the storm is spent, the stars come peeping out ;
the air is chill and sweet ; and we drag our way
along the wet and smoking plain.

Want of sleep, want of food, want of exercise
for we are jolted over the unmade tracks all night,
all day, stopping at the creeks for a little water,
at the log-stables for a change of mules, but a
few moments only have made us ill. We obtair
no proper supplies of food and drink, and we an
cooped up in a waggon designed (one mighi



THE PRAIRIES. 53

appose) by some infernal genius as a place of

prture ; a machine in which you can neither sit,

or stand, nor lie down. My friend is suffering

x>m bilious sickness ; I am tormented by eruptions

n the skin ; yet, even with these quick monitors

f evil in us, we are every day astonished by

ae sudden gush of life, which conies with the

iiorning light. We crawl from our miserable den

: a den without a door, without a window, without

: step with nothing save a coarse canvas cover for

I roof, coarse canvas flaps for sides, into the dust

,.nd filth of a stable ; banged and beaten and jolted,

intil our heads are swollen, our faces bruised, our

.lands lacerated ; sleepless, hungry ; our temples

Backed by pain, our nostrils choked with sand, our

hubs stiffened and bent with cramps ; but after

.insing our mouths and dipping our heads in some

ittle creek, the water of which we dare not drink,

tnd pushing on three or four miles ahead of the

tage, winding up the long prairie sweUs, and

wreathing the morning air, we pause in our brisk

;tep, look at each other, and smile. The effect is

nagical ; all pain, all cramp, all languor, have dis-

ippeared ; the blood flows freely, the lungs act

softly, the nostrils seem to open from within, and

tho eyes appear to cast out sand and dust by some



54 NEW AMERICA.

internal force. If we could only now get food,
we feel strength enough to defy all other forms of
pain.

But food is a thing we cannot get.



55



CHAPTEE V.

PRAIEIE INDIANS.

THE red-men of these Prairies have been taking
counsel together in a field near Fort Ellsworth, as
to the policy of allowing the white men, headed
by their Big Father in Washington, to open a new
road through their country by way of this Smoky
Hill Fork ; and the warlike tribes of this region,
the Cheyennes and Arappahoes, aided and sup
ported by allies from the south and from the
north, the powerful Sioux, the savage Kiowas,
the clever Comanches, and the swift Apaches, are
said to have resolved on war.

These Indians say they have been deceived
by the white men ; this they always say when
going out on the w r ar-path ; for a red man s pride
will not suffer him to acknowledge, even to him
self, that he has done any wrong that he has
broken any pledge. In these frontier quarrels, the



56 NEW AMERICA.

Indian, by his own confession, is always right. So
far as we can learn from these Cheyennes and
their allies, it would seem that early in the spring
of this present year (1866) Major Wyncoop, an
officer of government, employed in the task oi
making treaties a brisk and profitable branch ol
the public service had been among these prairie
hunters, giving them arms and blankets, floui;
and whisky, in exchange for a promise of gooc";
behaviour on the roads in respect to emigran
waggons and merchants trains. Wyncoop, the}
say, had told them, by word of mouth, to. have n<
fears about the safety of their buffalo-runs, sine
the Big Father in Washington had no intention o
opening any new road by way of the Smoky HilJ
After Wyncoop left them, they began to fear tha
he had been a bearer of lies; for they heard thai
even while he was sleeping in their lodge, eatin
elk with Eoman Nose, Black Hawk, and Spotte
Dog, Cheyenne chiefs and warriors, the whit
men had been laying their plans for cutting
road straight towards the heart of these buffal
lands.

Of course they have heard from the Pale-face
that all roads should be free and open. They ha\ j
been told that the road from St. Louis to Ne



PKAIRIE INDIANS. 57

York is just as free to a red man as to a white
man ; and they have been also told, as though this
second thing followed from the first, that the path
from St. Louis to Salt Lake should be as free to
the white man as it is to the red ; but Roman
Nose, Black Hawk, and Spotted Dog, are men too
subtle to be taken in by what they call baby-talk.
They answer, that in their sense of the word yon
road from St. Louis to New York is not open.
Would Black Hawk be allowed to hunt through
the fields of Ohio? Would Spotted Dog be
suffered to pitch his lodge in the streets of Indian-
opolis ? Could Roman Nose, on that road from St.
Louis to New York, kill and eat sheep and cow,
animals which have replaced his own buffalo and
elk? If not, how, they ask, can the track be
called open to them, dwellers in wigwams, hunters
of wild game ? These Cheyennes, these Arappa-
hoes and Sioux, are as well aware as any pale-face
in Washington, that their laws are not our laws,
their liberties not our liberties. If it were one of
their Indian fashions to have a party-cry, they
would probably raise the shout of " The hunting-
ground for the hunter ! "

Roman Nose and Spotted Dog tell us that the
very best hunting-grounds now left to the red



58 NEW AMERICA.

man, are these prairie lands, lying along and
around the Smoky Hill Fork ; a dry and sandy
ravine, more than a hundred miles in length,
stretching at the foot of this high ridge or bluff,
called Smoky Hill from the cap of mist which
commonly floats above its crest. Here grow the
sweet bunch-grasses which the buffalo loves to
chew, and hither come those herds of game on
which the Indian lodge depends for its winter
store. Disturb these herds in their present quarters,
and whither can they flee ? Southward lies the
Arkansas road from St. Louis to Santa Fe ; north
ward lies the Platte road from Omaha to Salt
Lake. No game will linger on the white man s
track ; and to make a path for the mail by way of
Smoky Hill Fork is simply to drive away the red
man s food. Elk and antelope may wander into
close vicinity to a trader s and an emigrant s trail ;
buffalo, a bolder and fiercer, but more cautious
animal, never.

" White man come, buffalo go," says Black
Hawk, with his sharp logic ; " when buffalo gone,
squaw and papoose die."

From Black Hawk s point of view, the policy
of resisting our encroachments on their hunting-
fields is beyond dispute.



PRAIRIE INDIANS. 59

A second cause has helped to create the trouble
which besets us on these Plains.

One of the great feuds which divide Eastern
America from Western America the states lying
east of the Mississippi from the states and terri
tories lying west of the Big Drink has its birth
in the question What line of policy should be
followed by the government in dealing with the
red men? The Eastern cities are all for rose-
water and baby-talk ; the Western cities are all
for revolvers and bowie-knives. Each section has
its sentiment and its passion. In Boston no one
believes that a red Indian can do wrong ; in
Denver no one believes that a red Indian can do
right. Each party accuses the other of ignorance
and petulance; Massachusetts looking on the red
skin solely in his romantic lights, as a repre
sentative of tribes and nations, dear to art and
poetry, which are rapidly passing into the land
of dreams ; Colorado looking upon him solely in
his prosaic aspects of a thief, a beggar, an assassin,
who may have stolen white women and scalped
white men. In Massachusetts, in Ehode Island, in
New Hampshire, almost everybody has either made
a sketch, composed a song, or read a romance, about
the Indian ; while in Colorado, in New Mexico



60 NEW AMERICA.

and California, almost everybody has had a kins
man butchered, or a kinswoman carried off by
that romantic personage : a difference which may
very well account for the radical opposition of
ideas as to a true Indian policy regarding him
in the East and in the West. Being strong in
Washington, Massachusetts has commonly had her
own way in Kansas, and wherever a judge s writ
will run ; being near to the Plains, Colorado has
sometimes had her own way in the lonely grass land
and the nameless creek.

One sudden blow Colorado dealt last year at
her savage enemy, when a body of volunteer horse
under Colonel Shevington broke into a Cheyenne
camp at Sand Creek, a little way in our front,
where a thousand Indians had encamped, under
the command of White Antelope, an aged and
renowned Cheyenne warrior. The Colorado vo
lunteers, raised by orders from Washington, rode
in upon these Indians, shooting down brave, and
squaw, and papoose, in undistinguishing hate and
wrath. White Antelope fell like the hero in a
poet s tale ; for, seeing that defence was idle, that
escape was impossible, he sprang up a mound of
sand, and throwing open his embroidered jacket,
bade the Pale-faces fire. With twenty slugs in



PEAIEIE INDIANS. 61

his body, he rolled upon the earth. Most of his
followers fell around his corpse ; old and young,
men and women, wrinkled warriors and puling
infants. Sixteen of the volunteers were slain ; and
their comrades rode back into Denver covered, as
they imagined, with the glory of their deed.

In New England, this raid upon the Cheyenne
camp is everywhere denounced as the Indian Mas
sacre ; in the ranches of these prairies, in the
cities near the mines, it is everywhere celebrated
as the Big Fight. Your opinion on the point is
held to be a test of your good sense. In Boston,
any approval of the big fight would subject you
to a social ban ; in Denver, any denunciation of
the Indian massacre would bring a bowie-knife
into your side. After saying so much, I need
scarcely add, that westward of the Missouri I have
never met a man who does not say that the Sand
Creek affair, though terrible enough in some of its
details, was a good and wholesome act of severity,
an act that ought to be repeated twice a-year,
until every Indian tribe has been swept away from
these Plains.

Eastern men assert, that when Shevington at
tacked the Indian camp, the Cheyennes were at
peace with the whites, and that the American flag



62 NEW AMEKICA.

was floating above White Antelope s tent. Shev-
ington denies these facts ; asserting that the Chey
enne camp had been the refuge of Dog soldiers,
a band of red-skin outlaws and assassins, who
had been plundering settlements, and .murdering
teamsters and emigrants for many months ; a fact
which he and his Colorado friends assert was
proved : in the first place, by the Indians having
had a white girl, of sixteen, and three young white
children in that very camp, whom they sold, after
much palaver, to the citizens : in the second place,
by their boast of having two other white women
in their lodges, whom they would neither give
away nor sell : in the third place, by the white
men finding, when the Indian camp was taken, a
heap of rings, ribbons, photographs, and human
scalps.

One act of atrocity, committed by these In
dians, is said to have roused, in a peculiar manner,
the indignation of Denver. In a ranch, on Eunning
Creek, near that city, lived, with his wife and
two children, a man named Hungate ; an honest
man, a good farmer, who stood well with his neigh
bours. The red men had swept down upon his
lonely farm, had driven off his cattle, had burnt
his ranch, had violated his wife, had massacreed his



PEAIKIE INDIANS. 63

children, and shot himself. The heads of all the
Hungate family were scalped, the bodies hacked
and pounded. When they were found in this muti
lated state, they had been borne into Denver city,
and made a public show, like the wounded men of
Paris in 48 ; rousing the hot blood of Colorado into
madness.

White Antelope was made to answer for the
blood of Hungate.

Two of the scalps which the volunteers under
Shevington found at Sand Creek, after the fight, are
said to have been fresh ; one, a white man s scalp,
was hardly cold ; a second, a white woman s scalp,
was declared by the army surgeon to have been
drawn within ten days.

Feud begets feud, and the strife of last year
can only be answered by strife in the coming fall.
A son of White Antelope is now going about the
Plains calling on the tribes and nations to rise and
avenge his father s death ; which Kornan Nose,
Black Hawk, Tall Buffalo, Lance, and Little Blanket,
all powerful chiefs, are said to be willing enough
to do, since they may gain a rare opportunity of
gratifying their passion for blood while clearing
these favourite buffalo-runs of all white disturbers
of the Indian game.



64 NEW AMERICA.



CHAPTEE VI.

THE BED MAN.

A LONG line of poems and novels leads an English
reader into habits of looking on the red man as
a picturesque figure of the prairie and the lake,
rather than as a living force in the midst of
American cities. We have lodged the Indians in
our minds, as we have the men who exist for us
only in tales and plays. When we recall either
an Iroquois, or a Mohican, he presents himself to
our vision in his war-paint, in his hunting gear ;
he is sitting in council under the Treaty tree,
seeing God in clouds, and hearing Him in the
wind. We note him stealing forth with Hawk-eye
on the war-path, watching over Minnehaha in the
wigwam, tearing himself from his old hunting-
grounds on the Ohio, starting for his new home in
the unknown West. We connect him with aged
hemlocks, running waters, and silent valleys. But






THE RED MAX. 65

whether he comes before us in his hunting gear or
in his paint and feathers, with a pipe of peace in
his mouth or a scalping-knife raised in his hand,
he is ever the same for us ; a being of the mind,
a picture, a poem, a romance ; not a man of flesh
and blood, endowed with senses, rich in passions,
fruitful in ideas, one strong to resist, one swift to
impress, all men who may come into contact with
him.

In the United States people know him better.
The red man lives amongst them like the black
man ; less ductile in genius, more prolific in ideas ;
having his own policy, his own arts, his own
traditions ; with a power, which the black man
has not, of giving back, no less than taking, in the
way of thought. They have to deal with him
from day to day as with a man having rights in
the soil which no Yankee can deny, which no
honest Yankee feels the wish to dispute.

No race of men ever yet drove out another

race of men from any country, taking their lands

: and cities from them, without finding on the spot

which they came to own a local genius, which

affected their polity, their usages and their

I arts. Man is a living power, acting and re-acting

i on his fellow, through a natural law. All force is

VOL. I. F



66 NEW AMERICA.

relative. If the strong act upon the weak, the
weak re-act upon the strong. Numbers are
strength ; and if the higher race should have
the disadvantage of being few in number, they
will fall in some measure to the level of their
slaves, in spite of their first superiority in physical
gifts and in moral power. Thus, the Roman mas
ters of Greece adopted the art, the language, the
religion, and at length the country, they had.
won by the sword. The Norman hero became
an English gentleman, helping to make that
name the proudest title borne on earth. After
three generations, the settlers under Strongbow
proved themselves more Irish in feeling than the
Celts. Duke Eollo s soldiers softened into Sici
lians. The Mantchoo Tartars have become Chinese.
Even in cases where fire and sword have been
used to thin off the original people, the effect has
been pretty much the same. The Israelites were
told to cut dow r n the Hittites and Amorites, the
Canaanites, Perizzites and Jebusites ; and they
slew the men of these nations without mercy, as
they had been commanded from God. Yet the
customs and ideas of these heathens clung to
the soil, and generation after generation of the
chosen people fell into sin by running after






THE RED MAN. 67

the native gods. Dagon, Moloch, Ashtaroth, drew
men away from Jehovah ; and the arts of Tyre
and Sidon acted upon those whom the sword
of Jabin could not drive from the land. In
like fashion, those red men whom our fore-comers
found on the Atlantic sea-board, and whom they
have been pushing back, at first towards the Alle-
ghanies, then to the Ohio and the Wabash, after
wards to the Mississippi, and at length beyond the
great river as far west as the Kansas and the Ar
kansas, have left the traces of their former pre
sence in the national mind ; in the popular politics,
in the popular science, in the popular life. They
have done so in places from which they have
wholly disappeared, as well perhaps as in districts
where they still exist; among the Spiritualists of
New England, among the Mormons of Salt Lake
valley. Man is what he eats ; and a nation
grows into the likeness of that which it absorbs.
Where the Indian has been destroyed by assimila
tion, the pale-face must have undergone a change,
to be measured by the amount of resisting power ;
a quality in which some tribes of these red-skins
are pre-eminently rich. When the Indian has
survived the shock of conflict with the pale-face,
as at Oneida Creek, at Wyandotte, at St. Mary s

F 2



68 NEW AMERICA.

Mission, and in many other places, the power of
acting and re-acting on the whites is still in force,
affecting the national character in a way which no
man could have foreseen, and no one will now

deny.

The Anglo-Saxon power of assimilation is very
great; but the Cheyenne and the Dakota present
to it, perhaps, the very hardest meal it has ever
been called upon to digest. The Anglo-Saxon has
not gone far in the process of eating up the red
man ; yet he shows by a hundred signs the effect
of that indigestible meal upon his health. The
Indian fibre is exceedingly tough. Can any one
say whether, up to this moment, though the white
men have an easy mastery, the action of the white
men on the red has been stronger than that of the
red man on the white ?

Let those who think so come into these
western plains, into the lands where red and white
men live together, in anything but harmony. They
will find that each has acquired the other s vices;
that while the Indian has learned how to beat his
pale brother in debauchery, the white man has only
come to equal his red brother in ferocity and craft
If the Yengee has taught the Indian to drinl<
whisky, the Indian has taught the Yengee to keej



THE RED MAN. 69

squaws. Nearly all the old trappers and team
sters, who have lived among Indians, are poly-
gamists : Jem Baker, of Clear Creek, has two
squaws ; Mageary, of South Platte, has three ;
Bent, of Smoky Hill, is said to have married six.
As an Indian chief said to Colonel Marcy, " The
first thing a Yengee wants in the Plains is plenty
wife." If Little Bear drinks and beats his squaw
to death, Jem Smith ers has learned to make a jest
of taking scalps. I hear anecdotes in these plains
to make the blood run cold. Jack Dunkier, of
Central City, scalped five Sioux in the presence
of his white comrade. The same Colorado boy is
said to have ridden into Denver with the leg of
an Indian warrior slung to his saddle ; a leg which
he had cut from the trunk, and on which he
reported that he had been living for two whole
days. No one believed his story ; but a boast is
in its way a fact, and there is no doubt that in
Denver city a white man openly boasted of having
boiled and eaten steaks from a human thigh. A
Pawnee would glory in such a deed ; vaunting
it afterwards in the meetings of his tribe. The
Yengee quickly learns to imitate the red man s
crimes. One of the Sand Creek volunteers re
turned to Denver with a woman s heart on the



70 NEW AMEKICA.

head of a pole ; Laving shot the squaw, ripped
her breast open, and plucked out her heart. No
one blamed him, and his trophy was received with
shouts by a rabble in the public streets. I am
glad to say, that white opinion underwent a
change, even in the rough mining districts, with
respect to this man s doings ; not that any one
dreamed of arresting him for his crimes, not that
his comrades in the ranks thought any worse of
him for his lark ; but the jokes of the grog-shop,
the gaming-house, and the smoking-room, turned
rather freely on his deed, and the fellow, being
deficient in wit and patience, fled away from the
town, and never came back. In a Cheyenne
brave, such a crime as his would have raised a
warrior to the rank of a chief. One offence,
though it implied no loss of life, appeared to me
more revolting than even the murder of a squaw,
of a papoose the violation of Indian graves by
the Yengees. A government train, passing
through the Indian territory, came upon a heap
of stones and rocks, which the knowing trapper
who accompanied the train pointed out as the
burial-place of some great chief: when the western
boys ripped it open, kicked the bones of the dead
warrior, and picked up the bow and arrows, the



THE RED MAX. 71

spoon of buffalo horn, (an officer of the United
States army gave me that horn as a keepsake !)
the beads and ornaments, the remnants of a
buffalo robe in which the chief had been wrapped
for his final rest.

Along with many of their vices, the Yengees
have borrowed from the Indians some of their
simple virtues a spirit of hospitality, a high re
spect for the plighted word, a sovereign contempt
for pain and death.

The red men have taught the whole world how
to smoke the Indian weed. Have they received
from the Pale-face any one boon to compare with
this gift from the savage to the civilised man ?

It is no figure of speech to say that in
White America, a red influence is very widely
spread and very strongly felt, alike in the sphere
of institutions and in the sphere of thought.

The confederacy of the Five Nations was the
type adopted by the whites when framing the
confederacy of the Thirteen Colonies ; not only as
regards the principle of their Union, but also in
respect to its most original details. The Iroquois
had invented the theory of State Eights, which
the colonists borrowed from them ; an indefinable
and dangerous theory, implying a power of se-



72 NEW AMERICA.

parate action, perhaps of withdrawal, from the
Union ; leading to a thousand quarrels, and to a
civil war, of which the end has not yet been
reached. These Iroquois had adopted the theory
of extending their power and territory, not by
adding to the limits of any existing nation of
the confederacy, but by bodily introducing new
tribes and nations into union ; a novel principle
of political growth, which the white men also
borrowed from them. Under these two principles,
the Five Nations had grown into Eight Nations ;
and the Thirteen Colonies, following in their wake
and carrying on their work, have expanded into
Forty-six States and Territories.

In the conference of 1774, when commissioners
from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, went to
consult the Iroquois sachems at Lancaster, the great
chief Casannatego addressed them in terms which
a Greek member of the Achaian League might have
used : " Our wise forefathers established union and
amity between the Five Nations. This union has
made us formidable. Th ! s has given us great
strength and authority with our neighbouring
nations. By showing the same method, you will
acquire fresh strength and power. Therefore, I
counsel you, whatever befalls you, never to fall out



THE RED MAX. 73

with one another." Official reports to Congress
from the Indian bureau confess that this Iroquois
confederation was the true political germ of the
United States.

The men of the Five Nations had very high
notions of liberty, and that on both the public and
the domestic side. Every man was considered
equal to his fellow. The sachem, even when he
came of a ruling stock, was elected to his office.
They had no hereditary rank, and no other titles
than the names which described their function,
such as warrior, councillor, and seer. They said
that all men of Iroquois race, together with their
allies, were born free and equal with each other ;
and that no man, thus freely born, could ever
be made a slave. Indeed, they set their faces
against slavery in any form. No Iroquois could
own his fellow. If enemies were taken by him
in war, they were either put to death or natural
ised and adopted into his tribe. Nay, the senti
ment of freedom was so strong in the Five
Nations that they declared the soil itself free, so