TRAITS OF INDIAN CHARACTER
from The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20)
by Washington Irving
"I appeal to any white man if ever he entered Logan's cabin
hungry, and he gave him not to eat; if ever he came cold and naked,
and he clothed him not."
SPEECH OF AN INDIAN CHIEF.
THERE is something in the character and habits of the North American
savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is
accustomed to range, its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic
rivers, and trackless plains, that is, to my mind, wonderfully
striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab
is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple and enduring; fitted to
grapple with difficulties, and to support privations. There seems
but little soil in his heart for the support of the kindly virtues;
and yet, if we would but take the trouble to penetrate through that
proud stoicism and habitual taciturnity, which lock up his character
from casual observation, we should find him linked to his fellow-man
of civilized life by more of those sympathies and affections than
are usually ascribed to him.
It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the
early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white
men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by
mercenary and frequently wanton warfare: and their characters have
been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. The colonist often
treated them like beasts of the forest; and the author has
endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it
easier to exterminate than to civilize; the latter to vilify than to
discriminate. The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed
sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both; and thus the poor
wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because
they were guilty, but because they were ignorant.
The rights of the savage have seldom been properly appreciated or
respected by the white man. In peace he has too often been the dupe of
artful traffic; in war he has been regarded as a ferocious animal,
whose life or death was a question of mere precaution and convenience.
Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered, and
he is sheltered by impunity; and little mercy is to be expected from
him, when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the
power to destroy.
The same prejudices, which were indulged thus early, exist in common
circulation at the present day. Certain learned societies have, it
is true, with laudable diligence, endeavored to investigate and record
the real characters and manners of the Indian tribes; the American
government, too, has wisely and humanely exerted itself to inculcate a
friendly and forbearing spirit towards them, and to protect them
from fraud and injustice.* The current opinion of the Indian
character, however, is too apt to be formed from the miserable
hordes which infest the frontiers, and hang on the skirts of the
settlements. These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings,
corrupted and enfeebled by the vices of society, without being
benefited by its civilization. That proud independence, which formed
the main pillar of savage virtue, has been shaken down, and the
whole moral fabric lies in ruins. Their spirits are humiliated and
debased by a sense of inferiority, and their native courage cowed
and daunted by the superior knowledge and power of their enlightened
neighbors. Society has advanced upon them like one of those
withering airs that will sometimes breed desolation over a whole
region of fertility. It has enervated their strength, multiplied their
diseases, and superinduced upon their original barbarity the low vices
of artificial life. It has given them a thousand superfluous wants,
whilst it has diminished their means of mere existence. It has
driven before it the animals of the chase, who fly from the sound of
the axe and the smoke of the settlement, and seek refuge in the depths
of remoter forests and yet untrodden wilds. Thus do we too often
find the Indians on our frontiers to be the mere wrecks and remnants
of once powerful tribes, who have lingered in the vicinity of the
settlements, and sunk into precarious and vagabond existence. Poverty,
repining and hopeless poverty, a canker of the mind unknown in
savage life, corrodes their spirits, and blights every free and
noble quality of their natures. They become drunken, indolent, feeble,
thievish, and pusillanimous. They loiter like vagrants about the
settlements, among spacious dwellings replete with elaborate comforts,
which only render them sensible of the comparative wretchedness of
their own condition. Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes;
but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields;
but they are starving in the midst of its abundance: the whole
wilderness has blossomed into a garden; but they feel as reptiles that
infest it.
How different was their state while yet the undisputed lords of
the soil! Their wants were few, and the means of gratification
within their reach. They saw every one around them sharing the same
lot, enduring the same hardships, feeding on the same aliments,
arrayed in the same rude garments. No roof then rose, but was open
to the homeless stranger; no smoke curled among the trees, but he
was welcome to sit down by its fire, and join the hunter in his
repast. "For," says an old historian of New England, "their life is so
void of care, and they are so loving also, that they make use of those
things they enjoy as common goods, and are therein so compassionate,
that rather than one should starve through want, they would starve
all; thus they pass their time merrily, not regarding our pomp, but
are better content with their own, which some men esteem so meanly
of." Such were the Indians, whilst in the pride and energy of their
primitive natures: they resembled those wild plants, which thrive best
in the shades of the forest, but shrink from the hand of
cultivation, and perish beneath the influence of the sun.
In discussing the savage character, writers have been too prone to
indulge in vulgar prejudice and passionate exaggeration, instead of
the candid temper of true philosophy. They have not sufficiently
considered the peculiar circumstances in which the Indians have been
placed, and the peculiar principles under which they have been
educated. No being acts more rigidly from rule than the Indian. His
whole conduct is regulated according to some general maxims early
implanted in his mind. The moral laws that govern him are, to be sure,
but few; but then he conforms to them all;- the white man abounds in
laws of religion, morals, and manners, but how many does he violate?
A frequent ground of accusation against the Indians is their
disregard of treaties, and the treachery and wantonness with which, in
time of apparent peace, they will suddenly fly to hostilities. The
intercourse of the white men with the Indians, however, is too apt
to be cold, distrustful, oppressive, and insulting. They seldom
treat them with that confidence and frankness which are
indispensable to real friendship; nor is sufficient caution observed
not to offend against those feelings of pride or superstition, which
often prompts the Indian to hostility quicker than mere considerations
of interest. The solitary savage feels silently, but acutely. His
sensibilities are not diffused over so wide a surface as those of
the white man; but they run in steadier and deeper channels. His
pride, his affections, his superstitions, are all directed towards
fewer objects; but the wounds inflicted on them are proportionably
severe, and furnish motives of hostility, which we cannot sufficiently
appreciate. Where a community is also limited in number, and forms one
great patriarchal family, as in an Indian tribe, the injury of an
individual is the injury of the whole; and the sentiment of
vengeance is almost instantaneously diffused. One council fire is
sufficient for the discussion and arrangement of a plan of
hostilities. Here all the fighting men and sages assemble. Eloquence
and superstition combine to inflame the minds of the warriors. The
orator awakens their martial ardor, and they are wrought up to a
kind of religious desperation, by the visions of the prophet and the
dreamer.
An instance of one of those sudden exasperations, arising from a
motive peculiar to the Indian character, is extant in an old record of
the early settlement of Massachusetts. The planters of Plymouth had
defaced the monuments of the dead at Passonagessit, and had
plundered the grave of the Sachem's mother of some skins with which it
had been decorated. The Indians are remarkable for the reverence which
they entertain for the sepulchres of their kindred. Tribes that have
passed generations exiled from the abodes of their ancestors, when
by chance they have been travelling in the vicinity, have been known
to turn aside from the highway, and guided by wonderfully accurate
tradition, have crossed the country for miles to some tumulus,
buried perhaps in woods, where the bones of their tribe were anciently
deposited; and there have passed hours in silent meditation.
Influenced by this sublime and holy feeling, the Sachem, whose
mother's tomb had been violated, gathered his men together, and
addressed them in the following beautifully simple and pathetic
harangue; a curious specimen of Indian eloquence, and an affecting
instance of filial piety in a savage.
"When last the glorious light of all the sky was underneath this
globe, and birds grew silent, I began to settle, as my custom is, to
take repose. Before mine eyes were fast closed, methought I saw a
vision, at which my spirit was much troubled; and trembling at that
doleful sight, a spirit cried aloud, 'Behold, my son, whom I have
cherished, see the breasts that gave thee suck, the hands that
lapped thee warm, and fed thee oft. Canst thou forget to take
revenge of those wild people who have defaced my monument in a
despiteful manner, disdaining our antiquities and honorable customs?
See, now, the Sachem's grave lies like the common people, defaced by
an ignoble race. Thy mother doth complain, and implores thy aid
against this thievish people, who have newly intruded on our land.
If this be suffered, I shall not rest quiet in my everlasting
habitation.' This said, the spirit vanished, and I, all in a sweat,
not able scarce to speak, began to get some strength, and recollect my
spirits that were fled, and determined to demand your counsel and
assistance."
I have adduced this anecdote at some length, as it tends to show how
these sudden acts of hostility, which have been attributed to
caprice and perfidy, may often arise from deep and generous motives,
which our inattention to Indian character and customs prevents our
properly appreciating.
Another ground of violent outcry against the Indians is their
barbarity to the vanquished. This had its origin partly in policy
and partly in superstition. The tribes, though sometimes called
nations, were never so formidable in their numbers, but that the
loss of several warriors was sensibly felt; this was particularly
the case when they had been frequently engaged in warfare; and many an
instance occurs in Indian history, where a tribe, that had long been
formidable to its neighbors, has been broken up and driven away, by
the capture and massacre of its principal fighting men. There was a
strong temptation, therefore, to the victor to be merciless; not so
much to gratify any cruel revenge, as to provide for future
security. The Indians had also the superstitious belief, frequent
among barbarous nations, and prevalent also among the ancients, that
the manes of their friends who had fallen in battle were soothed by
the blood of the captives. The prisoners, however, who are not thus
sacrificed, are adopted into their families in the place of the slain,
and are treated with the confidence and affection of relatives and
friends; nay, so hospitable and tender is their entertainment, that
when the alternative is offered them, they will often prefer to remain
with their adopted brethren, rather than return to the home and the
friends of their youth.
The cruelty of the Indians towards their prisoners has been
heightened since the colonization of the whites. What was formerly a
compliance with policy and superstition, has been exasperated into a
gratification of vengeance. They cannot but be sensible that the white
men are the usurpers of their ancient dominion, the cause of their
degradation, and the gradual destroyers of their race. They go forth
to battle, smarting with injuries and indignities which they have
individually suffered, and they are driven to madness and despair by
the wide-spreading desolation, and the overwhelming ruin of European
warfare. The whites have too frequently set them an example of
violence, by burning their villages, and laying waste their slender
means of subsistence: and yet they wonder that savages do not show
moderation and magnanimity towards those who have left them nothing
but mere existence and wretchedness.
We stigmatize the Indians, also, as cowardly and treacherous,
because they use stratagem in warfare, in preference to open force;
but in this they are fully justified by their rude code of honor. They
are early taught that stratagem is praiseworthy; the bravest warrior
thinks it no disgrace to lurk in silence, and take every advantage
of his foe: he triumphs in the superior craft and sagacity by which he
has been enabled to surprise and destroy an enemy. Indeed, man is
naturally more prone to subtility than open valor, owing to his
physical weakness in comparison with other animals. They are endowed
with natural weapons of defence: with horns, with tusks, with hoofs,
and talons; but man has to depend on his superior sagacity. In all his
encounters with these, his proper enemies, he resorts to stratagem;
and when he perversely turns his hostility against his fellow-man,
he at first continues the same subtle mode of warfare.
The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy
with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected
by stratagem. That chivalrous courage which induces us to despise
the suggestions of prudence, and to rush in the face of certain
danger, is the offspring of society, and produced by education. It
is honorable, because it is in fact the triumph of lofty sentiment
over an instinctive repugnance to pain, and over those yearnings after
personal ease and security, which society has condemned as ignoble. It
is kept alive by pride and the fear of shame; and thus the dread of
real evil is overcome by the superior dread of an evil which exists
but in the imagination. It has been cherished and stimulated also by
various means. It has been the theme of spirit-stirring song and
chivalrous story. The poet and minstrel have delighted to shed round
it the splendors of fiction; and even the historian has forgotten
the sober gravity of narration, and broken forth into enthusiasm and
rhapsody in its praise. Triumphs and gorgeous pageants have been its
reward: monuments, on which art has exhausted its skill, and
opulence its treasures, have been erected to perpetuate a nation's
gratitude and admiration. Thus artificially excited, courage has risen
to an extraordinary and factitious degree of heroism: and arrayed in
all the glorious "pomp and circumstance of war," this turbulent
quality has even been able to eclipse many of those quiet, but
invaluable virtues, which silently ennoble the human character, and
swell the tide of human happiness.
But if courage intrinsically consists in the defiance of danger
and pain, the life of the Indian is a continual exhibition of it. He
lives in a state of perpetual hostility and risk. Peril and
adventure are congenial to his nature; or rather seem necessary to
arouse his faculties and to give an interest to his existence.
Surrounded by hostile tribes, whose mode of warfare is by ambush and
surprisal, he is always prepared for fight, and lives with his weapons
in his hands. As the ship careers in fearful singleness through the
solitudes of ocean;- as the bird mingles among clouds and storms,
and wings its way, a mere speck, across the pathless fields of air;-
so the Indian holds his course, silent, solitary, but undaunted,
through the boundless bosom of the wilderness. His expeditions may vie
in distance and danger with the pilgrimage of the devotee, or the
crusade of the knight-errant. He traverses vast forests, exposed to
the hazards of lonely sickness, of lurking enemies, and pining famine.
Stormy lakes, those great inland seas, are no obstacles to his
wanderings: in his light canoe of bark he sports, like a feather, on
their waves, and darts, with the swiftness of an arrow, down the
roaring rapids of the rivers. His very subsistence is snatched from
the midst of toil and peril. He gains his food by the hardships and
dangers of the chase: he wraps himself in the spoils of the bear,
the panther, and the buffalo, and sleeps among the thunders of the
cataract.
No hero of ancient or modern days can surpass the Indian in his
lofty contempt of death, and the fortitude with which he sustains
its cruellest infliction. Indeed we here behold him rising superior to
the white man, in consequence of his peculiar education. The latter
rushes to glorious death at the cannon's mouth; the former calmly
contemplates its approach, and triumphantly endures it, amidst the
varied torments of surrounding foes and the protracted agonies of
fire. He even takes a pride in taunting his persecutors, and provoking
their ingenuity of torture; and as the devouring flames prey on his
very vitals, and the flesh shrinks from the sinews, he raises his last
song of triumph, breathing the defiance of an unconquered heart, and
invoking the spirits of his fathers to witness that he dies without
a groan.
Notwithstanding the obloquy with which the early historians have
overshadowed the characters of the unfortunate natives, some bright
gleams occasionally break through, which throw a degree of
melancholy lustre on their memories. Facts are occasionally to be
met with in the rude annals of the eastern provinces, which, though
recorded with the coloring of prejudice and bigotry, yet speak for
themselves; and will be dwelt on with applause and sympathy, when
prejudice shall have passed away.
In one of the homely narratives of the Indian wars in New England,
there is a touching account of the desolation carried into the tribe
of the Pequod Indians. Humanity shrinks from the cold-blooded detail
of indiscriminate butchery. In one place we read of the surprisal of
an Indian fort in the night, when the wigwams were wrapped in
flames, and the miserable inhabitants shot down and slain in
attempting to escape, "all being despatched and ended in the course of
an hour." After a series of similar transactions, "our soldiers," as
the historian piously observes, "being resolved by God's assistance to
make a final destruction of them," the unhappy savages being hunted
from their homes and fortresses, and pursued with fire and sword, a
scanty, but gallant band, the sad remnant of the Pequod warriors, with
their wives and children, took refuge in a swamp.
Burning with indignation, and rendered sullen by despair; with
hearts bursting with grief at the destruction of their tribe, and
spirits galled and sore at the fancied ignominy of their defeat,
they refused to ask their lives at the hands of an insulting foe,
and preferred death to submission.
As the night drew on they were surrounded in their dismal retreat,
so as to render escape impracticable. Thus situated, their enemy
"plied them with shot all the time, by which means many were killed
and buried in the mire." In the darkness and fog that preceded the
dawn of day some few broke through the besiegers and escaped into
the woods: "the rest were left to the conquerors, of which many were
killed in the swamp, like sullen dogs who would rather, in their
self-willedness and madness, sit still and be shot through, or cut
to pieces," than implore for mercy. When the day broke upon this
handful of forlorn but dauntless spirits, the soldiers, we are told,
entering the swamp, "saw several heaps of them sitting close together,
upon whom they discharged their pieces, laden with ten or twelve
pistol bullets at a time, putting the muzzles of the pieces under
the boughs, within a few yards of them; so as, besides those that were
found dead, many more were killed and sunk into the mire, and never
were minded more by friend or foe.
Can any one read this plain unvarnished tale, without admiring the
stern resolution, the unbending pride, the loftiness of spirit, that
seemed to nerve the hearts of these self-taught heroes, and to raise
them above the instinctive feelings of human nature? When the Gauls
laid waste the city of Rome, they found the senators clothed in
their robes, and seated with stern tranquillity in their curule
chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or
even supplication. Such conduct was, in them, applauded as noble and
magnanimous; in the hapless Indian it was reviled as obstinate and
sullen! How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstance! How
different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from
virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness!
But I forbear to dwell on these gloomy pictures. The eastern
tribes have long since disappeared; the forests that sheltered them
have been laid low, and scarce any traces remain of them in the
thickly-settled states of New England, excepting here and there the
Indian name of a village or a stream. And such must, sooner or
later, be the fate of those other tribes which skirt the frontiers,
and have occasionally been inveigled from their forests to mingle in
the wars of white men. In a little while, and they will go the way
that their brethren have gone before. The few hordes which still
linger about the shores of Huron and Superior, and the tributary
streams of the Mississippi, will share the fate of those tribes that
once spread over Massachusetts and Connecticut, and lorded it along
the proud banks of the Hudson; of that gigantic race said to have
existed on the borders of the Susquehanna; and of those various
nations that flourished about the Potomac and the Rappahannock, and
that peopled the forests of the vast valley of Shenandoah. They will
vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth; their very history
will be lost in forgetfulness; and "the places that now know them will
know them no more for ever." Or if, perchance, some dubious memorial
of them should survive, it may be in the romantic dreams of the
poet, to people in imagination his glades and groves, like the fauns
and satyrs and sylvan deities of antiquity. But should he venture upon
the dark story of their wrongs and wretchedness; should he tell how
they were invaded, corrupted, despoiled, driven from their native
abodes and the sepulchres of their fathers, hunted like wild beasts
about the earth, and sent down with violence and butchery to the
grave, posterity will either turn with horror and incredulity from the
tale, or blush with indignation at the inhumanity of their
forefathers.- "We are driven back," said an old warrior, "until we can
retreat no farther- our hatchets are broken, our bows are snapped, our
fires are nearly extinguished:- a little longer, and the white man
will cease to persecute us- for we shall cease to exist!"
* The American government has been indefatigable in its exertions to
ameliorate the situation of the Indians, and to introduce among them
the arts of civilization, and civil and religious knowledge. To
protect them from the frauds of the white traders, no purchase of land
from them by individuals is permitted; nor is any person allowed to
receive lands from them as a present, without the express sanction
of government. These precautions are strictly enforced. [Return to text.]