Farnham's Travels in the Great Western Prairies, etc., May 21-October 16, 1839, part 1

A trader is living there with a young Eutaw squaw, through whose charms he has forsaken friends, wealth and ease, and civilization, for an Indian lodge among all the dangers and wants of a wilderness. This gentleman is said to have a standing offer of £140 for his dear one, whenever, in the course of a limited time, he will sell her graces. But it is believed that his heart has so much to do with his estimation of her value, that no consideration could induce him voluntarily to deprive himself of her society.

The above anecdotes were related to me during the first evening I spent at Fort David Crockett. It was a bright ethereal night. The Fort stood in the shade of the wild and dark cliffs, while the light of the moon shone on the western peaks, and cast a deeper darkness into the inaccessible gorges on the face of the mountains. The Sheetskadee flowed silently among the alders – the fires in the Indian lodges were smouldering; sleep had gathered every animate thing in its embrace. It was a night of deep solitude. I enjoyed the lovely scene till near midnight in company with Mr. St. Clair; and when at last its excitements and the thrilling pleasure of being relieved from the prospect of death by hunger allowed me to slumber, that gentleman conducted me to his own room and bed, and bade me occupy both while I should remain with him. He expressed regret that he had so little provisions in the Fort; – a small quantity of old jerked meat; a little tea and sugar.

"But," said he, "share it with me as long as it lasts. I have hunters out; they will be here in ten or twelve days; you have been starving; eat while there is any thing left, and when all is gone we'll have a mountain sheep, or a dog to keep off starvation till the hunters come in."

My companions and guide were less fortunate. We purchased all the meat which either money or goods could induce the Indians to sell. It amounted to one day's supply for the company. And as there was supposed to be no game within a circuit of one hundred miles, it became matter of serious inquiry whether we should seek it in the direction of Fort Hall, or on the head waters of Little Snake River, one hundred miles off our proper route to Oregon.

In the latter place there were plenty of fine, fat buffalo; but on the way to the other point there was nothing but antelope, difficult to kill, and poor. A collateral circumstance turned the scale of our deliberations. That circumstance was dog meat. We could get a supply of these delectable animals from the Indians; they would keep life in us till we could reach Fort Hall; and by aid thereof we could immediately proceed on our journey, cross the Blue Mountains before the snow should render them impassable, and reach Vancouver, on the lower Columbia, during the autumn. On the contrary, if we sought meat on the waters of Little Snake River, it would be so late before we should be prepared to resume our journey, that we could not pass those mountains until May or June of the following spring.

The dogs, therefore, were purchased; and preparations were made for our departure to Fort Hall, as soon as ourselves and our animals were sufficiently recruited for the undertaking. Meanwhile my companions ate upon our stock of barking mutton. And thus we spent seven days – delightful days; for although our fare was humble and scanty, yet the flesh began to creep upon our skeletons, our minds to resume their usual vivacity, and our hearts to warm again with the ordinary emotions of human existence.

The trials of a journey in the western wilderness can never be detailed in words. To be understood, they must be endured. Their effects upon the physical and mental system are equally prostrating. The desolation of one kind and another which meets the eye every where; the sense of vastness associated with dearth and barrenness, and of sublimity connected with eternal, killing frost; – of loneliness coupled with a thousand natural causes of one's destruction; perpetual journeyings over endless declivities, among tempests, through freezing torrents; one half the time on foot, with nothing but moccasins to protect the feet from the flinty gravel and the thorns of the prickly pear along the unbeaten way; and the starvings and thirstings wilt the muscles, send preternatural activity into the nervous system, and through the whole animal and mental economy a feebleness, an irritability altogether indescribable.

At Fort David Crockett there were rest, and food, and safety; and old Father Time, as he mowed away the passing moments and gathered them into the great garner of the Past, cast upon the Future a few blossoms of hope, and sweetened the hours, now and then, with a bit of information about this portion of his ancient dominion. I heard from various persons, more or less acquainted with the Colorado of the West, a confirmation of the account of that river given in the journals of previous days; and also that there resides at the lower end of its great kenyon, a band of the Club Indians – very many of whom are seven feet high, and well proportioned; that these Indians raise large quantities of black beans upon the sandy intervales on the stream; that the oval-leaf prickly-pear grows there from fifteen to twenty feet in height; that these Indians make molasses from its fruit; that their principal weapon of warfare is the club, which they wield with amazing dexterity and force; that they inhabit a wide extent of country north-west, and south-east of this lower part of the river; that they have never been subdued by the Spaniards, and are inimical to all white people.157 Subsequent inquiry in California satisfied me that this river is navigable only thirty or forty miles from its mouth, and that the Indians who live upon its barren banks near the Gulf, are such as I have described.

The Snakes, or Shoshonies, are a wandering tribe of Indians who inhabit that part of the Rocky Mountains which lies on the Grand and Green River branches of the Colorado of the West, the valley of Great Bear River, the habitable shores of the Great Salt Lake, a considerable portion of country on Snake River above and below Fort Hall, and a tract extending two or three hundred miles to the west of that post. Those who reside in the place last named, are said to subsist principally on roots; they, however, kill a few deer, and clothe themselves with their skins. The band living on Snake River subsist on the fish of the stream, buffalo, deer, and other game. Those residing on the branches of the Colorado, live on roots, buffalo, elk, deer, the mountain-sheep, and antelope. The Snakes own many horses. These, with their thousands of dogs, constitute all the domestic animals among them. They have conical skin-lodges, a few camp-kettles, butcher-knives and guns. Many of them, however, still use the bow and arrow. In dress, they follow the universal Indian costume – moccasins, leggings, and the hunting-shirt. Nothing but the hair covers the head; and this, indeed, would seem sufficient, if certain statements made in relation to it be true; as that it frequently grows four and five feet in length, and in one case eleven feet. In these instances, it is braided and wound round the head in the form of a Turkish turban. If only two or three feet in length, it is braided on the female head in two queues, which hang down the back: on the male, it is only combed behind the ears, and lies dishevelled around the shoulders. The female dress differs from that of the male in no other respect than this: the shirt or chemise of the former extends down to the feet. Beaver, otter, bear and buffalo skins, and horses are exchanged by them with the Arrapahoes, and the Americans, and British traders, for some few articles of wearing apparel; such as woollen blankets and hats. But as their stock of skins is always very limited, they find it necessary to husband it with much care, to obtain therewith a supply of tobacco, arms and ammunition.

From the first acquaintance of the whites with them, these people have been remarkable for their aversion to war, and those cruelties generally practised by their race. If permitted to live in peace among their mountains, and allowed to hunt the buffalo – that wandering patrimony of all the tribes – when necessity requires, they make war upon none, and turn none hungry away from their humble abodes. But these peaceable dispositions in the wilderness, where men are left to the protection of their impulses and physical energies, have yielded them little protection. The Blackfeet, Crows, Sioux and Eutaws have alternately fought them for the better right to the Old Park, and portions of their Territory, with varied success; and, at the present time, do those tribes yearly send predatory parties into their borders to rob them of their horses. But as the passes through which they enter the Snake country are becoming more and more destitute of game on which to subsist, their visits are less frequent, and their number less formidable. For several years, they have been in a great measure relieved from these annoyances.

From the time they met Lewis and Clark on the head-waters of the Missouri158 to the present day, the Snakes have opened their lodges to whites, with the most friendly feelings. And many are the citizens of the States, and the subjects of Britain, who have sought their villages, and by their hospitality have been saved from death among those awful solitudes. A guest among them is a sacred deposit of the Great Spirit. His property, when once arrived within their camp, is under the protection of their honour and religious principle; and should want, cupidity, or any other motive, tempt any individual to disregard these laws of hospitality, the property which may have been stolen, or its equivalent, is returned, and the offender punished. The Snakes are a very intelligent race. This appears in the comforts of their homes, their well-constructed lodges, the elegance and useful form of their wardrobes, their horse-gear, &c.

But more especially does it exhibit itself in their views of sensual excesses and other immoralities. These are inhibited by immemorial usages of the tribe. Nor does their code of customs operate upon those wrong doings only which originate among a savage people. Whatever indecency is offered them by their intercourse with the whites, they avoid. Civilized vice is quite as offensive as that which grows up in their own untrained natures. The non-use of intoxicating liquor is an example of this kind. They abjured it from the commencement of its introduction among them. And they give the best of reasons for this custom: – "It unmans us for the hunt, and for defending ourselves against our enemies; it causes unnatural dissensions among ourselves; it makes the Chief less than his Indian; and by its use, imbecility and ruin would come upon the Shoshonie tribe."

Whatever difference of opinion may exist among civilized men on this matter, these Indians certainly reason well for themselves, and, I am inclined to think, for all others. A voice from the depth of the mountains – from the lips of a savage – sends to our ears the startling rebuke – "Make not, vend not, give not to us the strong water. It prostrates your superior knowledge, your enlarged capacities for happiness, your cultivated understandings. It breaks your strong laws; it rots down your strong houses; it buries you in the filthiest ditch of sin. Send it not to us; we would rather die by the arrows of the Blackfeet."

The Crows159 are a wandering tribe, and usually found in the upper plains around the head-waters of the north fork of Great Platte, Snake, and Yellowstone rivers. Their number is estimated to be about five thousand. They are represented as the most arrant rascals among the mountains. The traders say of them that "they have never been known to keep a promise or do an honourable act." No white man or Indian trusts them. Murder and robbery are their principal employments. Much of their country is well watered, timbered, and capable of yielding an abundant reward to the husbandman.

The Blackfeet Indians reside on the Marias and other branches of the Missouri above the Great Falls. In 1828 they numbered about two thousand five hundred lodges or families. During that year they stole a blanket from the American Fur Company's steamboat on the Yellowstone, which had belonged to a man who had died of the small-pox on the passage up the Missouri. The infected article being carried to their encampment upon the "left hand fork of the Missouri," spread the dreadful infection among the whole tribe. They were amazed at the appearance of the disease. The red blotch, the bile, congestion of the lungs, liver, and brain, were all new to their medicine-men; and the rotten corpse falling in pieces while they buried it, struck horror into every heart. In their frenzy and ignorance they increased the number of their sweat ovens upon the banks of the stream, and whether the burning fever or the want of nervous action prevailed; whether frantic with pain, or tottering in death, they were placed in them, sweated profusely and plunged into the snowy waters of the river. The mortality which followed this treatment was a parallel of the Plague in London. They endeavoured for a time to bury the dead, but these were soon more numerous than the living. The evil-minded medicine-men of all ages had come in a body from the world of spirits, had entered into them, and were working the annihilation of the Blackfeet race.

The Great Spirit had also placed the floods of his displeasure between himself and them. He had cast a mist over the eyes of their conjurors, that they might not know the remedial incantation. Their hunts were ended; their bows were broken; the fire in the Great Pipe was extinguished for ever; their graves called for them; and the call was now answered by a thousand dying groans. Mad with superstition and fear, brother forsook sister; father his son; and mother her sucking child; and fled to the elevated vales among the western heights, where the influences of the climate, operating upon the already well-spent energies of the disease, restored the remainder of the tribe again to health. Of the two thousand five hundred families existing at the time the pestilence commenced, one or more members of eight hundred only survived its ravages; and even to this hour do the bones of seven or eight thousand Blackfeet lie unburied among the decaying lodges of their deserted village, on the banks of the Yellowstone. But this infliction has in no wise humanized their blood-thirsty nature. As ever before, they wage exterminating war upon the traders and trappers, and the Oregon Indians.160

The Arrapahoes reside south of the Snakes.161 They wander in the winter season over the country about the head of the Great Kenyon of the Colorado of the West, and to a considerable distance down that river; and in summer hunt the buffalo in the New Park, or "Bull Pen," in the "Old Park" on Grand River, and in "Boyou Salade," on the south fork of the Platte. Their number is not well ascertained. Some estimate it at three thousand, others more, and others still less. They are said to be a brave, fearless, thrifty, ingenious, and hospitable people. They own large numbers of horses, mules, dogs, and sheep. The dogs they fatten and eat. Hence the name Arrapahoes – dog eaters. They manufacture the wool of their sheep into blankets of a very superior quality. I saw many of them; possessed one; and believe them to be made with something in the form of a darning-needle. They appeared to be wrought, in the first time, like a fishing-net; and on this, as a foundation, darned so densely that the rain will not penetrate them. They are usually striped or checked with yellow and red.

There is in this tribe a very curious law of naturalization; it is based upon property. Any one, whether red or white, may avail himself of it. One horse, which can run with sufficient speed to overtake a buffalo cow, and another horse or mule, capable of bearing a pack of two hundred pounds, must be possessed by the applicant.

These being delivered to the principal chief of the tribe, and his intentions being made known, he is declared a citizen of the Arrapahoe tribe, and entitled to a wife and other high privileges thereunto appertaining. Thus recognized, he enters upon a life of savage independence. His wife takes care of his horses, manufactures his saddles and bridles, and leash ropes and whips, his moccasins, leggings, and hunting-shirts, from leather and other materials prepared by her own hands; beats with a wooden adze his buffalo robes, till they are soft and pleasant for his couch; tans hides for his tent covering, and drags from the distant hills the clean white-pine poles to support it; cooks his daily food and places it before him. And should sickness overtake him, and death rap at the door of his lodge, his squaw watches kindly the last yearnings of the departing spirit. His sole duty, as her lord in life, and as a citizen of the Arrapahoe tribe, is to ride the horse which she saddles and brings to his tent, kill the game which she dresses and cures; sit and slumber on the couch which she spreads; and fight the enemies of the tribe. Their language is said to be essentially the same as that spoken by the Snakes and Cumanches.162

This, and other tribes in the mountains, and in the upper plains, have a custom, the same in its objects as was the ceremony of the "toga virilis" among the Romans.

When ripened into manhood, every young man of the tribe is expected to do some act of bravery that will give promise of his disposition and ability to defend the rights of his tribe and family. Nor can this expectation be disregarded. So, in the spring of the year, those of the age alluded to, associate themselves forty or fifty in a band, and devote themselves to the duties of man's estate in the following manner: – They take leave of their friends, and depart to some secret place near the woodlands; collect poles twenty or thirty feet in length, and raise them in the form of a cone; and cover the structure so thickly with leaves and boughs as to secure the interior from the gaze of persons outside. They then hang a fresh buffalo's head inside, near the top of the lodge where the poles meet; and below this, around the sides, suspend camp-kettles, scalps, and blankets, and the skin of a white buffalo, as offerings to the Great Spirit. After the lodge is thus arranged, they enter it with much solemnity, and commence the ceremonies which are to consecrate themselves to war, and the destruction of their own enemies, and those of the tribe. The first act, is to seat themselves in a circle round a fire built in the centre of the lodge, and "make medicine;" that is, – invoke the presence and aid of protecting spirits, by smoking the great mystic pipe.

One of their number fills it with tobacco and herbs, places upon the bowl a bright coal from the fire within the lodge, draws the smoke into his lungs, and blows it thence through his nostrils. He then seizes the stem with both hands, and leaning forward, touches the ground between his feet with the lower part of the bowl, and smokes again as before. The feet, and arms, and breast, are successively touched in a similar way; and after each touching, the sacred smoke is inhaled as before. The pipe is then passed to the one on his right, who smokes as his fellow has done. And thus the Great Pipe goes round, and the smoke rises and mingles with the votive offerings to the Great Spirit which are suspended above their heads. Immediately after this smoking is believed to be a favoured time for offering prayer to the Great Spirit. They pray for courage, and victory over their foes in the campaign they are about to undertake; and that they may be protected from the spirits of evil-minded medicine men. They then make a solemn and irrevocable vow, that if these medicine men do not make them sick – do not enter into their bosoms and destroy their strength and courage, they will never again see their relatives and tribe, unless they do so in garments stained with the blood of their enemies.

Having passed through these ceremonies, they rise and dance to the music of a war chant, till they are exhausted and swoon. In this state of insensibility, they imagine that the spirits of the brave dead visit them and teach them their duty, and inform them of the events that will transpire during the campaign. Three days and nights are passed in performing these ceremonies; during which time, they neither eat nor drink, nor leave the lodge. At early dawn of the fourth day they select a leader from their number, appoint a distant place of meeting; and emerging from the lodge, each walks away from it alone to the place of rendezvous. Having arrived there, they determine whose horses are to be stolen, whose scalps taken, and commence their march. They always go out on foot, wholly dependent upon their own energies for food and every other necessary. Among other things, it is considered a great disgrace to be long without meat and the means of riding.

It sometimes happens that these parties are unable to satisfy the conditions of their consecration during the first season; and therefore are compelled to resort to some ingenious and satisfactory evasion of the obligations of their vow, or to go into winter quarters till another opening spring allows them to prosecute their designs. The trappers relate a case of this kind, which led to a curious incident. A war party of Blackfeet had spent the season in seeking for their enemies without success. The storms of approaching winter had begun to howl around, and a wish to return to the log fires and buffalo meat, and hilarities and friendships of the camp of the tribe in the high vales of the Upper Missouri, had become ardent, when a forlorn, solitary trapper who had long resided among them, entered their camp. Affectionate and sincere greetings passed at the moment of meeting.

The trapper, as is the custom, was invited to eat; and all appeared friendly and glad. But soon the Indians became reserved, and whispered ominously among themselves. At length came to the ear of the trapper high words of debate in regard to his life. They all agreed that his white skin indubitably indicated that he belonged to the "Great Tribe" of their natural enemies, and that with the blood of a white upon their garments, they would have fulfilled the terms of their vow, and could return to their friends and tribe. A part of them seriously questioned whether the sacred names of friend and brother, which they had for years applied to him, had not so changed his natural relationship to them, that the Great Spirit, to whom they had made their vow, had sent him among them in the character which they themselves had given him – as a friend and brother. If so, they reasoned that the sacrifice of his life would only anger Him, and by no means relieve them from the obligations of their vow.

Another party reasoned that the Great Spirit had sent this victim among them to test their fidelity to Him. He had indeed been their friend; they had called him brother, but he was also their natural enemy; and that the Great One to whom they had made their vow, would not release them at all from its obligations, if they allowed this factitious relation of friendship to interfere with obedience to Himself. The other party rejoined, that although the trapper was their natural enemy, he was not one within the meaning of their vow; that the taking of his life would be an evasion of its sacred obligations, a blot upon their courage, and an outrage upon the laws of friendship; that they could find other victims, but that their friend could not find another life. The other party rebutted, that the trapper was confessedly their natural enemy; that the conditions of their vow required the blood of their natural enemy; and that the Great Spirit had sufficiently shown His views of the relative obligations of friendship and obedience to Himself in sending the trapper to their camp.

The trapper's friends perceiving that the obstinacy of their opponents was unlikely to yield to reason, proposed as a compromise, that, since, if they should adjudge the trapper their enemy within the requirements of their vow, his blood only would be needed to stain their garments, they would agree to take from him so much as might be necessary for that purpose; and that in consideration of being a brother, he should retain enough to keep his heart alive. As their return to their tribe would be secured by this measure, little objection was raised to it. The flint lancet was applied to the veins of the white man; their garments were dyed with his blood; they departed for their nation's village, and the poor trapper for the beaver among the hills.