To bring one's material to a strictly
historical and classified order is almost an
impossibility when dealing with a subject so
diversified as that of the Red Race of the
North American Continent. But I have sought,
found and brought together an amount of
information concerning that peculiar people
that has never before been published; having
been born of parents who were missionaries
to the Choctaws in 1820, and having been
reared among them and intimately acquainted
with them during the vicissitudes of a life
extending to nearly four score of years. I
well know that the Indian race has oft been
the subject of the pen, and still continues
to be, but only in short details, thus
leaving the reader in bewilderment, though
historical truths were to be found in
abundance among them wherever one turned
truths one can never forget; scenes and
events which have an imperishable memory.
Then come awhile with me, reader, from what
you have hitherto learned about the Red Man
of this continent, to that which may be
entirely; new to you no matter how old it
may be to others; since you might learn
something more of the primitive influences
which shaped the career of the North
American Indians in their dealings with the
White Race from their first acquaintance to
the present day; as I have endeavored to
present many based upon knowledge acquired
by a personal acquaintance with two tribes
(closely allied) during a protracted life of
many years, seeing and learning the romance
and poetry of their natures, a people of
interest, moral worth and individuality of
character. I know that to all my race, the
Indian (comparatively speaking) lives only
in the vague memory of the legendary past
that period made vivid by the wrongs of the
White Race perpetrated upon the Red all a
series of struggles terminating in
sanguinary executions when no services
rendered by the tribe in their vain struggle
to be free, availed to save the defeated
Chieftain from a felon's grave; while the
feeble remnant that still survives stands as
the best commentary of their wrongs, while
they despairingly cry kill us also, and thus
complete your cruelty by taking our lives as
you began with our liberties."
Truly, what a sad and melancholy record is
there his story; undervalued by the
civilized world, though in op position to
the declarations of all who knew them, as
justice demanded they should be known. Alas,
broken hearted for two centuries, yet having
their souls pierced and lacerated by the
poisonous shafts of unjust defamation and
cruel false hood, while they sadly ask in
lamentations of woe: "Where is to be the
end? Only to hear echoes fearful response,
"The grave." Therefore they seem indifferent
now as to what the world is doing around
them, since none extend the hand of
friendship to them but to defraud; none
smile on their dejected faces but to deride;
none sympathize with them in their poverty
but to mock; and now when you meet them,
they neither look to the right nor left, but
straight forward walking with slow and
measured steps that betoken the thoughts of
a helpless and hopeless people hopeless, at
least, of all that life may bring them of
freedom and prosperity. Few even speak to
them in tones of kindness, yet all
momentarily stop to gaze on them with
wondering stare as if they were cumberers of
the ground, though there is still upon their
faces of despair a visible touch of
lingering chivalry worthy of a better fate.
With many of their illustrious men (long
deceased) whom I have brought into this
history, I was personally acquainted through
the vicissitudes of many years; with others,
though not personally, yet I knew their
minds and the motives of their actions, and
these truly constitute the man. And they
were men whose high endowments (nature's
gift) could not be misled into selfish
ambition; nor prosperity inflate; nor
disappointment depress from holy trust and
honor able action known by the veritable
touchstone, "Ye shall know a tree by its
fruits." Nor have I sketched a virtue that I
have not seen, nor painted a folly from
imagination; but have endeavored to be
faithful to reality, in all things as
touching that peculiar yet noble race of the
human family, who sought resignation in all
their misfortunes and woes, and found it
only in the decrees of the "Great Spirit"
who had given to their race so many
centuries of uninterrupted bliss, truly a
noble people who taught misfortune dignity.
They had never left their secluded and quiet
homes amid nature's forest groves to expose
themselves to the contaminations of the
vices (to them unknown) of the civilized
(so-called) world of traffic and trade.
Sequestered from its view, neither its
pageants nor its follies had ever reached
them there. It was then and there I studied
their unsophisticated natures with an
enthusiasm, which is the fragrance of the
flower that lives after the bloom is
withered. Nor am I ashamed to confess my
profound admiration of the North American
Indian, to whom there was nothing so dear as
his freedom unrestrained, which he proved
beyond all dispute by fearlessly resisting
the hand of tyrannical oppressions from the
Atlantic coast to the Pacific, against odds
in point of numbers, munitions of war, skill
and means, as one to ten thousand, and
yielded not until the last warrior had
fallen, the last bow broken and his race
reduced to absolute poverty, want and woe.
Still, though poor and lowly as he seemed to
his venal destroyers, yet his whole heart
and life were wrapped up in the remembrance
of his freedom. He worshipped the thought as
his most precious property, the dear
treasure of his secret and highest bliss. It
was the constant companion of his thoughts
the monitor of his actions and the true key
to his life.
But alas, when memory now turns to the past
of his early life and its unexpected
blighting, and raises before his mind every
hope connected with it, and his seeming
present doom stares him in the face, what
can rid him of those successive images that
seem to glide around him like mournful
apparitions of the long lamented dead, since
grief long since has looked up the avenues
of complaint, and he stands as one petrified
to stone. But how wonderful, amid all their
adversities, has been their power to rally
and to recover their waning resolution and
courage; verily, they oft seemed to
experience a kind of determined pleasure in
resolutely confronting the worst aspect of
their innumerable reverses; yea, in standing
in the breech that has long since overthrown
their future, and hurling back in defiant
despair, "Here we stand, at least an honest
and chivalrous people;" but alas, only to
seek solitude by retiring within themselves
pleading "Jailor, lock the door." Truly
their lives, though not with out their
efforts of strong exertion, have been during
the last two centuries, and still are, a
dream spent in chewing the cud of sweet and
bitter fancy, while they have worn the garb
of hope which has diverted their past and
present woes by a touch of the wand of
imagination and gilded over the future by
prospects fairer than were ever realized.
But it is impossible to deny and yet not to
admire and praise the strong sense of
solidity and fraternity which, through all
their lives, still unite the members of the
same tribe, and the feelings which have not
been dimmed by modern changes but still
exist as warm and active as ever; yet the
White Race has ever looked upon the Red from
the Ishmaelitish standpoint, and in all its
intercourse, from first to last, began and
so continued by treating them as inferior
beings, too low in the scale of humanity to
be reached by the hand of Christianity and
civilization; inveterate and uncompromising
enemies to be circumvented and overreached
under an exhibition of smiling and artful
hypocrisy and base venality unknown to the
Red Man and unsurpassed in the annals of the
White.
But long since cut loose from their ancient
moorings, they have felt for more than a
century that they were slowly but surely
drifting toward an unknown destiny
foreshadowing extermination. What other
people that would not have had recourse to
war or the suicides rifle? Yet, after
despair had usurped the place of hope in
longer resistance, they had principle to
resist the one, and resolution to combat the
other. But they were to tread the lowest
paths of sorrow, poverty and humiliating
depressions; whose circumstances were too
humble to expect redress and whose
sufferings (mental and physical) were too
great even for pity and whose wrongs, at the
hands of inside white intruders and outside
defamers, have long since destroyed that
strength of mind with which mankind can meet
distress; therefore they prepare to suffer
in silence rather than openly complain. What
else could they do? The world disclaims
them. Christianity even seems to have turned
its back upon their distress, given them up
to spiritual nakedness and hunger, and left
them to plead to white wretches whose hearts
are stone, or to debauchees who may curse
but will not give relief, while every
devilish trick is played upon them, and
their every action made a fund for eternal
ridicule.
Truly, instead of wondering that so little
of their true history has been preserved, it
is a matter of much greater wonder that so
much of truth has escaped the waste of it;
two centuries through which they have been
dragged from place to place, while all
narratives concerning them have been
written, with few exceptions, in shameful
derogation of their true characters, all
exaggerated and still continuing to be
exaggerated, evincing a strange love of
defamation only to gratify the morbid
fondness of their readers for the marvelous,
and their own manifested inability to tell
the truth; therefore the most absurd and
ridiculous falsehoods are fabricated and
published about this people and joyfully
read and believed by all who are in harmony
with their traducers, a truth that remains,
in essential points at least, from one end
of the scale to the other.
True, the ways of the Indians are not the
ways of the civilized world of which they
knew nothing; nor were they, being without
its ways, versed in its revolting vices,
amid their so called love of war and carnage
existed but in the imagination of the White
Race, one of its beliefs which may be traced
hither and thither but never to the
propitiation of truth concerning anything
about the Red; since, having its origin
alone in the impatience of its venality
while drifting amid zones of ignorance and
prejudice; and when I contemplate such, I am
taught to look upon their errors more in
sorrow than anger. True the Indians were
cruel to their enemies in war, and so are we
together with all the nations of earth.
But when I take up the North American Indian
who has suffered and represent to myself the
struggles he has passed through for
centuries past, to defend his just rights
and sustain the freedom of his country from
exotic vandals, and reflect upon his brief
pulsations of joy; the tears of woe; the
feebleness of purpose; the scorn of the
world that has, with out just reason, no
charity for him; the desolation of his souls
sanctuary, his freedom buried in the memory
of the past; happiness gone; hope fled; I
fain would leave his blighted soul with Him
from whose hands it came, for how difficult
it is to roll away the black and huge stone
of prejudice from off the white man's heart,
to whom ignorance is bliss in regard to all
Indians; thousands, therefore, hate the
Indian because they do not know him and
desire not to know him because they hate
him.
Truly, the North American Indians constitute
as grand a record of human courage,
patriotic endurance, and as harrowing a
history of human suffering as has ever been
told; while their oppressors and destroyers,
who have figured in their nefarious designs
against them from the alpha to omega as the
beau ideal of cruel injustice, are still
laboring with a zeal never manifested before
to intensify the public feeling against the
helpless people, that they may the more
effectually accomplish their infamous
schemes to rob and plunder them; and whose
consciences seem so elastic that, at one
time it seems difficult for them to stretch
them over a mole hill; at another, with
ease, they stretch them over a mountain. Yet
the influence, power and grip these
characters exert and impress upon the public
mind are truths both humiliating and
disgraceful, and the strange liberties that
are, by our seemingly defective systems of
jurisprudence, legally permitted to such
plunderers in high x places who have the
audacity and impertinence to appeal to law,
and misuse its machinery for selfish and
covetous purposes, are everywhere
illustrated at the expense of the misguided
and alike help less and unfortunate Indians,
upon whom they have descended in countless
thousands as blow flies on a decomposing
body, to rob and plunder them of the last
acre of their territories. Truly our
sensibilities in the light of humanity, and
our judgment in the light of truth and
justice, are absolutely dead in regard to
this people; therefore, thousands have
supinely yielded to the false assertions of
thieves and robbers, the reverence due to a
Divine decree, without any investigation
whatever, which has been done in all cases
of dealing with Indians from first to last.
Truly it may be written as an epitaph for
their history, "unutterably sad, because so
disastrously true." Alas, multiplied
thousands today look with horror on the
wrongs and sufferings of the feeble and
helpless Indians still hovering in our
midst, yet are content to hide themselves
from their woes; yea, they openly
acknowledge their shameful reality yet do
nothing to alleviate their condition. They
well know of the thousand wrongs continually
being heaped upon them, yet only shrug-
their shoulders and fold their arms in
callous acquiescence in that which they
falsely and. cowardly declare to be
inevitable; while they, at the same time,
acknowledge a sense of shame and personal
guilt in permitting such infamous cruelty
and oppression to be heaped upon that help
less race in their midst and under their own
eyes, without being actuated to noble
efforts to stop it. No wonder the Indians
countenance seems prematurely marked by deep
furrows, and his long hair waves over his
brow on which is fixed a deep gloom that no
smile from the lips can chase away! Alas,
through what direful changes have they been
forced to pass through what cycles of hope
and fear have their generations been coerced
while the world about them seemed like a
vision hurrying by as they stood still in
silence, helplessness and woe! Therefore, in
their entire history, how little there is
to, contemplate but the most agonizing
struggles followed by the deepest and most
ostensible decay through their long and
continued attempts at redress and the
recovery of their God inherited rights which
expired with their liberty.
Source:
History Of The Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians, Written by, H. B. Cushman, 1899,
Headlight Printing House, Greenville, Texas.
Online
Publication: The manuscript was scanned and
then ocr'd. Minimal editing has been done,
and readers can and should expect some
errors in the textual output.
