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28 chapters
PREFACE
PREFACE
These pages describe the adventures of men whom duty or inclination has brought into contact with the Indians of the entire American continent; and, since every day sees the red race diminishing, or abandoning the customs and mode of life once characteristic of it, such adventures must necessarily relate mainly to a bygone generation. To-day the Indians form a bare sixtieth of the American population, a falling off for which the colonist has been responsible both actively and involuntarily. The
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
It has been said by certain historians that, after the American War of Independence, British agents were employed not only to poison the minds of those Siouan and Iroquoian tribes that dwelt on the United States side of the Boundary, but even to keep them supplied with rifles and ammunition. Be that as it may, it is certainly a fact that, in 1793, the Cherokee and Seneca tribes of the Iroquois were not only at war with the Crows, Iowas, etc., of the rival Sioux faction, but were turning their my
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
The South American Indian, as a soldier, is a being about whom we English know very little. Of course we know that, centuries ago, he was a force to be reckoned with locally; we know that when his civilisation was stamped out of him he became a mere savage, ignorant, dirty, brutal and crafty; but it is something of a surprise to us to learn that, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he occasionally shook off much of his savagery, and showed himself the equal of the white soldier i
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
Till the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Guaranian Indians (with the Abipons and other sub-tribes) were in possession of a great part of Southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Eastern Argentina. They were one of the strongest of the Indian peoples, unusually tall and athletic, and, so long as they had reliable leaders, well able to hold their own against the Portuguese. But owing to internal dissensions, intermarriages with Europeans, and more especially to the crushing defeat by the colonists,
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
The Iroquoian branch of the red race is considered by the best authorities to be far superior, mentally and physically, to any other. Before British rule was definitely established in Canada, they were a power (known as “The Six Nations”) duly recognised by English and French alike; and to-day, though less numerous than the Algonquins, they show fewer signs of dying out than the other families. Ontario is, and has ever been, a favourite district of theirs, and it was while living in this provinc
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
A great deal of abuse has been poured, from time to time, on the United States Government for its treatment of the North American Indians. In point of fact, much of this abuse was quite undeserved, for, as the well-known traveller, Captain Basil Hall, R.N., has shown, constant endeavours were made by Congress to render the savages self-supporting; large grants of money and land were given to those who were dispossessed of their forest or prairie homes, and the remainder were allowed and encourag
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
Sir George Head, elder brother of the great South American explorer and Colonial Governor, was a sort of Ralegh on a small scale, inasmuch as he figured in the various rôles of sailor, soldier, traveller, and courtier. The greater part of his time from 1814 to 1830 was spent in and about Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ungava, his military duties at Halifax, as chief of the commissariat, giving him plenty of opportunity for combining pleasure with business in long journeys northward. Late in the autumn
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
Tierra Del Fuego—“The Land of Fire,” as Maghelhaens christened it, from the number of beacons exhibited along its coast—is the home of a family of Indians properly known as Pesherahs. Whence they came no one can tell us, though some think them to be of Chilean origin; but they are—and have been, during the last four centuries—among the most degraded savages that the earth holds. This is, no doubt, partly owing to the barrenness of the archipelago and the almost animal simplicity of their lives w
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
Some allowance ought surely to be made for a man who is condemned to go through life with such a name as Muckkertamesheckkerkerk; and, to do the United States Government justice, the gentleman so styled seems to have been treated with a good deal of patience and lenity. “Black Hawk” (to give him at once the name by which he is better known in American history) was an Indian chief who contrived to be as much a thorn in the flesh of the white rulers of his country as—let us say—some of the Welsh p
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
The history of South America teems with accounts of arduous marches made by European explorers through its forests or deserts, across its mountains or along the banks of its rivers. Some of these are more widely celebrated than others because the results were greater; but many minor expeditions—some unsuccessful, others serving no practical end—are as worthy of remembrance because those who undertook them went coolly, and with their eyes open, into all manner of privations or dangers, for the so
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
In 1839, curious as to the rumours of general anarchy prevailing throughout most of the Central American countries, the United States Government sent a young Foreign Office official—Mr. John Lloyd Stephens—to find out the truth of the matter. At first glance there seems nothing specially alarming or hazardous about such a mission, nor would there be nowadays; but, at the date of which we are speaking, there were no means of rapid communication between the towns, and many of the roads, rivers, an
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
Prince Adalbert of Prussia, a nephew of Friedrich Wilhelm III, is less remembered as a traveller than as a frequent visitor to this country, and one who sought to build up a German navy that should, in time, be an exact copy of our own. Yet, in his younger days, before he took seriously to sailoring, he led a restless, wandering life, and, in the course of about eighteen years, contrived to see almost every country in the world. In 1842, when he was a little over thirty, he landed at Parahiba, i
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
One of America’s great naval commanders—Captain Henry Augustus Wise—made use of the opportunity afforded him by the Mexican War of 1846-7 to collect material for a very engrossing account of some Indians concerning whom little was then known: the coast Comanches of Lower California and Mexico. The Captain—a cousin of Governor Wise of Virginia, and an intimate friend of Rear-Admiral Wilkes—was at that time second lieutenant of the man-of-war Independence , a steamship which was cruising between S
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CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
There is no part of the American continent, save perhaps Guatemala (and, of course, the Arctic Regions), where the Indian race has survived in such power and—relatively—such numbers as in Bolivia. At the last census, the entire population of the republic was two millions, and of that number the whites, blacks, and half-bloods together amounted to less than three hundred thousand. The coast Indians belong mainly to the Colla (more commonly called Aymara) tribe of the Quechuan family, and, unlike
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CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
There is nothing extraordinary to the English reader in a man’s making a sixteen-hundred-mile journey across lonesome prairies and mountain-ranges, where railways are almost unknown and fierce tribes of savages abound, merely for the sake of shooting big game; for if we do not take our pleasures sadly, we at least are proud to devote to our sports as much energy and self-discipline as another nation would bestow on its politics or monetary interests. After a good deal of rambling through the eas
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CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
Till 1851, the peaks and valleys of the Californian Sierra Nevada were known only as a grim, mysterious region that white men, who valued their lives, would do well not to pry into. Parties of diggers travelling westwards had crossed the range in certain places, but even the strongest bands of them carried their lives in their hands in so doing, for the Snake Indians regarded the whole neighbourhood as their special property. All that was definitely known was that, between the hills, lay deep, u
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CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
A somewhat adventurous career fell to the lot of the late Julius Froebel, a nephew of the great Friedrich Froebel of “Kindergarten” fame. Having devoted his early manhood to journalism and politics of a very rabid and revolutionary character, he became the recognised leader of the Dresden democratic party in 1848. After being arrested in Austria and reprieved from a death-sentence, he fled to New York, and was for some time the editor of a German paper published there. Two years later he joined
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CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
From the foregoing chapter it will have been seen that Mexico, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was not a neighbourhood wherein a man might look to find rest and quiet; and it is safe to say that if any one part of it was less to be desired than another as a place of resort, it was the United States frontier. When the war between Mexico and the United States ended in 1847, this frontier had to be overhauled and settled afresh, and within the next two years Presidents Polk and Taylor appo
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CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
The Gran Chaco, or “great hunting-ground” of Western Paraguay, is a land of wooded plains and little patches of primeval forest, about which astonishingly little is known even to-day. White men have never yet explored more than the fringe of it, and it was to an Englishman that the honour fell of being the first European in a period of forty years to venture into the unknown region, as well as of proceeding farther through it than any of his predecessors had done. This was in 1853, when Mansfiel
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CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
It is a fact generally acknowledged throughout the American continent, that the Indian population have never yet failed to take advantage of war, revolution, or other political crises among the white settlers, to make themselves more than usually troublesome. From 1810 to 1867, Mexico went through a troublous period of rebellion and warfare; which is another way of saying that, for fifty-seven years, the Mexican Indians saw themselves at liberty to plunder and slay without the least fear of orga
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CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
We have already spoken, in Chapter VIII, of the Algonquin branch of the red race. This vast family, comprising Ojibewas, Shawnees, Crees, Araphoes, Blackfeet, etc., once owned practically the whole of South Canada, as well as the eastern portion of the States as far down as Kentucky. The territory peculiar to the Ojibewas ran in a rough curve from Saratoga to Winnipeg, and round about the lake district; but as the construction of the railway from New York to Montreal seemed to establish the defi
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CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
While human nature is what it is, the sudden discovery of gold in any country must ever be the signal for all the available flotsam and jetsam and riff-raff of society to flock to that country, in the sorry hope of finding a shorter road to wealth than the old-fashioned one of steady plodding. Before mining concerns were regulated by governments or by syndicates, the edifying spectacle of men wrangling and fighting over a claim or a “find,” like dogs over a bone, might be witnessed at any hour o
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CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
In a former volume [4] the writer has related a hunting adventure which befell the late Lieutenant John Keast Lord; but, as the career of this intrepid traveller was so full of romantic and striking episodes, the reader may be glad to hear a little more about him. After his eventful mule-buying expedition into the States, he returned to British Columbia, where he was acting as naturalist to the Canadian Boundary Commission; but he had no sooner reached New Westminster than he found other instruc
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CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIII
A very voluminous writer, and an explorer of no small repute in Germany—Johann Georg Kohl—has drawn up, from personal experience, as exhaustive an account of the Mohawk section of the Iroquois Indians as Surgeon Bigsby gave of the Huron and Cherokee branches of that once powerful family. Herr Kohl spent the years 1859-60 in travelling about the north-eastern portion of the United States and Southern Canada, and thus was able to gather some interesting and valuable information concerning the trib
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CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXIV
The Athabaskan or Athapascan family of Indians may be found anywhere between Alaska and Manitoba, and some of the more unsettled or enterprising tribes have even wandered as far as the Mexican boundary. In Southern and Western Canada they are principally represented by the Kuchins and Chippewyans, hardy hunters, canoemen, and fighters, many of whom are to this day very unsophisticated in their views and habits. In the ’sixties, Canada still knew little about railways; lakes and rivers were the r
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CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXV
Taken as a whole the Indians of Uruguay are—and have ever been—a brave but peace-loving people, engaged principally in sheep and cattle-rearing. No doubt the mildness of their character and pursuits is largely due to considerations which are purely geographical; for the sea and the Uruguay River together make the country almost an island, to which the Argentine and Brazilian Indians would never venture to penetrate. Further, there are—apart from the native cattle—no large or fierce wild animals.
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CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVI
When poor Charles Mansfield made his journey up to the unknown Chaco, he passed, on his way, a district equally unknown at that time: the valley of the Salado River, which remained unexplored till 1863, when Hutchinson, the African traveller, traced the river to its source. Thomas Hutchinson, F.R.S. , had been appointed British Consul at Rosario in 1862, and, before leaving England, had been instructed by the Foreign Secretary (Earl Russell) to take the first opportunity of exploring the Salado
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CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVII
South America is the land of revolution and civil war, and Venezuela has not been far behind the other republics in its indulgence in such pastimes. In 1864, five out of seven provinces that had been enrolled the previous year seceded, and the Commander-in-Chief, General Paez, was kept busy between subduing seceders and warding off Colombian invasion. It is common enough to find an English gentleman filling any imaginable capacity, from highest to lowest, in America; but one is scarcely prepared
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