Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States
IT is well for the science of history that it ceased to be the mere picturing of fragments of yesterday, and rose to contemplate the phenomena and laws of all human progress, while primitive man still existed upon the earth.
A knowledge of the departure man has made from the archaic to the present time, a definite realization of what human culture is and is to be, require two points of comparison: the story of mediæval or even classic living and thinking, so fascinatingly revealed to ns by modern historians, fails to push far enough back front the motives of the nineteenth century to furnish those broad, fundamental differences from which progressional laws may be most clearly seen. Primitive man, or man as remote as we may find him, furnishes us the desired datum point to bring into contrast with to-day.
Providentially for future knowledge, the vital need of this comparison of the beginnings of man with his after development has become fully apparent, and everywhere students are putting our ancestor on the witness stand.
They creep into his caves and lairs, and come out to the light, of day laden with his flints, the débris of his primeval entrées and rôtis, the club which served for the chase or for defense, and sometimes settled inevitable domestic incompatibilities with the partner of his prehistoric joys. No restful grave, fathoms under Danish peat, is secure; no damp sub-lacustrine Swiss relic safe. Whenever and wherever an extinct race yields up, be it ever so faint a clew, instantly the sleep of ages is broken, and science never stays until it has collected the uttermost material and had its wrangle over the cranium of the long buried brother. No mystic island of the Columbia so loved for the centuries’ sleep of its Indian dead, but an enterprising professor steps ashore from his canoe and twists off a complete suite of the venerated skulls.
Man and his belongings are inexorably dug from the earth wherever accident or pious care has consigned him, measured, classified, figured, and fitted into his proper nook in the great mosaic which God has designed and science is slowly, atom by atom, filling up —• the mosaic of the origin and progress of man.
Invaluable and interesting as are the already gathered facts which enable us partially to share the life of extinct human families, to know their habits and trace their rude half-begiuning of art, there is of necessity a limit all too readily reached in our realization of the character of the man himself. Beyond the baldest outlines of his physical life, howsoever we plead or question, extinct man is forever silent.
Science therefore turns with a keener interest, a more fascinated eagerness, to study living man in all the infinite gradation of his wild and aboriginal conditions.
There one may come into sympathetic understanding of primitive culture, enter tribal and family life, feel the sorrow and the dark struggle of the savage’s soul toward God, or share the picturesque hours of his joy.
Every resource, every phase of his battle with nature, each custom and habit, primitive instincts, art, love, ethics; all the round of savage being lies open to the sympathetic student, whose good fellowship may unlock all those reserves which secretive savage nature closes against scientific curiosity.
Each research into the origin or culture of living savages is a service to knowledge which cannot long be made; for everywhere the vaporous vitality of primitive man melts and vanishes before the light of modern progress. However complex and subtle the cause of this strange, swift extinction, however guilty enlightened society may be, the fact remains. Civilization, flashing around the world like the advancing sun, discovers a savage tribe, only that we may see it stagger under the blinding focus, fall to the earth, and perish.
Mr. Tylor, in his excellent Primitive Culture, and doubtless in the forthcoming Flint Period, has rendered signal service in this field of research; and now, with a fullness of conception and admirable breadth of method only to be realized by true students of his book, Mr. Hubert H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, has completed a study of the native races of western North America. It is fifteen years since Mr. Bancroft conceived a plan of this great work and began the exhaustive collection of his literary materials. He visited and ransacked Europe, and was able to bring together a library of sixteen thousand volumes, of which many are in original manuscripts. Written in a half dozen languages, good and bad material woven intricately together, and the whole almost unindexed, he had first out of this chaos of authorities to create an order. Organizing a corps of expert assistants, he made a complete index of the library as if it were one book. With this elaborate, this indispensable key, he is now able to enter the maze of material and assemble an encyclopedic collection of facts upon any subject in the natural and human history of the Pacific States. Having accomplished with enormous labor this unique index, the first task Mr. Bancroft has set for himself is a complete survey of the Native Races of the Pacific States. The first volume of this remarkable work is just given to the public, and the other four, now passing through the press, will all be issued within 1875. The subjects of these volumes are as follows: —
Vol. I. Wild Tribes; their Manners and Customs.
Vol. II. Civilized Nations of Mexico and Central America.
Vol. III. Mythology and Languages of both Savage and Civilized Nations.
Vol. IV. Antiquities and Architectural Remains.
Vol. V. Aboriginal History and Migrations. Index to Entire Work.
We propose to examine in this article the first of the series.
Twelve hundred authorities are used in the preparation of this book; their various works and the edition examined are given in an alphabetical list at the beginning.
In his preface Mr. Bancroft says:
“ To the immense territory bordering on the western ocean from Alaska to Darien. and including the whole of Mexico and Central America, I give arbitrarily, for the want of a better, the name Pacific States. ... A word as to the nations of which this work is a description.
. . . Aboriginally, for a savage wilderness, there was here a dense population; particularly south of the thirtieth parallel and along the border of the ocean north of that line.
“ Before the advent of Europeans this domain counted its aborigines by millions, ranked among its people every phase of primitive humanity, from the reptile-eating cave-dweller of the Great Basin to the Aztec and Maya-Queehé civilization of the Southern table-land; a civilization, if we may credit Dr. Draper, I that might have instructed Europe,’ a culture wantonly crushed by Spain, who therein ‘ destroyed races more civilized than herself.’
“ Differing among themselves in minor particulars only, and bearing a general resemblance to the nations of eastern and southern America; differing again, the whole, in character and cast of feature from every other people of the world, we have here presented hundreds of nations and tongues, with thousands of beliefs and customs, wonderfully dissimilar for so segregated a humanity, yet wonderfully alike for the inhabitants of a land that comprises within its limits nearly every phase of climate on the globe.
“ At the touch of European civilization, whether Latin or Teutonic, these nations vanished, and their unwritten history, reaching back for thousands of ages, ended. . . . Their strange destiny fulfilled, in an instant they disappear, and all we have of them beside their material relics is the glance caught in their hasty flight, which gives us a few customs and traditions, and a little mythological history. To gather and arrange in systematic, compact form all that is known of these people, to rescue some facts, perhaps, from oblivion, to bring others from inaccessible nooks, to render all available to science and to the general reader, is the object of this work.”
For the purposes of description, the tribes inhabiting this long strip bordering on the Pacific are divided into six groups: I. Hyperboreans; II. Columbians; III. Californians; IV. New Mexicans; V. Wild Tribes of Mexico; VI. Wild Tribes of Central America.
“ It is my purpose,” writes Mr. Bancroft, “ without any attempt at ethnological classification or further comment concerning races and stocks, plainly to portray such customs and characteristics as were peculiar to each people at the time of its first intercourse with European strangers.”
I. Hyperboreans. The first or Arctic group is divided into a chain of four littoral tribes: the Eskimo, who occupy the Arctic shore of North America from the mouth of the Mackenzie River to Kotzebue Sound; the Koniagas, who live from Kotzebue Sound across the Kaviak Peninsula, border on Behring Sea from Norton Sound southward, and stretch over the Alaskan Peninsula and Koniagan Islands to the mouth of the Atna River; the Aleuts, or people of the Aleutian Archipelago; the Thlinkeets, who follow the coast from the Atna to the Nass River. These four tribes, all often classed as Eskimo, are nearly related to each other.
Inland from this littoral chain of tribes, whose habitation rarely extends more than a hundred miles from the seashore, throughout the whole interior are scattered divisions of the great Tinneh or Athabascan Indian tribe. The picture drawn of these two families by Mr. Bancroft is full and interesting. It is beyond imagination to figure the conditions for a narrower or more gloomy life than tile northmen must lead. A long, blazing day, under whose constant light and heat sudden Arctic vegetation crowds into being, an abundant animal life on sea and land, a season of gluttonous fullness, a harvest of “winter supplies; then slowly gathers that mysterious darkness of northern night, when the earth seems to radiate her last wave of warmth into a vault of polar stars, when the very winds are frozen, and the motionless air is dumb with cold; a long reign of silent darkness relieved now and then by the icy flash of auroras. This shore-inhabiting Eskimo tribe is held by many authorities to be the only American people directly connected with the races of another continent. Behring’s Strait offers to the inhabitants of both the Asiatic and the American coasts an easy canoe transit, nor can certain evident ethnological affinities be denied.
This strange northern man, whose cheerless life seems clinging to forbidding nature against such awful odds, is he not oppressed, saddened, and forever cast down by the bitter rigors of his environment? Can be have an instant’s thought beyond food and warmth? is it not all with him battle and sleep? Behold him, on the contrary, a sleek, fat, oleaginous fellow, with plenty of good nature, developing, beside the ordinary human courage and ingenuity in capturing his daily food, a few customs we are wont to deem the privileges of civilization. Eskimo government is patriarchal, and men become venerated as they distinguish themselves in bold pursuit of the whale. Blubber, as in New Bedford, lubricates the avenue to greatness.
To religion and marriage we may ever turn as to final expressions of the inner nature of man. His attitude toward the God whose unseen presence he can but feel, and his treatment of the mother of his children, at once fix his place in the scale of manhood and nobility.
The Eskimo and their littoral brothers to the south peer through their enveloping atmosphere of fatty content only a little way into the infinite and unknown. The southern members of this shorefamily delegate their moral and medical responsibility to a priestly personage called the Shamán, whose privileges and rites are revolting beyond description, The aged are neglected; the dead put in a box raised upon posts, howled and danced around, and abandoned forever. The wife is practically a slave, although treated with adipose good nature. Actual slavery, of both males and females, with its ordinary cruelties mitigated by the race’s sluggish mildness, everywhere exists. Skill and patience in fashioning their boats, sleds, and implements; boldness and power in the chase, are everywhere shown by this singular tribe, but their life centres in the love of feasting and repose.
Of the Tinneh, the great division of Indians lying within this shore chain of tribes, Mr. Bancroft gives an equally full and valuable account. Food and raiment are chiefly derived from game, among which the reindeer furnishes the most important supply. Widely scattered and surrounded by extremely varied conditions as the Tinneh are, it is to be expected that great diversity of social and personal habits should obtain; accordingly we find the many subdivisions of the main tribe developing interesting local peculiarities. In general, religion rises no higher than dances and incantations addressed to certain birds and beasts. The dead are burned with weird ceremony, and here for the first time we find a reminder of East Indian suttee, in the forced grief of widows upon the cremation of their husbands. The brief account given by Mr. Bancroft illustrating this shocking barbarity we quote: —
“ When the funeral pile of a Tacully is fired, the wives of the deceased, if there are more than one, are placed at the head and foot of the body. Their du y there is to publicly demonstrate their affection for the departed; which they do by resting their heads upon the dead bosom, by striking in frenzied love the body, nursing and battling the fire meanwhile. And there they remain until the hair is burned from their heads, until, suffocated and almost senseless, they stagger off to a little distance, then recovering, attack the corpse with new vigor, striking it first with one hand then with the other, until the form of the beloved is reduced to ashes. Finally these ashes are gathered up, placed in sacks, and distributed, one sack to each wife, whose duty it is to carry upon her person the remains of the departed for the space of two years.
“ During this period of mourning the women are clothed in rags, kept in a kind of slavery, and not allowed to marry. Not unfrequently these poor creatures avoid their term of servitude by suicide. At the expiration of the time a feast is given them, and they are again free.”
Among the Chipewyans, who in many respects represent the lowest members of the Tinneh tribe, the dead are left exposed where life forsakes them, without respect, care, or ceremonial. The Kenai, at the end of a year after cremation, hold a feast in honor of the memory of the deceased, after which his name may never be mentioned. Oblivion, rather than affectionate memory, seems to be the desire of the Tinneh, and this more than all else gives a clew to the indefiniteness of their conception of a future state.
Man rules supreme, woman is the obedient creature of his wants; yet here and there are to be found instances of respect, even tenderness, toward the gentler sex, and once over the Nehannes, a warlike and turbulent tribe, there ruled a woman of whom Mr. Bancroft writes: " Her influence over her fiery
people, it is said, was perfect; while her warriors, the terror and scourge of the surrounding country, quailed before her eye. Her word was law, and was obeyed with marvelous alacrity. Through her influence the women of her tribe were greatly raised.” It would be interesting to know if this queen were comely; whether she reigned as a Cleopatra or a Boadicea,
Courtship, involving a higher idea than abduction or barter, here and there makes its appearance. Among the arts the rudiments of pottery are practiced.
The Hyperboreans are numerous, because of a profuse natural food and clothing supply. The littoral family, steeped in fat, show an absence of warlike or even personally quarrelsome disposition. Religion and the family life are unspeakably low. Cunning, ingenuity, and the hungry boldness of the whale captor are their chief redeeming qualities. Hospitality is indeed a general virtue, tied the Eskimo one and all possess a love of evening parties.
To the many who in civilized society consider a ball not only an ennui but a barbarity, it will communicate a thrill of satisfaction to find its exact counterpart in Arctic savage life. Each village has a casino, at once bath-house, rendezvous, and ball-room. Here, by the smoky light of train-oil lamps, gather the brave and the fair, decked in their best. Madame has her raven locks reinforced by false hair, the whole soaked in fat, and her complexion made hideous by cosmetics. Indigenous delicacies, such as fish fat and berries, are served, and the guests dance like maniacs to execrable music until improper hours. Civilization has substituted better theatrical properties, but the motive is painfully identical.
II. The Columbians. Following the southerly sweep of the Pacific coast from latitude 55° to the parallel of 43°, or nearly to the present northern boundary of California, the Columbians occupy a zone from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles wide, with an extreme length of quite a thousand miles.
South of the Fraser River this territory widens inland almost as far east as the head waters of the Missouri. Nature has here relaxed her boreal austerity. The great Japan current, or Pacific Gulf Stream, of tropically warmed water impinges along nearly this entire coast, and rolls over the land its aerial companion-river of mild, fog-laden ah. Extremes of cold or dryness are hence unknown, and under these constantly tempered conditions a superb and richly varied forest is sustained. Deep fjords indent the coast, in whose still, seagreen depths are mirrored towering crag, dark forest, and the flashing snow-crest of far granite peaks. Southward opens Puget Sound, margined with woodland, gemmed with green islands, and watched over by the lofty white cones of Baker and Tachoma; and still southward flows the Columbia, interesting alike to savage and civilized man. Thence to their lower boundary the Columbians possessed fair Oregon, with its wealth of fertile valley, oak-clad hill, and piny mountain. Gayety and color have become everywhere woven into the landscape. Climate is friend, not foe. Food is still plentiful and far more varied than in the chilly north. Man expands, his new condition begetting new faculties; freed from blubber and zero, his intelligence, as it were, thaws out, and more elevated feelings animate his career.
According to Mr. Bancroft’s classification the division of Haidahs occupy Queen Charlotte’s Island and the adjacent coast from 55° to 52° latitude; the Nootkas inhabit Vancouver’s Island and the labyrinth of islets from the 5 2d parallel to the 49th; thence to the southern boundary of the division extend the Chinooks, while east of the Cascade Mountains, on the elevated cool plateau of the upper branches of the Columbia, dwell a series of families grouped under the name of Interior Tribes.
Among the Haidahs bordering on the northern division is still to be seen the revolting use of labrets, nose ornaments, and tattooing, and here also the whale is an object of pursuit; but otherwise a marked improvement has taken place. Dwellings, either for single families or built upon a communistic plan for the accommodation of several hundred souls, show improved construction, and are more or less artistically decorated with carved and painted figures of grotesque men and animals. Religious buildings, with elaborately carved, inlaid, and painted posts forty or fifty feet high, are described. Treaties solemnized with pomp and ceremonial are made between neighboring clans. Rank, nominally hereditary and usually derived from the mother’s side, is in truth only held by men of eminence and individual power, the imbecile or inactive noble lapsing into peasantry. They manage this more craftily in Europe. Large works of general value are accomplished by voluntarily associated labor. Marriage has often a ceremonial, and although the relation still possesses the elements of brutal tyranny on the one side and devoted submission on the other, the wife is usually shielded from the worst features of Eskimo dishonor. Death is no longer forgotten with vacant stupidity till the hour of its coming, but forms a subject of earnest contemplation and gives birth to a belief in infernal spirits, who, strange to say, are not feared for the after-life, but for their power to harm the living. The dead are reverently cared for, either laid in state in a canoe and lashed to the overhanging branches of a tree above a river, or burned.
Among the Nootkas and Chinooks still more progress may be noted. The idea of clan is developed and symbolized by the adoption of a crest, which is carved or painted upon all belongings, from canoe to coffin; moreover it is strictly forbidden for two persons bearing the same crest to marry. Such startling examples of highly developed intelligence, of enlightened forethought, are constantly discovering themselves to us in savage life, springing up as a sporadic growth, one plant at a time, as if latent in the very substrata of humanity were the seeds of all good, lacking only the coming of a moral summer to flower and bear fruit. Totems, dreams, endless superstition and myth-making, sorceries and incantations darken and confuse the poor soul, that straining, and striving into the unknown finds itself met only by silence and darkness. To its wildest and loudest questionings comes only the spiritual echo whispering vaguely back again the problems of its own asking. Among the Chinooks the most noteworthy custom is the battening of the head, a practice having its origin about the mouth of the Columbia River, and spreading more or less throughout the whole Columbia division. The compression of cranium, although grossly disfiguring, exercises no appreciable effect upon the mental faculties; no characteristic differences being observable between the flattened and the normal individuals.
The coast Columbians are of rather full, rounded physique, but of middle height. In their arts, all centring as they do upon physical wants, are observed certain elements of novelty, as the invention of a rude loom for weaving of blankets, and a basket-work of exquisite finish, artistically ornamented with geometrical patterns in color. Music has progressed from a monotonous chant to rather agreeable choral melodies.
East of the Cascades, the Interior Tribes are a taller, hardier, more elevated type. Possessed of horses and skin - lodges, they are nomadic, and of necessity warlike. Here vengeance sometimes rises into justice. Marriage, ordinarily a mere barter, is among the Flatheads a grave ceremony. The domestic life throughout all these Interior Tribes is often rendered admirable by scrupulous cleanliness and a sacred regard for the marriage-vow. Even in divorce, their superiority is shown in the equitable division of family property and the cession of the children to their mother.
The Columbians, then, have carried all their arts and ornaments higher than their northern neighbors; introduced the loom; invented cleanliness; made the pipe a symbol of peace and deliberation; expressed the idea of clan by a crest, and placed woman in a neat dwellmg, guarding her against insult and wrong: yet, with all these phenomena of uplift and development, all this enlivening promise, the savages have actually stooped to the custom of afterdinner speeches. We have no right to criticise or blame them for the brutal practice of skull-flattening, so long as the ladies of our better civilization persist in deforming and lacing a far more vital part of the body.
III. Californians. Next in order of description Mr. Bancroft treats of the Californians, comprising, besides actual dwellers within the political outlines of that State, the Shoshone family, who spread over a vast portion of the Great Basin, and push eastward for a thousand miles.
In California proper are found the finest physical conditions united in one spot upon the continent, unless, indeed, we must except the Mexican plateau.
Nature, in the scale and character of her manifestations, here culminates. The perfection of climate, together with a prodigal supply for all bodily wants, seems to prepare the way for human elevation. Here, one would say, with an animating air, with ample leisure, with freedom from hunger and cold, the Indian must expand, must burst the fetters of savagery. On the contrary, we find him sunk deeper in torpor and an-, dualism than his northern neighbors. The Californian is perhaps most remarkable for his lacks, and the pointed manner in which his whole culture deviates from the general law that a singularly favorable habitat will produce correspondingly fine human development. Mr. Bancroft clearly points out that ease of life and absence of enforced struggle are not enough to account for the lowered type we find. We incline to believe that in recent local geology may possibly be traced the causes of this singular interruption of a regular progress of improvement traced from the Arctic Sea to Mexico. Since the Indian occupation of California (as Whitney hag proved by the discovery of man and his implements in the pliocene beds), volcanoes, glaciers, and floods have wrought a far more general and terrible work than has been traced to the north or south. Development might well be arrested, if not destroyed, by such Impressive catastrophes. It is enough to say of the Californians that they are repetitions of tlie Columbians, sunken a little lower in selfishness, and lacking those few culminating points of true character which, like snow-peaks, reflect a higher light and give distinction to the moral topography.
Peculiarities of savage law often obtain in single localities only, like the Modoc statute that a mail may kill his mother-in-law with impunity. Elsewhere, the woman who has reared and nurtured the queen of a man’s affections is only punished for it by being made to serve as the target for sneer and gibe in polite fiction.
Among the Californians are seen a characteristic Indian love of elaborate finery, delicate art in ornamenting, the old fondness for annual feasting and dancing sprees, with riotous excesses, melodramatic oratory, and pantomime; but in no one stroke of experimental intelligence, no single effort of moral perception, do they betray the presence of that divine unrest which is the motor of all true progress. Polygamy, slavery, and a burden of shadowy myth-horn fears rob daily life of all dignity. With some the belief in a material heaven is firmly fixed; and an idea of vicarious propitiation finds expression in the penances of the medicine-man. This personage still unites the offices of physician and high-priest, belief in whose pretensions varies in different places, some tribes retaining full faith in a divine responsibility behind his tricks and incantations, while others, like the Mojaves pf the Colorado, sharpen professional wits by decreeing that when a medicine-man makes his tenth mistake in prognosis, off goes his head.
Not many years since, Eagle-Sky, a venerable Mojave doctor, having made, during a long professional career, his nine allowable mistakes, became deeply concerned when a virulent form of measles fell like a scourge upon his tribe. “With what Matthew Arnold humorously calls a “blood-thirsty clinging to life,” this crafty practitioner examined each patient whom he was called to attend, and invariably informed the family that the sick man could not possibly recover. Obedience from the patient is rigid etiquette on the Colorado as well as elsewhere: when the measles reached a critical point, Eagle-Sky ordered his patients to plunge into the chilly river; his dark prognosis invariably Came true, and the sly fellow avoided his fatal tenth mistake.
Thus brutal savages limit the man whom they intrust with their dearest possession, life, to but ten fatal examples of malpractice. What if the actual knowledge of our civilized doctors were thus put to the crucial test? Charity distinguishes enlightened peoples, and we of the higher culture, while permitting the barbaric mystery to enshroud our medicine - men, concede them the high privilege of blundering to their hearts’ content.
IV. The New Mexicans. Here Mr. Bancroft has pictured a region and unveiled a phase of savage life of peculiar interest. A desert dotted now and then with natural or artificial oases, its dreary monotony interrupted (wherever the topography lifts itself into the higher strata of moist air) by stretches of forestclad upland; a climate always dry, yet subject to annual extremes of intense heat and cold.
Valleys, canons, and lacustrine basins are either dry as tinder, or possess in their few springs and shrunken rivulets the mere echoing reminder of a powerful and abundant water supply. You ride down great canon beds once brimming with affluent rivers, and only the arid sand whispers under the footsteps of your thirsty horse.
Strange, garish - colored rock walls, like remnants of a huge architecture, rise above the plateaux, and afar are summits with perpetual snow. Excepting the healthful purity of air, all conditions would seem combined to repress, even to extinguish, human advancement; yet here, in this forbidding desert, are found rudiments of a civilization, a true, creative start into higher life.
Here occur two totally distinct savage types: a brave, pitiless, carnivorous family of nomadic tribes, embracing the Apaches, Navajoes, and Comanches; and the mild, tranquil group of agricultural people called Pueblo Indians from their remarkably constructed pueblos or towns. In their arts, beliefs, and whole mode of living the latter are notably superior to their holder enemies. The nomads have but one passion in life — assassination; one bequest from father to son — the tiger love of human blood; one mental activity — treachery. As observed by early Spanish students, the Apache differs in no wise from the astonishing devil whose lodge is to - day decked with the bloody scalps of last year’s pioneers. He is the same whom we have lately seen in the person of Cachise, demurely drawing down the grin of hell into the oily counterfeit of a brotherly smile, and “ swapping ” platitudes with a certain child-like general, while his picked warriors only a few miles away danced a veritable can-can d’enfer around a writhing soldier whom they grilled for pastime. Strategy, which, shorn of its martial halo, is only a craftily acted lie, seems their dominant faculty, as murder is the single idée fixe. The Comanches, it is true, hear a reputation for superiority, which only means that their cruel energies are not so brilliantly developed as the Apaches’, and that a certain Arab dignity and dim idea of hospitality gloss over their brutishness, just as beaded and brilliantly-wrought garments cover the dirty hide.
Among the mild and bucolic Pueblos may he observed certain civilized arts which have grown up under the fostering influence of clean, comfortable, fixed abodes, and even such graces of character as are caused to bud and bloom by that humble but irresistible civilizer, a pumpkin factor in diet. The pueblos or communistic buildings of residence are large structures counting as many as seven stories of firmly mortared stone, built by the joint labor of men and women, and so planned in terraces, so flanked by mural defenses, as to give each family a sunny outlook, combining at the same time the advantages of a stronghold impregnable against their perpetual enemies, the Navajoes.
Living in unique structures, with flocks and gardens outspread beneath their watch, with an intelligent system of artificial irrigation, with a providence in laying up annual supplies, these Indians have found time to reach considerable proficiency in ornamented pottery and in the weaving of tasteful fabrics.
The estufa, or sweat - house, which exists as a sacred or medical institute everywhere down from the Arctic regions, here plays the double rôle of Russian hath and temple, uniting the ideas of cleanliness and godliness. Among a people who wash and pray we need not he surprised to find the sentiment of love rising higher than with previously noted tribes. Here, too, for the first time, we observe a solicitous care for the morals of the young and habits of family decorum. But, as if tacitly admitting man’s fallibility and his inexorable need of a safety-valve spree, an annual festival is given, in which religion is dragged down to riot with baser emotions, as sometimes occurs in civilization.
Among tlie amenities of Pueblo life is this: a maiden falling a victim to the tender passion has here the coveted privilege of making the premier pas ; her father negotiates with the parents of the unconscious youth, and often leads a coy bridegroom to his expectant daughter’s borne.
So, with tlh pumpkin diet, with fields and flocks, it seems in keeping to find a love-sick swain serenading with a reed flute. With characteristic savage patience he toots forth his love for hours and even days, till the dear girl is glad to buy a little silence at the price of marriage.
The Indians of the peninsula of Lower California are degraded below all other tribes, presenting hut the one redeeming trait of love of country.
Comprised within this subdivision are also the tribes of extreme Northern Mexico.
V. Wild Tribes of Mexico. Within limits marked by the twenty-third and eighteenth parallels of latitude and the two oceans, Mr. Bancroft groups and describes aboriginal Mexicans who at the time of the Spanish Conquest were still savages, who, if possessing any affinity with the civilized Aztec, showed only traces of that powerful reflex action which higher advancement always sheds around it.
The configuration of the country produces three types of climatic region: a highland, or tierra fria ; those lower mountain slopes and sierras embraced under the term tierra templada; and hot lowlands bordering the two oceans, known as tierras calientes. Humanity shows this diversity; warlike, cruel, active Indians occupying the tierra fria, and a race of gentler, more sensuous, and gayer people living under tropical palms in the lowlands. The arts and manufactures are far higher than among northern nations, great skill being shown in modeling clay figures and in the ornamentation of pottery, textile fabrics, and gold jewelry. Weaving and embroidery especially are carried to artistic excellence, and the use of colors in dress is effected with positive success. It is interesting to find coast tribes obtaining from a murex the same royal purple dye for which Tyre was once famous.
Superstitions are more tinged with terror: black spirits, battle gods, and evil genii crowd upon the savage imagination and lend a sombre view to life, beside stimulating excess of intemperance and other vices. Mysteries in divine providence, all the tangled web of trials and disappointments, all the thousand cruel blows of fate, — of which human life everywhere, in all time, in whatever status, is so largely made up, — seem to the Mexican savage the work of malignant spirits. Death is met bravely, as it is by all Indians, and the departed is speeded on his journey by covering the grave with garlands of fragrant flowers and repasts of savory viands. Not a few such suggestions of Mongolian customs are observed.
In sickness certain tribes consult a sacred crystal, whose clear light is supposed to influence the patient for good.
The Mexican gave his whole mind to the subject of drinks, and certainly succeeded in inventing many delicious compounds. Cookery also rose into the realm of a domestic art, where it surely belongs. Omelets, delicate maize tortillas, cups of refined chocolate, and ragout of game piquantly enlivened with fragrant pepper, were, strange to say, not enough to elevate the lives of this benighted people. Perhaps they even smothered the higher sensibilities with such demoralizing delicacies as sauce a la chile. In New England, where the noblest average type of morality obtains. there is nothing in the prevalent cuisine to allure the Pilgrim mind from its most ascetic moods.
VI. Wild Tribes of Central America. The Mexican plateaux and sierras narrow and concentrate to the southward into a single water divide, which is prolonged throughout all Central America, following closely the Pacific coast and leaving a broad area of tropical lowlands between the Cordilleras and the Atlantic. Mountain or templada country occupies less and less area toward the Isthmus. Warm savannas alternate with luxuriant forests. Vegetation is at once varied and magnificent. Splendid flowers wreathe and drape the trees with veils of viny growth ; enormous leafage lines the river banks; blazing orchids, stately palms, bend toward the sea. In this primeval forest, tropic night broods with a deep, impressive silence; the heavy air soothes brain and nerve, and sleep is the deepest, the most dreamless oblivion. Here, when the Indian lies down at night, it is to rest as the northman with his high nerve tension never can. Every atom sleeps, every fibre relaxes; each morning finds him full of verve, yet calm and reposeful as the Sphynx. Men and women are often models of symmetry and grace. Whoever has strolled at dusk where palm groves lean to the shore, and watched the Indian women sauntering in the cool of evening with a gait in which a ripple of grace undulates — whoever has seen their soft, dark eyes, and read the expression of tenderness and pathos which is habitual on their faces, can but feel that here simple nature has done all she can for woman. Mr. Bancroft describes a marvelous richness of customs, an all but endless variety of social phenomena.
The Central Americans are supplied with ample food, the minimum of labor providing for all their wants. The arts, especially pottery, are carried to a high finish; decorated vases and jars, rivaling the finer Etruscan, are frequently met. The hammock, the palm-leaf mats woven in elegant p it terns, carved calabashes, rich and tasteful use of colors, mark a certainty and spontaneity of taste which belong, we believe, to people who have not yet wholly emerged from primitive culture. A Greek temple and a Guatemalan vase are creations. A modern picture, however fine, is only a more or less successful plagiarism from nature.
Lyric poetry, founded on heroic deed or mythical idea, is a phase of the artistic impulse in the Central Americans; and a sort of archaic opera bouffe, satirical of governments and leaders, exists in spite of the general veneration for constituted authority. Complicated wooden musical instruments are used for accompaniments, with fair artistic effect, during their character dances and choruses.
Incense of fragrant gums is burned in solemn conclave of warriors before setting out for battle. Caste and hereditary rights find place among nearly all tribes. Man here is not always lord of the family life, whole tribes and clans being subject to petticoat rule. Polygamy and slavery are the darkest phases of society, as myth-terror is of individual life. The old merging of the offices of priest and doctor is observed, with the added barbarity of enforcing celibacy upon the priesthood. Infallibility seems not to have been promulgated here. Head-fiattoning is effected as among the Columbians. Gold jewelry, with pearls and gems, is highly valued, and from prehistoric times has been prominent in their arts.
With all the marvels of diversity Mr. Bancroft has traced from Eskimo to Isthmian, with all the shadings of development, all the sporadic and isolated upspringings of progressive impulse, there is a marked community of general type. An Indian, whether he sits down to make his breakfast of a banana or of a whale, is still never more nor less than in Indian.
In the most vague and sketchy manner, we have followed Mr. Bancroft’s fertile research into these interesting tribes, the narrow limits of a review absolutely preventing more than a hint at the wealth of material he has brought together. Scholarly in method, sagacious in the balancing of oft-conflicting authorities, conscientious in keeping the data of science pure and unvitiated by the special pleading of theorists, he has achieved a conspicuous success.
In this, the least fascinating of the series, students will find a museum of human facts, all ticketed and classified upon a geographical basis. In the following volumes, as we know from advance sheets, may be studied for the first time with full material the most absorbingly interesting problems of primitive America.
Beside a certain scientific generalship in the command of his army of authors, and beyond all the patient labor in marshaling details, Mr. Bancroft shows also a sound, healthy literary judgment. Possessing a cool, clear style, he adapts it with excellent taste to the uses of a book for the most part simple, direct, and low-toned; there are, however, passages of singularly happy description, where a few vivid touches, made with the decision of a master’s sketch, bring out the aspect of a region in admirable distinctness. Excellent also are the rare passages where he cannot help a philosophic reflection, or prevent a ray of thoughtful wit.
Perhaps a true literary workman is known as well by his foot-notes as by the page; a frankness in citing arguments or opinions contrary to his own conclusion, and a well-considered abundance of data for the special uses of certain classes of scholars, are among the good qualities of the ample notes of this work.
Whether we judge his work by comparison with the finest investigation into aboriginal culture, or from the point of view of personal acquaintance with Indians, or whether we estimate it by the constantly expressed wants of modern scholars, Mr. Bancroft has assuredly compelled our respect and even out gratitude.
It is not a little noteworthy that so monumental a literary labor should have been accomplished in a new country, far from all scholastic atmosphere, remote from the daily association with fellowinvestigators, by the perseverance of one courageous student.
Clarence King