The Conquest of Canada, Vol. 1

It has been ascertained that this western coast is populous, and the race somewhat superior to the other Indians in arts and civilization.—Ramusio, tom. iii., p. 297-303; Venegas's California, Part ii., §ii.

"From the happy coincidence of various circumstances, man raises himself to a certain degree of cultivation, even in climates the least favorable to the development of organized beings. Near the polar circle, in Iceland, in the twelfth century, we know the Scandinavians cultivated literature and the arts with more success than the inhabitants of Denmark and Prussia."—Humboldt.

217

Mr. Flint says. "I have inspected the northern, middle, and southern Indians for a length of ten years; my opportunities of observation have, therefore, been considerable, and I do not undertake to form a judgment of their character without, at least, having seen much of it. I have been forcibly struck by a general resemblance in their countenance, make, conformation, manners, and habits. I believe that no race of men can show people who speak different languages, inhabit different climes, and subsist on different food, and who are yet so wonderfully alike."—(1831.)

Don Antonio Ulloa, who had extensive opportunities of forming an opinion on the natives of both the continents of America, asserts that "If we have seen one American, we may be said to have seen all, their color and make are so nearly the same."—Notic. Americanas, p. 308. See, likewise, Garcia, Origin de los Indios, p. 55-242; Torquemada, Monarch. Indiana, vol. ii., p. 571.

"If we except the northern regions, where we find men similar to the Laplanders, all the rest of America is peopled with inhabitants among whom there is little or no diversity. This great uniformity among the natives of America seems to proceed from their living all in the same manner. All the Americans were, or still are, savages; the Mexicans and Peruvians were so recently polished that they ought not to be regarded as an exception. Whatever, therefore, was the origin of those savages, it seems to have been common to the whole. All the Americans have sprung from the same source, and have preserved, with little variation, the characters of their race; for they have all continued in a savage state, and have followed nearly the same mode of life. Their climates are not so unequal with regard to heat and cold as those of the ancient continent, and their establishment in America has been too recent to allow those causes which produce varieties sufficient time to operate so as to render their effects conspicuous."—Buffon, Eng. trans., vol. iii., p. 188.

218

See Appendix, No. XLVIII (vol. II.)

219

See Appendix, No. XLIX. (vol. II.)

220

There would never have been any difference of opinion between physiologists, as to the existence of the beard among the Americans, if they had paid attention to what the first historians of the conquest of their country have said on this subject; for example, Pigafetta, in 1519, in his Journal preserved in the Ambrosian library at Milan, and published (in 1800) by Amoretti, p. 18.—Benzoni, Hist. del Mundo Nuovo, p. 35, 1572; Bembo, Hist. Venet., p. 86, 1557; Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 235.

"The Indians have no beard, because they use certain receipts to extirpate it, which they will not communicate."—Oldmixon, vol. i., p. 286.

"Experience has made known that these receipts were little shells which they used as tweezers; since they have become acquainted with metals, they have invented an instrument consisting of a piece of brass wire rolled round a piece of wood the size of the finger, so as to form a special spring; this grasps the hairs within its turns, and pulls out several at once. No wonder if this practice, continued for several generations, should enfeeble the roots of the beard. Did the practice of eradicating the beard, originate from the design of depriving the enemy of such a dangerous hold on the face? This seems to me probable."—Volney, p. 412.

221

When the statue of Apollo Belvedere was shown to Benjamin West on his first arrival at Rome, he exclaimed, "It is a model from a young North American Indian."—Ancient America.

222

"It is a notorious fact, that every European who has embraced the savage life has become stronger and better inured to every excess than the savages themselves. The superiority of the people of Virginia and Kentucky over them has been confirmed, not only in troop opposed to troop, but man to man, in all their wars."—Volney, p. 417.

223

Yet infanticide is condemned among the Red Indians both by their theology and their feelings. Dr. Richardson relates that those tribes who hold the idea that "the souls of the departed have to scramble up a great mountain, at whose top they receive the reward of their good or bad deeds, declare that women who have been guilty of infanticide never reach the top of this mountain at all. They are compelled instead to travel around the scenes of their crimes with branches of trees tied to their legs. The melancholy sounds which are heard in the still summer evenings, and which the ignorance of the white people looks upon as the screams of the goat-suckers, are really, according to my informant, the moanings of these unhappy beings"—Franklin's Journey to the Polar Seas, p. 77, 78.

224

"At night the savages direct their course by the polar star; they call it the motionless star. It is a curious coincidence that the constellation of the Bear should be called by the savages the Bear. This is certainly a very ancient name among them, and given long before any Europeans visited the country. They turn into ridicule the large imaginary tail which astronomers have given to an animal that has scarcely any such appendage, and they call the three stars that compose the tail of the Bear, three hunters who are in pursuit of it. The second of these stars has a very small one very close to it. This, they say, is the kettle of the second hunter, who is the bearer of the baggage and the provision belonging to all three.["Even at the present time" (1720), Lafitau writes, "these three stars are called in Italy, i tre cavalli"—the three knights—on the celestial globe of Caronelli] The savages also call the Pleiades 'the Dancers,' and Hygin tells us that they were thus called by the ancients, because they seem, from the arrangement of their stars, to be engaged in a circular dance."—Lafitau, vol. ii., p. 236. Hygin., lib. ii., art. Taurus.

225

See Appendix, No. L. (vol. II.)

226

Charlevoix says that the eloquence of the savages was such as the Greeks admired in the barbarians, "strong, stern, sententious, pointed, perfectly undisguised."

Decanesora's oratory was greatly admired by the most cultivated among the English: his bust was said to resemble that of Cicero. The celebrated address of Logan is too well known to be cited here. Mr. Jefferson says of it, "I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any other more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan." An American statesman and scholar, scarcely less illustrious than the former, has expressed his readiness to subscribe to this eulogium.—Clinton's Historical Discourse, 1811.

227

Catlin gives the following account of a native preacher, known by the name of the Shawnee Prophet: "I soon learned that he was a very devoted Christian, regularly holding meetings in his tribe on the Sabbath, preaching to them, and exhorting them to a belief in the Christian religion, and to an abandonment of the fatal habit of whisky-drinking. I went on the Sabbath to hear this eloquent man preach, when he had his people assembled in the woods; and although I could not understand his language, I was surprised and pleased with the natural case, and emphasis, and gesticulation which carried their own evidence of the eloquence of his sermon. I was singularly struck with the noble efforts of this champion of the mere remnant of a poisoned race, so strenuously laboring to rescue the remainder of his people from the deadly bane that has been brought among them by enlightened Christians. It is quite certain that his exemplary endeavors have completely abolished the practice of drinking whisky in his tribe."—Catlin, vol. ii., p. 98.

228

"Whatever may be the estimate of the Indian character in other respects, it is with me an undoubting conviction, that they are by nature a shrewd and intelligent race of men, in no wise, as regards combination of thought or quickness of apprehension, inferior to uneducated white men. This inference I deduce from having instructed Indian children.[All those who have expressed an opinion on the subject seem to agree that children of most native races are fully, or more than a match, for those of Europeans, in aptitude for intellectual acquirement. Indeed, it appears to be a singular law of Nature, that there is less precocity in the European race than almost any other. In those races in which we seem to have reason for believing that the intellectual organization is lower, perception is quicker, and maturity earlier.—Merivale On Colonization, vol. ii., p. 197] I draw it from having seen the men and women in all situations calculated to try and call forth their capacities. When they examine any of our inventions, steamboats, steam-mills, and cotton factories, for instance; when they contemplate any of our institutions in operation, by some quick analysis or process of reasoning, they seem immediately to comprehend the principle or the object. No spectacle affords them more delight than a large and orderly school. They scorn instinctively to comprehend, at least they explained to me that they felt, the advantages which this order of things gave our children over theirs."—Flint's Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, 1831.

Mr. Flint, an experienced and intelligent observer, takes so dark a view of the moral character of the Red Indian that his favorable opinion of their mental faculties may be looked upon as probably accurate, though differing strongly from that more generally held. On the other side of the question, among the early writers may be cited M. Bouguer, Voyage au Pérou, p. 102; Voyage d'Ulloa, tom. i., p. 335-337. "They seem to live in a perpetual infancy," is the striking expression of De la Condamine, Voyage de la Riv. Amazon, p. 52, 53. Chauvelon, Voyage à la Martinique, p. 44, 50. P. Venegas, Hist. de la Californie.

229

"Thus, on the whole, it may be said that the virtues of the savages are reducible to intrepid courage in danger, unshaken firmness amid tortures, contempt of pain and death, and patience under all the anxieties and distresses of life. No doubt these are useful qualities, but they are all confined to the individual, all selfish, and without any benefit to the society. Farther, they are proofs of a life truly wretched, and a social state so depraved or null, that a man, neither finding nor hoping any succor or assistance from it, is obliged to wrap himself up in despair, and endeavor to harden himself against the strokes of fate. Still it may be urged that these men, in their leisure hours, laugh, sing, play, and live without care for the past as well as for the future. Will you then deny that they are happier than we? Man is such a pitiable and variable creature, and habits have such a potent sway over him, that in the most disastrous situations he always finds some posture that gives him ease, something that consoles him, and, by comparison with past suffering, appears to him well-being and happiness; but if to laugh, sing, or play constitute bliss, it must likewise be granted that soldiers are perfectly happy beings, since there are no men more careless or more gay in dangers or on the eve of battle. It must be granted, too, that during the Revolution, in the most fatal of our jails, the Conciergerie, the prisoners were very happy, since they were, in general, more careless and gay than their keepers, or than those who only feared the same fate. The anxieties of those who were at large were as numerous as the enjoyments they wished to preserve; they who were in the other prisons felt but one, that of preserving their lives. In the Conciergerie, where a man was condemned in expectation or in reality, he had no longer any care; on the contrary, every moment of life was an acquisition, the gain of a good that was considered as lost. Such is nearly the situation of a soldier in war, and such is really that of the savage throughout the whole course of his life. If this be happiness, wretched indeed must be the country where it is an object of envy. In pursuing my investigation, I do not find that I am led to more advantageous ideas of the liberty of the savage; on the contrary, I sees in him only the slave of his wants, and of the freaks of a sterile and parsimonious nature. Food he has not at hand; rest is not at his command; he must run, weary himself, endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and all the inclemency of the elements and seasons; and as the ignorance in which he was born and bred gives him or leaves him a multitude of false and irrational ideas and superstitious prejudices, he is likewise the slave of a number of errors and passions, from which civilized man is exempted by the science and knowledge of every kind that an improved state of society has produced."—Volney's Travels in the United States, p. 467.

"Their impassible fortitude and endurance of suffering are, after all, in my mind, the result of a greater degree of physical insensibility. It has been told me, and I believe it, that in amputation and other surgical operations, their nerves do not shrink, do not show the same tendency to spasm with those of the whites. When the savage, to explain his insensibility to cold, called upon the white man to recollect how little his own face was affected by it, in consequence of its constant exposure, he added, 'My body is all face."[Delicacy of skin is observed to be in proportion to civilization among nations, in proportion to degrees of refinement among individuals.—Sharon Turner] This increasing insensibility, transmitted from generation to generation, finally becomes inwrought with the whole web of animal nature, and the body of the savage seems to have little more sensibility than the hoofs of horses."—Flint's Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi. See, also, Ulloa's Notic. Amer., p. 313.

Charlevoix quotes a passage from Cicero to the effect that "l'habitude au travail donne de la facilité à supporter la douleur."—2 Tusc., 25.

230

Conical stones, wrapped up in 100 goat skins, were the idols preserved in the temple of the Natchez. Many authors assert that the Amazons and many Eastern people had nothing in their temples but these pyramidal stones, which represented to them the Divinity.... "Peut-être aussi vouloient ils (les fondateurs des Pyramides) figurer en même tems la Divinité, et ce qui leur restoit d'idées du mystère de la Sainte Trinité, dans les trois faces de ces pyramides. Du moins est ce ainsi qu'aux Indes un Brame paroissoit concevoir les choses et s'expliquer d'après les anciennes. 'Il faut,' disoit il, 'se réprésenter Dieu et ses trois noms différents qui répondent à ces trois principaux attributs, à peu près sous l'idée de ces Pyramides triangulaires qu'on voit élevées devant la poste de quelques temples."—Lettre du Père Bouchet à M. Huet, Evêque d'Avranches. Three logs are always employed to keep up the fire in the Natchez temple.—Lafitau, vol. i., p. 167.

Extract from a dialogue between John Wesley and the Chickasaw Indians:

"Wesley. Do you believe there is One above who is over all things?

"Answer. We believe there are four beloved things above—the clouds, the sun, the clear sky, and He that lives in the clear sky.

"Wesley. Do you believe there is but One who lives in the clear sky?

"Answer. We believe there are two with Him, three in all."—Wesley's Journal, No. 1., p. 39.

231

See Stephens's "Incidents of Travel in Central America," vol. ii., p. 346.

"Les croix qui ont tant excité la curiosité des conquistadores à Coqumel, à Yucatan, et dans d'autres contrées de l'Amérique ne sont pas 'des contes de moines,' et méritent, comme tout ce qui a rapport au culte des peuples indigènes du Nouveau Continent, un examen plus sérieux. Je me sers du mot culte, car un relief conservé dans les ruines de Palenque, de Guatemala, et dont je possède une copie, ne me paraît laisser ancun doute qu'une figure symbolique en forme de croix étoit un objet d'adoration. Il faut faire observer cependant qu'à cette croix manque le prolongement supérieur, et qu'elle forme plutôt la lettre tau. Des idées qui n'ont ancun rapport avec le Christianisme ont pu être symboliquement attachées à cet emblême Egyptien d'Hermès, si célébre parmi les Chrétiens depuis la destruction du temple de Sérapis à Alexandrie sous Théodose le Grand. (Rufinus, Hist. Eccles., lib. ii., cap. xxix., p. 294; Zozomenes, Eccl. Hist., lib. iii., cap. xv.) Un bâton terminé par une croix se voit dans la main d'Astarté sur les monnaies de Sidon au 3me siècle avant notre ère. En Scandinavie, un signe de l'alphabet runique figurait le marteau de Thor, très semblable à la croix du relief de Palenque. On marquoit de cette rune, dans les tems payens, les objets qu'on vouloit sanctifier." (Voyez l'excellent Traité de M. Guillaume Grimm. Ueber Deutsche Runen, p. 242.)—Humboldt, Géographie de Nouveau Continent, vol. ii., p. 356.

"Laët avoue qu' Herrera parle d'une espèce de baptême, et de confession usitée dans Yucatan et dans les isles voisines, mais il ajoute qu'il est bien plus naturel d'attribuer toutes ces marques équivoques de Christianisme qu'on a cru apercevoir en plusieurs provinces du Nouveau Monde au démon qui a toujours affecté de contrefaire le culte du vrai Dieu." Charlevoix adds, "Cette remarque est de tous les bons auteurs qui out parle de la religion des peuples nouvellement découverts, et fondée sur l'autorité des pères de l'Eglise."—Charlevoix, tom. v., p. 28.

232

See Appendix, No. LI. (vol. II.)

233

"The most sensual, degraded, and least intellectual tribes of Northern Asia and America have purer notions of a Spiritual Deity than were possessed of old by the worshipers of Jupiter and Juno under Pericles."—Progression by Antagonism. This, according to Lord Lindsay's theory, is to be accounted for by the absence of imagination, these nations being only governed by Sense and Spirit, to the exclusion of intellect in either of its manifestations, Imagination, or Reason.—P. 21, 26.

234

"At the breaking up of the winter," says Hunter, "after having supplied ourselves with such things as were necessary and the situation afforded, all our party visited the spring from which we had procured our supplies of water, and there offered up our orisons to the Great Spirit for having preserved us in health and safety, and for having supplied all our wants. This is the constant practice of the Osages, Kansas, and many other nations of Indians on breaking up their encampments, and is by no means an unimportant ceremony." The habitual piety of the Indian mind is remarked by Heckewelder, and strongly insisted upon by Hunter, and it is satisfactorily proved by the whole tenor of his descriptions, where he throws himself back, as it were, into the feelings peculiar to Indian life. And, indeed, after hearing at a council the broken fragments of an Indian harangue, however imperfectly rendered by an ignorant interpreter, or reading the few specimens of Indian oratory which have been preserved by translation, no one can fail to remark a perpetual and earnest reference to the power and goodness of the Deity. "Brothers! we all belong to one family; we are all children of the Great Spirit," was the commencement of Tecumthé's harangue to the Osages; and he afterward tells them: "When the white men first set foot on our grounds, they were hungry; they had no places on which to spread their blankets or to kindle their fires. They were feeble; they could do nothing for themselves. Our fathers commiserated their distress, and shared freely with them whatever the Great Spirit has given to his red children."—Quarterly Review.

235

On the remarkable occasion on which our forces were compelled, in 1813, to evacuate the Michigan territory, Tecumthé, in the name of his nation, refused to consent to retreat; he closed his denial with these words: "Our lives are in the hand of the Great Spirit: He gave the lands which we possess to our fathers; if it be his will, our bones shall whiten upon them, but we will never quit them." An old Oneida chief, who was blind from years, observed to Heckewelder, "I am an aged hemlock; the winds of one hundred years have whistled through my branches; I am dead at the top. Why I yet live, the great, good Spirit only knows." This venerable father of the forest lived long enough to be converted to Christianity.—Quarterly Review.

236

A Huron woman under the instruction of a missionary, who detailed to her the perfections of God, exclaimed, in a species of ecstasy, "I understand, I understand; and I always felt convinced that our Areskoui was exactly such a one as the God you have described to me."—Lafitau, tom. i., p. 127. The Great Spirit was named Areskoui among the Huron, Agriskoné among the Iroquois, Manitou among the Algonquins.

237

See Appendix, No. LII. (vol. II.)

238

Every spring the Arkansas go in a body to some retired place, and there turn up a large space of land, which they do with the drums beating all the while. After this they call it the Desart, or the Field of the Spirit, and thither they go when they are in their enthusiastic fits, and there wait for inspiration from their pretended deity. In the mean while, as they do this every year, it proves of no small advantage to them, for by this means they turn up all their land by degrees, and it becomes abundantly more fruitful.—Tonti.

239

Lafitau asserts that the first beast killed by a young hunter was always offered in sacrifice.—Vol. i., p. 515. See Catlin's description of the sacrifices and ceremonies practiced when the first fruits of corn are ripe.—Catlin, vol. i., p. 189.

240

Peter Martyr speaks of the general opinion among the early discoverers that the Indians believed in a species of immortality. "They confess the soul to be immortal; having put off the bodily clothing, they imagine it goeth forth to the woods and the mountains, and that it liveth there perpetually in caves; nor do they exempt it from eating or drinking, but that it should be fed there. The answering voices heard from caves and hollows, which the Latines call echoes, they suppose to be the souls of the departed wandering through those places."—Peter Martyr, Decad. VIII., cap. ix., M. Lock's translation, 1612.

241

"Une jeune sauvagesse voyant sa sœur mourante, par la quantité de ciguë qui elle avoit pris dans un dépit, et déterminé à ne faire aucun remède pour se garantir de la mort, pleuroit à chaudes larmes, et s'efforçoit de la toucher par les liens du sang, et de l'amitié qui les unissoit ensemble. Elle lui disoit sans cesse, 'C'en est donc fait; in veux que nous ne nous retrouvions jamais plus, et que nous ne nous revoyions jamais?' Le missionnaire, frappé de ces paroles, lui en demanda la raison. 'Il me semble,' dit-il, 'que vous avez un pays des âmes, où vous devez tous vous reünir à vos ancêtres; pourquoi donc est ce que tu parles ainsi à la sœur?' 'Il est vrai,' reprit-elle, 'que nous allons tous au pays des âmes; mais les mechants, et ceux en particulier, qui se sont dêtruits eux-mêmes par un mort violente, y portent la peine de leur crime; ils y sont séparés des autres, et n'ont point de communication avec eux: c'est là le sujet de mes peines.'"—Lafitau, tom. i., p. 404. See Appendix, LII. (vol. II.)