The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
But if courage intrinsically consists in the defiance of danger and
pain, the life of the Indian is a continual exhibition of it. He lives
in a state of perpetual hostility and risk. Peril and adventure
are congenial to his nature, or rather seem necessary to arouse his
faculties and to give an interest to his existence. Surrounded by
hostile tribes, whose mode of warfare is by ambush and surprisal, he is
always prepared for fight and lives with his weapons in his hands. As
the ship careers in fearful singleness through the solitudes of ocean,
as the bird mingles among clouds and storms, and wings its way, a
mere speck, across the pathless fields of air, so the Indian holds his
course, silent, solitary, but undaunted, through the boundless bosom of
the wilderness. His expeditions may vie in distance and danger with
the pilgrimage of the devotee or the crusade of the knight-errant. He
traverses vast forests exposed to the hazards of lonely sickness, of
lurking enemies, and pining famine. Stormy lakes, those great inland
seas, are no obstacles to his wanderings: in his light canoe of bark he
sports like a feather on their waves, and darts with the swiftness of
an arrow down the roaring rapids of the rivers. His very subsistence
is snatched from the midst of toil and peril. He gains his food by the
hardships and dangers of the chase: he wraps himself in the spoils of
the bear, the panther, and the buffalo, and sleeps among the thunders of
the cataract.
No hero of ancient or modern days can surpass the Indian in his lofty
contempt of death and the fortitude with which he sustains his cruelest
affliction. Indeed, we here behold him rising superior to the white man
in consequence of his peculiar education. The latter rushes to glorious
death at the cannon’s mouth; the former calmly contemplates its
approach, and triumphantly endures it amidst the varied torments of
surrounding foes and the protracted agonies of fire. He even takes
a pride in taunting his persecutors and provoking their ingenuity of
torture; and as the devouring flames prey on his very vitals and the
flesh shrinks from the sinews, he raises his last song of triumph,
breathing the defiance of an unconquered heart and invoking the spirits
of his fathers to witness that he dies without a groan.
Notwithstanding the obloquy with which the early historians have
overshadowed the characters of the unfortunate natives, some bright
gleams occasionally break through which throw a degree of melancholy
lustre on their memories. Facts are occasionally to be met with in the
rude annals of the eastern provinces which, though recorded with the
coloring of prejudice and bigotry, yet speak for themselves, and will
be dwelt on with applause and sympathy when prejudice shall have passed
away.
In one of the homely narratives of the Indian wars in New England there
is a touching account of the desolation carried into the tribe of
the Pequod Indians. Humanity shrinks from the cold-blooded detail of
indiscriminate butchery. In one place we read of the surprisal of an
Indian fort in the night, when the wigwams were wrapped in flames and
the miserable inhabitants shot down and slain in attempting to escape,
“all being despatched and ended in the course of an hour.” After a
series of similar transactions “our soldiers,” as the historian
piously observes, “being resolved by God’s assistance to make a final
destruction of them,” the unhappy savages being hunted from their homes
and fortresses and pursued with fire and sword, a scanty but gallant
band, the sad remnant of the Pequod warriors, with their wives and
children took refuge in a swamp.
Burning with indignation and rendered sullen by despair, with hearts
bursting with grief at the destruction of their tribe, and spirits
galled and sore at the fancied ignominy of their defeat, they refused to
ask their lives at the hands of an insulting foe, and preferred death to
submission.
As the night drew on they were surrounded in their dismal retreat, so as
to render escape impracticable. Thus situated, their enemy “plied them
with shot all the time, by which means many were killed and buried in
the mire.” In the darkness and fog that preceded the dawn of day some
few broke through the besiegers and escaped into the woods; “the rest
were left to the conquerors, of which many were killed in the swamp,
like sullen dogs who would rather, in their self-willedness and madness,
sit still and be shot through or cut to pieces” than implore for mercy.
When the day broke upon this handful of forlorn but dauntless spirits,
the soldiers, we are told, entering the swamp, “saw several heaps of
them sitting close together, upon whom they discharged their pieces,
laden with ten or twelve pistol bullets at a time, putting the muzzles
of the pieces under the boughs, within a few yards of them; so as,
besides those that were found dead, many more were killed and sunk into
the mire, and never were minded more by friend or foe.”
Can any one read this plain unvarnished tale without admiring the stern
resolution, the unbending pride, the loftiness of spirit that seemed to
nerve the hearts of these self-taught heroes and to raise them above the
instinctive feelings of human nature? When the Gauls laid waste the city
of Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes and seated with
stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered
death without resistance or even supplication. Such conduct was in them
applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indian it was
reviled as obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and
circumstance! How different is virtue clothed in purple and enthroned
in state, from virtue naked and destitute and perishing obscurely in a
wilderness!
But I forbear to dwell on these gloomy pictures. The eastern tribes have
long since disappeared; the forests that sheltered them have been laid
low, and scarce any traces remain of them in the thickly-settled States
of New England, excepting here and there the Indian name of a village
or a stream. And such must, sooner or later, be the fate of those other
tribes which skirt the frontiers, and have occasionally been inveigled
from their forests to mingle in the wars of white men. In a little
while, and they will go the way that their brethren have gone before.
The few hordes which still linger about the shores of Huron and Superior
and the tributary streams of the Mississippi will share the fate of
those tribes that once spread over Massachusetts and Connecticut and
lorded it along the proud banks of the Hudson, of that gigantic race
said to have existed on the borders of the Susquehanna, and of those
various nations that flourished about the Potomac and the Rappahannock
and that peopled the forests of the vast valley of Shenandoah. They will
vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth; their very history will
be lost in forgetfulness; and “the places that now know them will know
them no more forever.” Or if, perchance, some dubious memorial of them
should survive, it may be in the romantic dreams of the poet, to people
in imagination his glades and groves, like the fauns and satyrs and
sylvan deities of antiquity. But should he venture upon the dark story
of their wrongs and wretchedness, should he tell how they were invaded,
corrupted, despoiled, driven from their native abodes and the sepulchres
of their fathers, hunted like wild beasts about the earth, and sent down
with violence and butchery to the grave, posterity will either turn with
horror and incredulity from the tale or blush with indignation at the
inhumanity of their forefathers. “We are driven back,” said an old
warrior, “until we can retreat no farther--our hatchets are broken, our
bows are snapped, our fires are nearly extinguished; a little longer and
the white man will cease to persecute us, for we shall cease to exist!”
PHILIP OF POKANOKET.
AN INDIAN MEMOIR.
As monumental bronze unchanged his look:
A soul that pity touch’d, but never shook;
Train’d from his tree-rock’d cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
Impassive--fearing but the shame of fear--
stoic of the woods--a man without a tear.
CAMPBELL.
IT is to be regretted that those early writers who treated of the
discovery and settlement of America have not given us more particular
and candid accounts of the remarkable characters that flourished in
savage life. The scanty anecdotes which have reached us are full of
peculiarity and interest; they furnish us with nearer glimpses of human
nature, and show what man is in a comparatively primitive state and what
he owes to civilization. There is something of the charm of discovery
in lighting upon these wild and unexplored tracts of human nature--in
witnessing, as it were, the native growth of moral sentiment, and
perceiving those generous and romantic qualities which have been
artificially cultivated by society vegetating in spontaneous hardihood
and rude magnificence.
In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence,
of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is
constantly acting a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native
character are refined away or softened down by the levelling influence
of what is termed good-breeding, and he practises so many petty
deceptions and affects so many generous sentiments for the purposes
of popularity that it is difficult to distinguish his real from his
artificial character. The Indian, on the contrary, free from the
restraints and refinements of polished life, and in a great degree a
solitary and independent being, obeys the impulses of his inclination
or the dictates of his judgment; and thus the attributes of his nature,
being freely indulged, grow singly great and striking. Society is like
a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and
where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface;
he, however, who would study Nature in its wildness and variety must
plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent,
and dare the precipice.
These reflections arose on casually looking through a volume of early
colonial history wherein are recorded, with great bitterness, the
outrages of the Indians and their wars with the settlers New England.
It is painful to perceive, even from these partial narratives, how the
footsteps of civilization may be traced in the blood of the aborigines;
how easily the colonists were moved to hostility by the lust of
conquest; how merciless and exterminating was their warfare. The
imagination shrinks at the idea of how many intellectual beings were
hunted from the earth, how many brave and noble hearts, of Nature’s
sterling coinage, were broken down and trampled in the dust.
Such was the fate of PHILIP OF POKANOKET, an Indian warrior whose name
was once a terror throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut. He was the
most distinguished of a number of contemporary sachems who reigned over
the Pequods, the Narragansetts, the Wampanoags, and the other eastern
tribes at the time of the first settlement of New England--a band of
native untaught heroes who made the most generous struggle of which
human nature is capable, fighting to the last gasp in the cause of their
country, without a hope of victory or a thought of renown. Worthy of
an age of poetry and fit subjects for local story and romantic fiction,
they have left scarcely any authentic traces on the page of history, but
stalk like gigantic shadows in the dim twilight of tradition.*
* While correcting the proof-sheets of this article the
author is informed that a celebrated English poet has nearly