While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
In all
the early histories of the American Colonies, in the stories of
Indian life and the delineations of Indian character, these
children of nature are represented as savages and barbarians,
and in the mind of a large portion of the community the
sentiment still prevails that they were blood-thirsty,
revengeful, and merciless, justly a terror to both friends and
foes. Children are impressed with the idea that an Indian is
scarcely human, and as much to be feared as the most ferocious
animal of the forest.
Novelists have now and then clothed a few with a garb
which excites your imagination, but seldom has one been invested
with qualities which you would love, unless it were also said
that through some captive taken in distant war, he inherited a
whiter skin and a paler blood. But I am inclined to think that
Indians are not alone in being savage not alone barbarous,
heartless, and merciless.
It is said they were exterminating each other by
aggressive and devastating wars, before the white people came
among them. But wars, aggressive and exterminating wars,
certainly, are not proofs of barbarity. The bravest warrior was
the most honored, and this has been ever true of Christian
nations, and those who call themselves Christians have not yet
ceased to look upon him who could plan most successfully the
wholesale slaughter of human beings, as the most deserving his
king's or his country's laurels. How long since the peen died
away in praise of the Duke of Wellington? What have been the
wars in which all Europe, or of America, has been engaged, That
there has been no records of her history? For what are civilized
and Christian nations drenching their fields with blood?
It is said the Indian was cruel to the captives, and
inflicted unspeakable torture upon his enemy taken in battle.
But from what we know of them, it is not to be inferred that
Indian Chiefs were ever guilty of filling dungeons with innocent
victims, or slaughtering hundreds and thousands of their own
people, whose only sin was a quiet dissent from some religious
dogma. Towards their enemies they were often relentless, and
they had good reason to look upon the white man as their enemy.
They slew them in battle, plotted against them secretly, and in
a few instances comparatively, subjected individuals to torture,
burned them at the stake, and, perhaps, flayed them alive. But
who knows anything of the precepts and practices of the Roman
Catholic Christendom, and quote these things as proofs of
unmitigated barbarity.
At the very time that the Indians were using the
tomahawk and scalping-knife to avenge their wrongs, peaceful
citizens in every country of Europe, where the Pope was the man
of authority, were incarcerated for no crime whatever, and such
refinement of torture invented and practiced, as never entered
in the heart of the fiercest Indian warrior that roamed the
wilderness to inflict upon man or beast.
We know very little of the secrets of the inquisition,
and this little chills our blood with horror. Yet these things
were done in the name of Christ, the Savior of the World, the
Prince of Peace, and not savage, but civilized. Christian men
looked on, not coldly, but rejoycingly, while women and children
writhed in flames and weltered in blood. Were the atrocities
committed in the vale of Wyoming and Cherry Valley unprecedented
among the Waldensian fastnesses and the mountains of Aurvergne?
Who has read Fox's book of Martyrs, and found anything to
parallel it in all the records of Indian warfare? The slaughter
of St. Bartholomew's days, the destruction of the Jews in Spain,
and the Scotch Covenanters, were in obedience to the mandates of
Christian princes, aye, and some of them devised by Christian
women who professed to be serving God, and to make the Bible the
man of their counsel.
It is said also that the Indians were treacherous, and
more, no compliance with the conditions of any treaty, was ever
to be trusted. But the Puritan fathers cannot be wholly
exonerated from the charge of faithlessness; and who does not
blush to talk of Indian traitors when he remembers the Spanish
invasion and the fall of the princely and magnanimous Montezuma?
Indians believed in witches, and burned them, too. And
did not the sainted Baxter, with the Bible in his hand,
pronounce it right, and was not the Indian permitted to be
present, when the quiet unoffending woman was cast into the
fire, by the decree of a Puritan council?
To come down to the more decidedly Christian times, it is not so
very long since, in Protestant England, hanging was the
punishment of a petty thief, long and hopeless imprisonment of a
slight misdemeanor, when men were set up to be stoned and spit
upon by those who claimed the exclusive right to be called
humane and merciful.
Again, it is said, the Indian mode of warfare is,
without exception, the most inhuman and revolting. But I do not
know that those who die by the barbed and poisoned arrow linger
in any more unendurable torment than those who are mangled with
powder and lead balls, and the custom of scalping among
Christian murderers would save thousands from groaning days, and
perhaps weeks, among heaps that cover victorious fields and fill
hospitals with the wounded and dying. But scalping is not an
invention exclusively Indian. "It claims," says Prescott, "high
authority, or, at least, antiquity." And, further history,
Herodotus, gives an account of it among the Scythians, showing
that they performed the operation, and wore the scalp of their
enemies taken in battle, as trophies, in the same manner as the
North American Indian. Traces of the custom are also found in
the laws of the Visigaths, among the Franks, and even the Anglo
Saxons. The Northern Indians did not scalp, but they had a
system of slavery, of which there are no traces to be found
among the customs, laws, or legends of the Iroquois.
Again, it is said, "They carried away women and children
captive, and in their long journey through the wilderness, they
were subjected to heartrending trials."
The wars of Christian men throw hundreds and thousands
of women and children helpless upon the cold world, to toil, to
beg, and to starve.
This is not so bright a picture as is usually given of
people who have written laws and have stores of learning, but
people cannot see in any place that the coloring is too dark!
There is no danger of painting Indians so they will become
attractive to the civilized people.
There is a bright and pleasing side to the Indian character, and
thinking that there has been enough written of their wars and
cruelties, of the hunter's and fisherman's life, I have sat down
at their fireside, listened to their legends, and am acquainted
with their domestic habits, understand their finer feelings and
the truly noble traits of their character.
It is so long now since they were the lords of this
country, and formidable as your enemies, and they are so utterly
wasted away and melted like snow under the meridian sun, and
helpless, that you can sit down and afford to listen to the
truth, and to believe that even your enemies had their virtues.
Man was created in the image of God, and it cannot be that
anything human is utterly vile and contemptible.
Those who have thought of Indians as roaming about in
the forests hunting and fishing, or at war, will laugh, perhaps,
at the idea of Indian homes, and domestic happiness. Yet there
are no people of which we have any knowledge, among whom, in
their primitive state, family ties and relationship were more
distinctly defined, or more religiously respected than the
Iroquois.
The treatment which they received from the white
people, whom they always considered as intruders, aroused, and
kept in exercise all their ferocious passions, so that none
except those who associated with them as missionaries, or as
captives, saw them in their true character, as they were to each
other.
Almost any portrait that we see of an Indian, he is
represented with tomahawk and scalping knife in hand, as if they
possessed no other but a barbarous nature. Christian nations
might with equal justice be always represented with cannon and
balls, swords and pistols, as the emblems of their employment
and their prevailing tastes.
The details of war are from far to great a portion of
every History of civilized and barbarous nations, to conquer and
to slay has been to long the glory of the Christian people; he
who has been most successful in subjugating and oppressing, in
mowing down human beings, has too long wore the laurel crown,
been too long an object for the admiration of men and the love
of women.
It seems you might be weary of the pomp and
circumstance of war, of princely banquets, and gay cavalcades.
The time and space you bestow upon King and courts, and the
homage you pay to empty titles, are unworthy your professed
republican spirit and preferences, let us turn aside from the
war path, and sit down by the hearth-stone of peace.
In the picture which I have given, I have confined
myself principally to the Iroquois, or Six Nations, a people who
no more deserve the term savage, than the whites do that of
heathen, because they have still lingering among them heathen
superstitions, and many opinions and practices which deserves no
better name.
The cannibals of some of the west Indies Islands, and the
Islands of the Pacific, may with justice be termed savage, but a
people like the Iroquois who had a government, established
offices, a system of religion eminently pure and Spiritual, a
code of honor and laws of hospitality, excelling those of all
other nations, should be considered something better than
savage, or utterly barbarous.
The terrible torture they inflicted upon their enemies, have
made their name a terror, and yet there were not so many burnt,
hung, and starved by them, as perished among Christian nations
by these means. The miseries they inflicted were light, in
comparison, with those they suffered. If individuals should have
come among you to expose the barbarities of savage white men,
the deeds they relate would quite equal anything known of Indian
cruelty. The picture an Indian gives of civilized barbarism
leaves the revolting custom of the wilderness quite in the
back-ground. You experienced their revenge when you had put
their souls and bodies at a stake, with your fire-water that
maddened their brains. There was a pure and beautiful
spirituality in their faith, and their conduct was much more
influenced by it, as are any people, Christian or Pagan.
Is there anything more barbaric in the annals of Indian
warfare, than the narrative of the Pequod Indians? In one place
we read of the
surprise of an Indian fort by night, when the inmates were
slumbering, unconscious of any danger. When they awoke they were
wrapped in flames, and when they Attempted to flee, were shot
down like beasts. From village to village, from wigwam to
wigwam, the murderers proceeded, "being resolved," as your
historian piously remarks, "by God's assistance, to make a final
destruction of them," until finally a small but gallant band
took refuge in a swamp. Burning with indignation, and made
sullen by despair, with hearts bursting with grief at the
destruction of their nation, and spirits galled and sore at the
fancied ignominy of their defeat, they refused to ask life at
the hands of an insulting foe, and preferred death to
submission. As the night drew on, they were surrounded in their
dismal retreat, volleys of musketry poured into their midst,
until nearly all were killed or buried in the mire. In the
darkness of a thick fog which preceded the dawn of day, a few
broke through the ranks of the besiegers and escaped to the
woods.
This site
includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes
reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These
items are presented as part of the historical record and should not be
interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes
implied .
Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations and History of the Tuscarora Indians
