USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Congress of Women : held in the Woman's building, World's Columbian exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893 : with portraits, biographies and addresses > Part 52
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The Indian mother has entire control of her children until they have reached womanhood and manhood. She says what they shall and shall not do, and if the father interferes unwisely, he is told to go about his business in terms he usually understands. The Indian woman in the ignorance of guileless and uncultured nature values the love and fidelity of her husband more than anything else in the world. To be a deserted wife is a sorrow and disgrace hard to be borne.
Both men and women are fond of athletic games. The Shawnee ball-game is quite amusing. The men are pitted against the women. Everyone bets on one side or the other. The women win quite as many games as the men. With their loose, flowing garments, well developed muscles, and superior strength, they are well matched with the men. The Ghost Dance is purely a religious ceremony. The scene, as I witnessed it, was weird in the extreme. The place chosen was a secluded spot, shut off from the surrounding country by a large wood of oaks. Three hundred and fifty or four hundred Indian men and women sat in a circle on the ground. Their dusky forms, wrapped in their blankets, were plainly visible in the waning moonlight. White Horse, a tall, stately Indian-one of Nature's noblemen-dressed in a blanket and with a headdress of feathers paced around the outside of the circle, talking as he walked. The rhythm and cadences of the Indian tongue, when the voice is moved by the passion of the soul, are very musical. The whole talk seemed to be addressed to their emotional nature alone. He spoke of their hopes, griefs and fears. Suddenly, and without any signal that myself or the interpreter could detect, the whole circle rose at the same instant, and the song and ghost dance began. Each commenced a slow and measured but ungainly step, until the whole were circling in a sort of magic dance. The movements were timed in some degree by the words of their songs, as were the gestures by the ideas. At intervals someone, overcome by his emotions, would break the line, and rushing toward the center, fall in a swoon. By midnight at least fifty were lying inside the circle in this hypnotic sleep.
This dance continues for days, weeks and months, and the overwrought condition of their emotional natures furnishes a fitting time for dangerous conspiracies and out- breaks.
The religion of the Indian, like that of other primitive races, has neither temple
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nor ritual. He was originally a sun-worshiper; but now he mingles with his religious ceremonies many of the rites of the Christian. He worships the Great Spirit, and believes almost universally in a future life. The Indian who becomes converted to Christianity is usually characterized by his moral, upright life.
Since 1889 twenty-three million acres have been taken from the Indian reserva- tions and added to the public domain. When Oklahoma was first thrown open to set- tlement the great cry, " Land für der landloss und Heimath für det Heimathloss," went out through all our broad land. The old chief, Queenoshamno, when he knew that the lands where his warrior father had lived and died, where his sons and daughters had grown to manhood and womanhood, were to be given to the white man, said: " Old Queenoshamno will never see the white man in his home," and his sightless eyes, made so by his own hands, are a proof of his heroism, born of his patriotism and des- peration.
The sun rose on the 22d day of April, 1889, in a clear sky. A sunrise in Okla- homa is a beautiful sight. The east gives a rosy promise of the morning, just the first soft glimmer from the gates ajar of that Heavenly chamber whence the sun will by-and- by come rejoicing. A doubtful, slowly-growing light spreads, encroaching on the shadows in the east. The sky beds itself on the bright green of the prairie with a deep foundation of rosy red, and builds upward with gradations of softest pink and gold and colors no one can name. Infinite changes gently succeed. The stars fade slowly, blinking at the increasing light like old religions dying before the Gos- pel. Graceful, airy clouds hover around. Shortly they put on glorious robes, and their faces are bright, as if, like Moses, in some lofty place they had seen God face to face. You wait but a moment for the grand uprise of the sun. Then narrow flashes of brilliant, dazzling light shoot up into the dusky immensity above it. Another moment and the west sees it. Another, the whole heavens feel it, and the day is full blown. The mist settles into the valleys, and you look into the face of the sun through a clear atmosphere. The air is laden with the fragrance of a thousand awakening flowers.
The day had now fairly opened on this seemingly interminable waste of prairie. The landscape was wrapped in a mantle of stillness, undisturbed save by the morning anthem of the mocking-bird and meadow lark. For the meadow lark of Oklahoma, unlike his northern brother, is a singing bird. The prairies were covered with green, for spring comes early in this warm climate. Thousands of flowers raised their little heads fearlessly. For a hundred years they had grown, budded, blossomed and died, kissed by the sun, wet by the dew, and swayed by the balmy breezes of the south. The purple mallows, the rose-tinted gentian of the South, the white poppy of the West, and the spring beauty of the North, are all here, for Oklahoma combines the flora of these three sections to make her own.
The prairie dog sat contentedly at the door of his village, and the rabbit confi- dently took his usual morning stroll. The quail and plover cared for their little ones in happy ignorance that, before the sun set, their homes would be crushed under the tread of men and horses, and their little broods scattered and dead.
The hours go by. The sun climbs to the zenith. Twelve hundred mounted sol- diers guard the line of the territory. It is high noon. The signal for the start is given, and with one mighty shout the whole line breaks into a wild race for the new lands. Such a sight was never seen in the history of this country. There are thou- sands of people in all kinds of conveyances, thousands mounted on all sorts of steeds, from the little burro of Mexico and the wiry Texas pony to the powerful thorough- bred of Kentucky. When the sun went down that night sixty thousand white men slept in the land of the uglo homma.
The desire for a home, a piece of God's green earth that he can call his own, is the absorbing passion in the breast of many a man and woman. The sacrifices made by many to obtain homes for themselves and children in this new, strange land required the greatest degree of heroism. But the farmer of Oklahoma today, as he looks
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across his broad acres and sees his shocks of golden wheat, his fields of waving corn, his cotton with its bursting bolls; when he gathers peaches from his orchard and grapes from his vineyard, forgets the labor and privations of his past four years.
The white man had again told the Ishmaelite of Oklahoma to " move on," and as, like Dickens' little Joe, he had been moving on and moving on ever since he was born, he obeyed.
When the Almighty pronounced these words: "Cursed be the ground for thy sake. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thec. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread," he spoke to the red man as well as to the white man. In work, in the digging up the thorns and the thistles that the ground may yield his daily bread, for " difficulties are God's errands," in meeting obstacles and overcoming them, has the white man alone grown strong, and able to rise as an individual and as a race.
The red man has been deprived of the great blessing of work. Lands and money have been given him. His bread and clothes have come to him without any effort on his part. He has been left in idleness and plenty to follow the wayward impulses of his own crude, savage nature, and in this consists his great degradation. Wherever the Indian has become poor and obliged to work to gain a livelihood he has risen accord- ingly. The time will come when the United States Government will have given him all his lands and money, and the white man will have stolen or cheated him out of it, and by the sweat of his brow he will earn his daily bread. Then, and not before, will the Indian again take his place among the self-governing nations of the world.
It is a common impression that the Indians are a vanishing race, and that in another century they will be known only in history. Recent statistics show that there has been no serious diminution in the number of Indians on this continent since the discovery of America. So we may conclude that the Indian is here to stay for at least another century, a people destined ere long to become citizens of this country in a common, national home.
How we may best give them a Christian education then becomes a problem of great importance to us. I am told that in the Indian schools of the territory the teachers are able to tell from the youngest child whether its mother has ever received any education, or, as they express it, whether " it has a school-mother."
The Indian girl who is educated at Haskell or Carlisle, when her school life is over returns to her people, and in nearly every instance puts on her blanket and becomes the wife of a blanket Indian, to whom she is usually sold by her parents for a few ponics.
At the first glance, with this fact in view, the educating of the Indian girl is dis- heartening in the extreme. The adult Indian habits have been formed. All remedies for them must be palliative. But in the children there is hope, through the mother to the child, each generation growing better and wiser than the one preceding it. In this line of endeavor lies, it seem to me, the surest solution of this problem.
Through the sufferings of the mother has the human family ever received its bap- tism of regeneration. Through the suffering of the Mary Mother a Christ came to dying humanity.
The chapter in our national history which tells of our dealings with the Indian tribes from Plymouth to San Francisco, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, will be one of the darkest and most disgraceful in our annals. No race will lift up at the Judgment such accusing hands against this nation as the Indian. We have cheated him out of one hunting-ground by compelling him to accept another, and have robbed him of the last by driving him to frenzy, and then punishing resistance with confisca- tion. The voices of their scattered dead will find an echo in the ages to come, and the crime of the white man against his red brother will be called at last for judgment.
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* "Patient stands the great Avenger: History's pages show, forsooth, One death-grapple in the struggle Twixt old systems and the truth; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God, within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own."
WHO ARE THE BUILDERS? By MRS. JONNIE ALLEN GEORGE.
In trying to solve the vexed questions of today as to the place or sphere or capa- bilities of women, we really deal with the problems which will involve the good or evil of the future of the human race. The interests of man and woman are so completely united, so indissolubly one, since God " made them twain one flesh," that it is impossible to separate them. "Every nation belongs as much to its women as to its men." What- ever then concerns its women concerns the welfare of the entire nation, for it is a long-established truth, that nature has endowed woman with those attributes which aid most in the highest possible development and fullest salvation of the race.
Woman's work and woman's worth have already been discussed in this Congress by some of the most gifted women of the world.
They have brought with them their new and 44 original ideas from England, Norway and Sweden; Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Bohemia, Australia; and the North, East, South and West of our own country. Surely from these meetings all political lines and national prejudices must pale into nothing- ness, and every woman carry home with her a new strength to be devoted to private and public weal. It MRS. JONNIE ALLEN GEORGE. is not of the questions of today, however, that I would speak; I leave that to wiser heads and stronger pens. I only would tell something of the women who live "'way down yonder in Dixie Land."
That land, " popularly supposed to be the Nazareth of America "-the South, with its balmy airs and blue and sunny skies, where the creamy orange blossoms, stately magnolias, and clinging jessamines waft their blended perfume from darkest lagoon to furthest pine-clad hilltops, and day and night are made musical by the mocking- bird's wild lay.
It is one of the most useful and grateful tasks of historians to bring forward to the eye of each succeeding generation the characters of those who have laid the foun- dations of society and state; and it is now my pleasure to tell you something of what the women of the South have done for the building of their country's strength.
The Revolution furnished many glorious instances of womanhood in the South, when such women as Lady Washington, Annie Carter, the wife of Light-horse Harry Lee, and the mother of the South's illustrious Robert E. Lec, together with Mrs. Madi- son, and later on Mrs. James K. Polk, influenced their husbands to grand achievements and inspired in their countrywomen a desire for higher things. Yet, notwith-
Mrs. Jonnie Allen George is a native of Alabama. Her parents were Rev. M. E. Butt and Henrietta Allen Butt, of two . of the oldest and most influential families of Georgia and among the largest slaveholders of the South. She was graduated from Tuskegee, Ala., with high honors, and later she received the degree of M. A. from Logan College, Ky. She has traveled extensively in the United States and Canada. She married Dr. Albert George, who lived but a few years, leaving Mrs. George with two daughters. She is a devoted mother, giving special attention to the training of her children in every department. Her literary works are short stories, which have appeared in Southern journals, and sketches of Shakespeare's characters. She is a most satisfactory and successful teacher. In religious faith she is a Methodist. Her postoffice address is Little Rock, Ark.
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standing all this, the social and political condition of women, not only of the South, but of all the world, at that time was not fully committed to the highest development of that sentiment which is woven in the warp and woof of every woman's nature. The sentiment which induces her to wish for that higher education and self-culture that would enable her to become her husband's intellectual companion, his friend and help- mate in the truest sense of the word, and to occupy that place in the world-not man's world but God's world -- the place not above her husband, nor below him, but by his side.
Because of the difficulties of travel, and imperfect communication with the out- side world, she knew little of the turmoil and strife for self-advancement that moved and swayed the restless heart of a dissatisfied world. Content to dwell at home among her own people, her mind and heart were not busy about the world's affairs. She asked nothing better for herself than that she might become the wife and mother of great men. And true to the traditions of her grandmothers, it would still be, perhaps, an impossible .task to convince a Southern woman that there could be any higher mission for her.
With sometimes a hundred trained slaves to attend the immediate household, with better facilities for travel, with new books and imported musical instruments, and foreign magazines and home journals, the minds and hearts of the women of the land were fully attuned to " catch the living manners as they rise." Is it any wonder, then, that the sentiment in favor of the higher education of women first took root in the South and grew and blossomed forth into the building of the first college in the world for women at Macon, Ga?
It was not until the tocsin of civil war had been sounded that the womanliness of the women of the South shone out in all its brightest light; and our men, who had ever been foremost in true chivalry toward women, learned more fully the half-accepted truth, that woman had not been created man's slave, his toy, his household drudge, nor yet, for that higher mission alone, of being his gentle nurse, his faithful companion, his prudent housewife, and the fond mother of his children; but to be also " his dis- interested friend, his equal in resources of character and understanding, and his superior in the virtues of heart and soul.
The heroes of the South, who fought those dreadful battles at Gettysburg and Manassas, and enriched the earth with the crimson stream of their life's blood " by the Potomac, and the Cumberland, and in the valley of the Shenandoah," had no cowardly mothers or vain and heartless wives. Their women were as heroic in every fiber as themselves. What a comparison exists between the heroic women of the American Revolution and the women of the Southern confederacy; the story of the one seems in many instances but a repetition of the other, except that women of the South were by far the greatest sufferers. Because of the peculiar circumstances which surrounded them, they passed through "the more fiery ordeal, the one most terrible in its character, inasmuch as no triumph awaited their sacrifices, no glad conclusions wiped out the bitter memory of their griefs."
The women of the South had ever been a peace party in.themselves. They loved the Union and honored the Flag. In their hearts they prayed that the cords of love which bound the different sections of the land together might not be snapped asunder; but when one state after another thought it best to withdraw from the Union, and Old Virginia finally threw herself into the breach, the women of the entire land cast in their lot with the Confederacy, and gave as hearty allegiance to the new Government as had been so lavishly bestowed upon the other.
The sudden transition of the land, smiling with peace and plenty, to the awful tur- moil of war was swift and appalling, but its women kept pace with the times. After the first burst of the storm the restless misery of the preceding suspense, was fol- lowed by the most faithful efforts of men and women alike. "Every village green became a camping ground, and its courthouse or public halls a rendezvous for busy women." The Confederacy-a new government which had sprung into being in an
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hour-had no means with which to meet the exigencies of war. There were no trained soldiers, but few surgeons and tailors, no hospitals and trained nurses, no war ships, no arms and ammunition, and no factories of any kind in the land. Where every able- bodied white man so gallantly laid down his plow and plane, closed up his law office, the minister left his pulpit with his Bible in his hand, and went to battle for the cause which he carnestly and honestly believed to be right; the mothers, wives, daughters and sweethearts of these men determined that the army should not want, so long as they had hearts to feel, heads to plan, and hands to labor. Women, old and young, worked together in the construction of soldiers' garments. With a firm faith that suc- cess must crown every such honest endeavor, to them an ultimate and complete vic- tory was a foregone conclusion; and though
" Never a morning wore to evening But some heart did break,"
these women faltered not in the tasks before them. They unhesitatingly spent their days and nights in nursing the sick in camp or wounded in hospitals established and maintained by themselves. They ministered to the dying in the rear of battlefields, and in many instances took in their own hands the spade and shovel in the midst of the night, and lifting their voices to Heaven, gave Christian burial to foe and friend alike.
Soon there came a time when the supplies in hand were utterly exhausted. Then it was that the latent business talent and executive ability of the Southern women began to appear. They renounced all desire for imported luxuries, and pledged themselves to card, spin and weave the clothing, tan the leather and make the shoes for their families and for the army. They had no factories; this had all to be done by hand. They directed the negrocs on those immense plantations in the work of tilling the field, planting the crops, gathering the harvest and converting it into food and cloth- ing for the country.
They gave their own personal property for the purchase of arms and ammunition for their beloved army; they melted into money their silverware and jewels, in which many a Southern household was rich. They almost starved themselves and their children at home, that they might purchase a little coffee and sugar and other luxuries for the soldiers. For coffee they often paid as high as five hundred dollars per pound, and for black pepper and sugar three hundred. They sat late into the winter nights over a fire of corn-cobs while they ripped up their carpets of softest pile, took down their richest damask draperies, and made them into blankets; cut their finest upholstery into mittens for the soldiers, and tore up their window curtains and table linen into bandages, to be used in dressing the wounded. They went through the darkened and silent streets of captured cities at midnight, to carry letters which they had smuggled through the lines from soldiers in distant camps to friends at home. They even faced the dangers of death itself in the charge of the bayonets. the tramp of cavalry, and the roar of cannons, as in "La Bataille des Mouchoirs" in New Orleans, that they might catch a glimpse of, and whisper a word of cheer to, loved ones on their way to distant North- ern prisons. In every way these women, for the first time in the world's history, " gilded the terrors of war with a heavenly beauty."
England has had her Florence Nightingale; Italy her countess, who, dressed in richest silks and brightest diamonds, visited the charity hospitals that the poor and suffering there might be gladdened by the sight of so much beauty; Germany had her princess who fed the hungry populace-the Revolution drew from every colony brave and heroic women, such as Mrs. Mott, of South Carolina. The North fur- nished many beautiful instances of individual bravery and self-sacrifice among its women during the war; but nowhere except in the South has the world ever witnessed the sublime spectacle of every woman of the land devoting herself entirely-her time, her strength, her talents-to the cause that needed such assistance.
It really scems invidious to mention a few of these noble women, when all worked,
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suffered, endured and lost alike. It was the women of the South who made it possi- ble for the Confederacy to last so long. General Grant, while he was in Mississippi, said to " a rebel woman:" "The work of you women surpasses anything in history. It is astonishing. Why, with my overwhelming numbers of trained soldiers I could whip this handful of raw recruits in a little time if it were not for you Southern women."
Finally, however, time and circumstances brought to an end this unequal struggle. The sun of the Confederacy had set never to rise again-set in a halo of glory which will forever far outshine the gaudy triumphs of victory. And the men and women who had suffered every vicissitude of fortune during these four years, though they had been reared as delicately as European princes, turned from the duties and dangers of war times to private life and hard labor. Though the bowl had been broken at the fountain, there was no time for vain regrets. In many instances the mother, or the eldest daughter, or perhaps a maiden sister, because of the ruthless hand of war, was all that was left on distant plantations, or in splendid but totally dismantled city homes, to battle with the world and keep the wolf from the door. When these women, so tenderly reared and delicately nourished, went forth as bread-winners from the very best families, daughter's of the South's proudest aristocracy, a new order of things for the Southern women was begun. Though her father, her brother, her hus- band and sweetheart were gone, her plantations devastated, left without stock, provis- ions or hands, her city home in smoldering ruins, the world has yet to hear one word of complaint or murmuring from her lips.
Ah! the influence of those women was and is being felt by the younger Southern women of today. During the storm that followed the first cloud-burst in the throes of silent agony, a new creature was born who came into the world possessed of a price- less heritage. The mothers of the Old South have laid a foundation upon which the Southern woman of today may build a personality for herself that will be a force in any undertaking. With no desire for public renown, no hungering for shout and stare and clapping of hands, and empty plaudits, those mothers and daughters mold society into lofty ideals of manhood and womanhood, yet still clinging with loving touch to the traditions of the past.
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