ing tribe. To advance from the stage of a Seneca
into that of an Arab, is a march requiring many
years, perhaps many generations, to accomplish ;
and even when that stage of pastoral existence
shall have been gained, with all its changes
habit and of thought, the hunter will be only half
way on his path towards the position occupied by
a grain-growing Saxon. After the second stage
of this journey has been accomplished by the red
man, those who have visited ISTahr Dehab in Syria,
and watched the trials there being made by the
Turks in settling the Ferdoon Arabs on the soil,
will feel inclined to wait for any further results of
his effort in a very calm and dispassionate frame
of mind.
THE INDIAN QUESTION. 117
The Cheyenne is a wild man of the woods,
whom neither cold nor hunger is strong enough
to goad mto working for himself, his children,
and his squaws. How should it? A man may
die of frost and snow, and even for lack of food,
without bringing dishonour upon his tribe ; but
to labour with his hands is, in his simple belief,
a positive disgrace. A warrior must not soil his
palm with labour, seeing that his only duties
in the world are to hunt and fight. If maize
must be planted, if roots must be dug, if fires
must be lit, if water must be carried, where is the
squaw? Not much work is ever done in a
Cheyenne lodge ; but whether it be much or little,
the man will take no part of the trouble upon
himself. To kill his enemy and to catch his prey
that, in a line, is the Cheyenne s whole duty
of man. Starvation itself will not drive him into
treating industry as a duty ; the neglect of which,
even in another, is never, in his eyes, an offence.
In some of the western tribes, where game is run
ning scarce and the beavers evade the trap, the
squaws and little ones throw a handful of grain
into the soil ; but the hunters give no heed to
their work ; and if, on their return to the spot,
kter in the year, the men find that their squaws
118 KEW AMERICA.
have omitted to sow the maize, the idea of any
body working and waiting for a crop to grow is
so foreign to their Indian taste, that they sit
down and laugh at the neglect as a passing jest.
If the tribe runs short of food, the hunter s
remedy is to march against his neighbour, and by
means of his bow and his tomahawk, to create a
fresh balance between the mouths to be fed and
the quantity of buffalo and elk which may be
found to feed them. This rude remedy for want
is his only art. Any thought of making the
two ends of his account meet by setting up
beehives and multiplying herds, would never pre
sent itself unbrought to his simple mind. His
fathers having always been hunters, the only
resource of his tribe, when their food runs short,
is the original one of breaking through every
obstacle to a fresh supply with his club.
Can we marvel, then, that when the Senecas
were placed upon such land as the Alleghany
reservation, in a bountiful and fruitful country,
rich in white pines, and in other valuable trees,
they should have done little or nothing in the
way of planting and sowing ; that they should
have sold their timber to the whites ; that they
should have rented their saw-mills and ferries tc
THE INDIAN QUESTION. 119
the whites ; that they should have let out their
rafting yards and landing-places to the whites ;
in short, that they should have starved on a few
dollars derived from rent, while the more eager
and industrious Yankee, placed in the same lo
cation, would have coined the real riches of the
country into solid gold ? Like his Arab brother
at ISTahr Dehab, the Seneca on the Alleghany
could not defile his hands with work, the busi
ness, not of warriors, but of squaws.
It is only fair, then, to remember, that the
failure of so many attempts to convert the hunter
into a husbandman at a single step was due to
great laws of nature, not to the perversity of
man. The chasm could not be bridged ; but
your eager and well-meaning friends of the red
race, having no science to guide them, had to
work this truth for themselves out of vague ideas
into visible facts. In their ignorance of the
general laws of growth, they saw their very sym
pathies and generosities changed into destroying
powers ; for the Indians who gave up their lands
to the white men, receiving rentals or annuities
in return for them, had to abandon their old
habits of life without being able to enter on any
new employments. And what was the end of this
120 NEW AMERICA.
change for them? Hanging about the skirts of
towns, they ate and drank, rioted and smoked,
themselves into premature old age. Of a hun
dred millions of dollars which have been paid to
the rod man, it is said that fifty millions at least
have been spent in grog-shops and in houses of
evil name. The misery is, that in their savage
state the red men have to live in the light of a
high civilisation. The ferns which grow in their
native forests would not more surely perish if
they were suddenly planted out in the open sun.
The same hasty desire to bring the red sav
age into close relation with white civilisation af
fects the policy pursued by government agents
in these Plains. In the American part of Bed
India failure of justice is the rule ; in the Ca
nadian part of Eed India failure of justice is
extremely rare ; and the reason is this, the trap
pers and traders living beyond the Canadian
frontier deal with robbery and murder with a
promptness and simplicity unknown to American
judges. My friend, Jem Baker, a sturdy old trap
per, who resides with his squaws and papooses
on Clear Creek, near Denver, put the whole
case into a few words. " You see, colonel," says
Jem, to whom every gentleman is a colonel, " the
THE INDIAN QUESTION. 121
difference is this : if a Sioux kills a white man
near Fort Ellice, you English say, Bring him in,
dead or living, here s two hundred dollars ; and
when the Indians have brought him in, you say
again, Try him. for his life ; if he is guilty, hang
him on the nearest tree. All is done in a day,
and the Indians have his blood upon themselves.
But, if a Sioux kills a white man near Fort La-
ramie, we Americans say, Bring him in with
care, along with all the witnesses of his crime ;
and when the Indians have brought him in, we
say again, He must have a fair trial for his life ;
he must be committed by a justice and sent before
a judge, he must have a good counsel to speak up
for him, and a jury to try him who know nothing
about his crime. So most times he gets off, has
a present from some lady perhaps, and goes back
to his nation a big chief."
I have heard the details of cases in which
Indian assassins, taken all but red-handed, have
been sent to Washington for trial, three thousand
miles away from the scenes and witnesses of their
crimes ; who, on being acquitted from the lack of
such evidence as complicated legal methods require,
have come back into these prairies, bearing on
their arms and necks gifts of philanthropic ladies,
122 NEW AMERICA.
and taking instant rank as leaders in their tribes.
A simpler and swifter form of trial is needed on
these Plains on penalty of such irregular acts of
popular vengeance as the battle of Sand Creek.
The truth is, the eastern cities have always
shirked the Indian question ; fearing to face it
boldly, hoping it would drop out of light and
vex their spirits no more. "We push our way,"
said Secretary Seward to me, condolingly ; " ninety
years ago, my grandfather had the same sort of
trouble with Indians, only sixty miles from New
York, that you have now been suffering six
hundred miles beyond St. Louis." I am often
surprised by the splendid confidence which Ame
ricans express in their power of living down every
thing which they find unpleasant ; but I am not
convinced that this policy of pushing the red man
off this continent is the only method of procedure.
If policy compels this people to make a new
road from St. Louis to San Francisco, policy sug
gests that the road should be made safe. Thus
much will be admitted in Boston as well as in
Denver. But how is a path through the buffalo-
runs to be made safe? By the white men going
out every spring to beg a treaty of peace from
Eornan Nose and Spotted Dog, paying for it with
THE INDIAN QUESTION. 123
baby talk, blankets, fire-arms, powder, and whisky ?
That is the present method of proceeding, and no
one, except the agents, finds it much of a success.
My own impression is, that such a method can
have only one result, to deceive the red man into
an utterly false impression of the white man s
weakness. These Cheyennes actually believe that
they are stronger, braver, and more numerous than
the Americans. If one of these fellows, who may
have been at St. Louis, reports to his tribe that the
white men of the sunrise are many beyond counting,
like the flowers on the prairie, they say that he
has been seized by a bad spirit, and made into a
speaker of lies. Thus, they hold the white men in
contempt.
If these new roads are to be kept open, and
blood is to be spared, this position of the white
and red man should be reversed, and the order
of things in this country made to correspond with
the actual facts. The Indians must be driven into
sueing for treaties of peace. If you admit their
right to the land, buy it from them. When they
come to you for peace, let them have it on gene
rous terms, and then compel them to observe it
with religious faith. A little severity may be
necessary in the outset ; for the Cheyenne has
124 NEW AMERICA.
never yet felt the white man s power; but a
policy, at once clear, clement and firm, would soon
become intelligible to these sons of the prairie. If
the policy of leaving things alone, and letting the
trader, emigrant, and traveller, push their way
through these deserts, is continued, the Americans
will never cease to have trouble on their Indian
frontiers.
125
CHAPTEE XL
CITY OF THE PLAINS.
AT the head of these rolling prairies stands Denver,
City of the Plains.
A few months ago (time runs swiftly in these
western towns ; two years take you back to the
middle ages, and a settler of five years standing is
a patriarch) Denver was a wifeless city.
"I tell you, sir," exclaimed a fellow- lodger in
the wooden shanty known to emigrant and miner as
the Planter s House, " five years ago, when I first
came down from the gulches into Denver, I would
have given a ten-dollar piece to have seen the skirt
of a servant-girl a mile off."
This fellow was sitting at a lady s feet ; a lady
of middle age and fading charms ; to whom, an
hour or so afterwards, I said, " Pray, madam, is the
gentleman who would have given the ten- dollar
126 NEW AMERICA.
piece to see the skirt of a girl s petticoat, your
husband?"
" Why do you ask, sir ? "
Having had no particular reason for my query,
I replied, with a bow, " Well, madam, I was rather
hoping that so good a lover had met with a bright
reward."
" No," she answered with a smile, " I am not his
wife ; though I might be to-morrow if I would.
He has just buried one lady, and he wants to try
on with a second."
On alighting at the Planter s House I had
noticed, swinging near the door, a little sign, on
which these words were painted
" MADAME MORTIMER,
" CLAIRVOYANT PHYSICIAN."
In the shop-windows of Main Street I had seen a
hand-bill, which appeared, from its ragged look to
have done service in some other house, of dirty
habits, announcing that the celebrated Madame
Mortimer had arrived in Denver, and might be
consulted daily (no address being given) on what I
may, perhaps, be allowed to call diseases of the
heart. Her room in the hotel stood next in the
corridor to mine, and as a large panel over her
CITY OF THE PLAIXS. 127
door (door discreetly locked) leading from my room
into hers was open, I could at any time of the last
three or four nights and days have made her per
sonal acquaintance by simply standing on tip-toe
and looking through. Strange to say, I have not
thought of arming myself against the wiles of my
neighbour, even by a cursory inspection of her
camp ; and when I spoke just now to the faded
woman in the parlour, I was utterly unaware that
she was the celebrated Madame Mortimer, who
could tell everybody s fortune show every man
a portrait of his future wife, every woman a picture
of her future husband for the low charge of two
dollars per head !
Poor sorceress ! there is not much poetic charm
in her ; not a tradition of the art, the grace, and
suppleness of spirit which made the genuine witch.
This afternoon, in passing my door in the lobby,
with the adoring lover at her heels, she saw me
looking on the ground for something. It was only
a match, which I had dropped w^hile drawing on
the wall for a light.
" You have lost something ? "
" Madam, it is only a match ; can you make me
a new one ? " said I, looking from her face to that
of the miner.
128 NEW AMERICA.
" We do not make matches in Denver," she
replied, in the saddest spirit.
" Surely they cannot help making them wherever
you are," I said with a bow.
She looked quite blank, though the lover be
gan to chuckle. " How ? " she asked, still simper
ing.
" How ! by gift and grace of heaven, where all
matches are made."
At last she smiled. " Ha ! thank you, sir ; I
like that, and will keep it ; on which she and the
lover slipt away into the parlour, and I lit my
cigar with a fusee. Yet this poor sorceress is a
feature in the City of the Plains ; and I am told
that, while the bloom of her coming was fresh
among these mining men, the curiosity about her
was keen, the flow of dollars into her pocket
steady. But the charm appears to be nearly spent ;
the landlord, properly protected by a wife, and not
being of a romantic turn, is said to be dunning
her for bills ; and she is consequently being driven
by adverse fates to trifle with the affections on her
own account. Her life in this city of rakes and
gamblers must have been a very hard one ; the
nearest town is six hundred miles away ; the
price of a seat in the stage is about two hundred
CITY OF THE PLAINS. 129
dollars. Poor artist in fate the stars appear to
be very hard on her just now !
(Note. On my return from Salt Lake City
to Denver, I found that her little sign had
, been removed from the house-front, and I began
to fear that she had been driven off by ad
verse angels to either Leavenworth or Omaha ;
I but in skipping upstairs to my room I met the
poor creature on the landing-stage, and made her
my politest bow. From a friend in the house I
learned that she had retired from her profession
into domestic life ; but only, I am grieved to add,
with what, in this City of the Plains, is described
as the brevet rank of lady and wife.)
The men of Denver, even those of the higher
! classes, though they have many strong qualities-
bravery, perseverance, generosity, enterprise, endur
ance heroic qualities of the old Norse gods are
also, not unlike the old Norse gods, exceedingly
frail in morals ; and where you see the tone of
society weak, you may always expect to find
aversion to marriage, both as a sentiment and as
i aa institution, somewhat strong. Men who have
lived alone, away from the influence of mothers
and sisters, have generally but a faint belief in
the personal virtue and fidelity of women ; and
VOL. i. K:
130 NEW AMERICA.
apart from this lack of belief in woman, which
ought to be a true religion in the heart of every
man, the desire for a fixed connexion and a settled
home will hardly ever spring up. Men may like
the society of women, and yet not care to encum
ber themselves for life. The worst of men ex
pect, when they marry, to obtain the best of
wives ; but the best of women do not quit New
England and Pennsylvania for Colorado. Hence
it is a saying in Denver, a saying confirmed by
practice, that in these western cities, though few
of the miners have wives, you will not find many
among them who can be truly described as marry
ing men.
On any terms short of marriage these lusty
fellows may be caught by a female snare. They
take very freely to the charms of negresses and
squaws. One of the richest men of this city,
whose name I forbear to give, has just gone up
into the mountains with a couple of Cheyenne
wives. Your young Norse gods are nervously
afraid of entering into a Christian church.
Denver is a city of four thousand people ; with i
ten or twelve streets laid out ; with two hotels,
a bank, a theatre, half-a-dozen chapels, fifty gam
bling-houses, and a hundred grog-shops. As you
CITY OF THE PLAINS. 131
wander about these hot and dirty streets, you seem
to be walking in a city of demons.
Every fifth house appears to be a bar, a whisky-
shop, a lager-beer saloon ; every tenth house ap
pears to be either a brothel or a gaming-house ;
very often both in one. In these horrible dens a
man s life is of no more worth than a dog s. Until
a couple of years ago, when a change for the
better began, it was quite usual for honest folks
to be awakened from their sleep by the noise
, of exploding guns ; and when daylight came
to find that a dead body had been tossed from a
window into the street. No inquiry was ever
made into the cause of death. Decent people
merely said, "Well, there is one sinner less in
i Denver, and may his murderer meet his match
to-morrow ! "
Thanks to William Gilpin, founder of Colorado,
and governor elect, aided by a Vigilance Com
mittee ; thanks also to the wholesome dread which
unruly spirits have conceived of the quick eye and
resolute hand of Sheriff Wilson ; thanks, more
thin all, to the presence of a few American and
English ladies in the streets of Denver, the man
ners of this mining pandemonium have begun to
change. English women who have been here two
K 2
132 NEW AMERICA.
or three years assure me it is greatly altered. Of
course, Gilpin is opposed in theory, at least to
all such jurisdiction as that exercised by the Vigi
lance Committee ; but for the moment, the society
of this city is unsettled, justice is blind and lame,
while violence is alert and strong ; and the Vigi
lance Committee, a secret irresponsible board, acting
above all law, especially in the matter of life and
death, has to keep things going by means of the
revolver and the rope. No one knows by name
the members of this stern tribunal ; every rich,
every active, man in the place is thought to be
of it ; and you may hear, in confidential whispers,
the names of persons who are supposed to be its
leaders, ministers, and executioners. The associa
tion is secret, its agents are many, and nothing, I
am told, escapes the knowledge, hardly anything
escapes the action, of this dread, irresponsible
court. A man disappears from the town : it is
an offence to inquire about him ; you see men
shrug their shoulders ; perhaps you hear the mys
terious words " Gone up." Gone up, in the slang
of Denver, means gone up a tree that is to say,
a cotton-tree by which is meant a particular
cotton-tree growing on the town creek. In plain
English, the man is said to have been hung. This
CITY OF THE PLAINS. 133
secret committee holds its sittings in the night,
and the time for its executions is in the silent hours
between twelve and two, when honest people
should be all asleep in their beds. Sometimes,
,when the store-keepers open their doors in Main
Street, they find a corpse dangling on a branch ;
but commonly the body is cut down before dawn,
removed to a suburb, where it is thrown into a hole
like that of a dead dog. In most cases, the place
of burial is kept a secret from the people, so that
no legal evidence of death can be found.
Swearing, fighting, drinking, like the old Norse
gods, a few thousand men, for the most part wife
less and childless, are engaged, in these upper parts
of the Prairie, in founding an empire. The expres-
sion is William Gilpin s pet phrase ; but the con
gregation of young Xorse gods who drink, and
swear, and fight along these roads, are comically
unaware of the glorious work in which they are
engaged.
"Well, sir," said to me, one day, a burly
stranger, all boots and beard, with a merry mouth
and audacious eye ; " well, what do you think of
1 our Western boys ? "
Eemembering Gilpin, and wishing to be safe
and complimentary, I replied, " You are making
134 NEW AMERICA.
an empire." "Eh?" he asked, not understanding
me, and fancying I was laughing in my sleeve
a liberty which your Western boy dislikes he
brought his hand, instinctively, a little nearer to
his bowie-knife. " You are making an empire ? "
I put in once again, but by way of inquiry this
time, so as to guard against giving offence and
receiving a stab.
"I don t know about that," said he, relaxing
his grim expression, and moving his hand from his
belt : " but I am making money. "
Gilpin, I daresay, would have laughed, and said
it was all the same.
William Gilpin is perhaps the most noticeable
man on the Plains, just as Brigham Young is
the most noticeable in the Salt Lake Valley;
and it would hardly be a figure of speech to say
that his office in Denver (a small room in the
Planter s House, which serves him for a bed
room, for a library, for a hall of audience, for a
workshop, and the upper ten thousand of Colo
rado, generally, for a spittoon,) is the high school
of politics for the gold regions and the moun
tain districts. By birth, Gilpin is a Pennsylva-
nian ; by nature and habit, a state founder. De
scending from one of the best Quaker families oi
CITY OF THE PLAINS. 135
liis state, (his ancestor was the Gilpin who came
out with Perm and Logan,) taught by history
the need of that large and graceful tolerance
of religious sentiment which Penn displayed in
the court of Charles the Second, which the
Friends have put into practice on the Susque-
hannah, and armed by nature with abundant
gifts of genius, patience, insight, eloquence, en
thusiasm, he has played, and he is now play
ing, a singular and dramatic part in this western
country. He describes himself to me as in
sympathy a Quaker-Catholic : that is to say,
as a man who embraces in his single person
the extremes of religious thought the feeling of
personality with the dogma of authority the
laxest forms of liberty with the sternest canons of
order; an unusual blending of sentiments and
sympathies, one not made in a day, not springing
from an individual whimsy, but the result of much
history, of a long family tradition ; and nowhere,
perhaps, to be found in this generation except on
the frontier-land which unites Quaker Pennsyl
vania with Catholic Delaware. Gilpin abounds in
apparent contradictions. A Quaker, he is also a
soldier a West Pointer and of singular distinc
tion in his craft. He bore a prominent part in
136 NEW AMERICA.
the Mexican war ; was the youngest man in the
army who attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel ;
and but for his resignation, on moving out west,
would have been the superior officer of Grant
and Sherman. It is a happy circumstance for
him that no call of duty made it necessary for
him to hold prominent command against any
section of his countrymen during the civil war.
Gilpin s work is in another field, in the Great
West, of which he is the champion and the idol ;
and which he has given his mind to explore, to
advertise, to settle, and to subdue.
Under this man s sway, the city is changed,
and is changing fast ; yet, if I may believe the
witnesses, the advent of a dozen English and
American ladies, who came out with their hus
bands, has done far more for Denver than the
genius and the eloquence of William Gilpin. A
lady is a power in this country. From the day
when a silk dress and a lace shawl were seen in
Main Street, that thoroughfare became passably
clean and quiet ; oaths were less frequently heard ;
knives were less frequently drawn ; pistols were
less frequently fired. None of these things have
ceased ; far, very far, is Denver yet from peace ;
but the young Norse gods have begun to feel
CITY OF THE PLAINS. 137
rather ashamed of swearing in a lady s presence,
and of drawing their knives before a lady s
face.
Slowly, but safely, the improvement has been
brought about. At first, the ladies had a very
bad time, as their idiom runs. They feared to
associate with each other ; every woman suspected
her neighbour of being little better than she should
be. Things are safer now ; and I can testify,
from experience, that Denver has a very charm
ing, though a very limited, society of the better