the Indians might endanger and alarm, but could not capture and hold.

It is to the Indian, in a large sense, that the United States owes its independence. For the Indian unwittingly taught the white the value, the need, the thrill of freedom, the necessity and the pride of individuality, and finally the true science of warfare by which the irregular colonial troops gradually harassed the British regular to desperation and rashness and wore out even English pluck and perseverance. Again, since many British historians credit the American Revolution with solidifying the liberty of the English parliament against royal encroachments, it is a curious, and not altogether a false deduction, that to the American Indian the English people are indebted for some of their freedom.

INDIAN CRUELTY AND WHITE CRUELTY

As to the cruelty of the Indian, there is no defence. It is not to lack of imagination or to lack of sympathy, so much as to sheer and wanton delight in pain. The fascinations of torment were sometimes inflicted on themselves and the training of a warrior occasionally included such ordeals as gave a new appearance to his infliction of the same tortures on captives. Outside of actual torture some of the Indians treated their women captives with a

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respect bordering on indifference. The plains Indians, however, added the horrors of rapine to the feeling of hatred and dread they inspired. But it must be remembered that in contemporary Europe general rapine was the custom in captured cities and that the Inquisition was showing how illiterate in the highest art of fiendishness the untutored Indian actually was. Torture was still a civil institution even in England and Scotland, and as late as 1646 a woman had her tongue nailed to a board at Henley-on-the-Thames because she complained of a tax levied by parliament. The English in the East Indies were using as great cruelties against the natives as the western Indians used against the invaders. The characters of the various tribes of Indians were almost as diverse as those of the different races and castes of Europe. The patriarchal idea of polygamy and the Roman idea of divorce at will were general. Personal habits varied from the filth and brutality of some northwest and Eskimo tribes to the sense of beauty and adornment, the gentle dignity of the Sacs and Foxes and some of the eastern tribes. Ideas of decency were, as everywhere, inconsistent. In some of the tribes where nakedness was almost absolute, a man or woman would be ashamed, unless very drunk, even to speak to, or look in the eye of a son-in-law or daughter-in-law. The ideas of "uncleanness" and its removal were akin to those of the Hebrews.

The Indian has been nearly as much sinned against as sinning. As Theodore Roosevelt and others point out, it is ridiculous to say that a few hundred Indians secured a property right over the great forest lands which they did not clear and till, did not mark out with boundaries, fixed no habitations upon, and about whose ownership they did not even fight among one another, except when it was for the time rich in game. The whites had quite as good a right here as the Indian, and the nature of their plans made the right superior. But the white cheated the Indian right and left, lied to him, robbed him, enslaved him, gave him rum with malice prepense. Against the cruelties of the Indians are to be set the retaliations in kind of the whites. Frontenac burned prisoners at the stake in 1692 (though the French in general treated the Indian with the greatest consideration and got on best with him); in 1764 the grandson of William Penn offered bounties for scalps, including $50 for the scalp of an Indian woman, and $130 for the scalp of an Indian boy under ten years old. It was a common thing for the whites to kill all their prisoners, and again it must be remembered what unspeakable atrocities were practised in Europe at the capture of a European city by Europeans, of Netherland towns by the Spanish for example, and of the Christian city of Constantinople by the holy crusaders. And the sum total of Indian atrocities is almost negligible in comparison with the superhuman ruthlessness of the Spaniards, who, as we shall see in the next chapter, absolutely annihilated whole tribes of Indians. And even in the years since the white has put the Indian under such control that he is no longer a serious danger, the treatment of him has been by no means such as to show that honesty, mercy, and truth are the exclusive importation of European civilisation.

As a whole, then, the Indian has been like everyone else. His environment moulded him and yet he was slowly rising in civilisation. He was a mixture of good impulses and bad, and they took turns in control of his action. Few things in history are more hideous than certain of his deeds, and few things are more beautiful than others. About him there has grown up a dual school of literature: the poetic phase of Chateaubriand, Cooper and Longfellow, and the cynical which denies him any praise whatever. There are truth and falsehood in about equal proportion in each phase. The real Indian oscillated between the sublime and the ridiculous as did the knights errant of

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