USA > Wisconsin > Buffalo County > History of Buffalo County, Wisconsin > Part 11
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With regard to the above I can not omit to remark, that, when- ever the word " gens" is used the word " clan " may be substi- tuted without much inaccuracy. The words " tribe " and " nation " may be considered as identical or very closely synonymous, when applied to Indians. These three words are Latin, but in the Ro- man application they did not exactly mean what they are made to express in modern languages.
Among the most serious events of life in any state of society is what may be called sickness, that is an interruption in the reg- ular functions of some one or more of the organs of the body. Among these disturbances we must also include the injuries by wounding, total loss of limbs, and such accidents as would un- avoidably happen in any state of civilization, and very frequently must have happened among Indians. It is true the Indian was inured to hardships of many kinds, to sudden changes of weather, to protracted marches, or as much protracted paddling in any kind of weather, sleeping in the open air, and many other exposures, too tedious to mention. Experience has, however, from the ear- liest times of the intercourse between Whites and Indians, demon- strated, that, other things being equal, an Indian could not in the long run, endure more than a white man. At any rate there was sickness among them. What were their means for combating this sickness? What was, or could be done, for the comfort of a sick
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person? Recollecting the wretched accommodation, the crowded state of dwellings and sleeping places, we had best leave out the idea of comfort altogether. In some cases, however, we may cre- dit the Indian women with tenderness enough to do the most that could be done in such an emergency. But the means for actually combating the sickness by removing its cause, by eradicating it from the system, were very scarce, and the credit given the Indians for a superior knowledge of medicinal virtues of certain plants, de- coctions and combinations, is usually but the trick of a quack to sell his own preparations to the ignorant. Many persons have been imposed upon by thinking that the Indian medicine-man was a physician. Some of that class may have known a few sim- ples and applied them empirically, but that was not their actual vocation. The cure they were expected to effect, was not by their own knowledge, but by the interference of those occult powers, which among Indians were omnipresent, and the cause of every- thing. Invocations by any means, mostly by unearthly noises, extraordinary distortions of limbs and body, and similar perform- ances, formed that part of their duty, that was most appreciated by the relatives and comrades of the sick person. The Jesuits and other missionaries called these medicine-men sorcerers. In fact that was what they were expected to be, but unfortunately their supposed powers of interference with the okis and manitous, and other unknown spirits, or natural forces, were no greater than those of other men who pretended to similar things with just as little warrant or actual vocation. If the patient recovered, the medicine- man claimed the credit, if he died, the fee was probably not less. All, of course must die, at some time, and there was no exception to that rule even among Indians. So we come to the question; What did the Indians do with their dead? They buried them. But if we would suppose that they always dug a grave and put the body into it, we would be much mistaken. The word burial is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word burgian, that is to hide and to save from destruction. This word is the same as the German bergen, which in combination with the prefix ver means to hide, without prefix however means to save, as goods from a shipwreck. In the conjugation of the word bergen we meet the word geborgen, that is saved or placed in safety. In that sense the Indians did bury their dead. Mr. H. C. Yarrow, in the " First Annual Report of the Bu-
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reau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution," enumerates seven distinct classes of burial.
1st. By inhumation, in pits, graves or holes in the ground, stone graves or cists, in mounds, beneath or in cabins, wigwams, houses or lodges, or in caves.
2d. By enibalinment, or a process of mummifying, the remains being afterwards placed in the earth, caves, mounds, boxes on scaffolds, or in charnelhouses.
3d. By deposition of remains in urns.
4th. By surface burial, the remains being placed in hollow trees or logs, pens, or simply covered with earth, or bark, or rocks, forming cairns.
5th. By cremation, or partial burning, generally on the sur- face of the earth, occasionally beneath, the resulting bones or ash- es being placed in pits in the ground, in boxes placed on scaffolds or trees, in urns, and sometimes scattered.
6th. By ærial sepulture, the bodies being left in lodges, houses, cabins, tents, deposited on scaffolds or trees, in boxes or canoes, the two latter receptacles supported on scaffolds or posts, or placed on the ground. Occasionally baskets have been used to contain the remains of children, these being hung to trees.
7th. By aquatic burial, beneath the water or in canoes, which were turned adrift.
These heads might, perhaps, be further subdivided, but the above seem sufficient for all practical needs.
So far Mr. Yarrow. But in the further elaboration, he gives an- other mode of burial, which, however, does not seem to be any burial at all, though he styles it "Living Sepulchres". He says: "This is a term quaintly used by the learned M. Pierre Muret to express the devouring of the dead by birds and animals, or the surviving friends and relatives. Mr. Yarrow is probably correct in the opinion, that this practice was not prevalent among North American Indians. It is nevertheless, true that the Hurons, the Tionnontates, Eries and Neutrals and the Iroquois in general prac- ticed cannibalism on their prisoners of war. The testimony in re- gard to this comes from the earlier Jesuit missionaries, from Champlain and other reliable sources. "I will eat your heart" was not at all a metaphorical expression among those nations, and re- sulted but too often in the literal execution of the threat. From
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what I have been able to learn it appears that inhumation was the practice prevailing among the Eastern Indians, the Algonquins and Iroquois-Huron relationship. But they did not bury their dead immediately. They preserved their bones for a number of years, and at the feast of the dead, which occurred at stated periods' every five, seven or ten years, the bones were together with articles of different kinds, weapons, kettles, robes of beaver etc. deposited in one great hollow or grave, covered with boughs of trees and with logs and then with earth. The Jesuit missionaries were more than once eye-witnesses to these proceedings and have left minute de- scriptions of the same. Surface burial and aerial sepulture, on the other hand seem to have been the more common practice of the Western Indians, the Dakotas, the Winnebagoes, Chippewas, Sacs and Foxes and Illinois.
The practice is, at least in those parts where the Indians are yet not converted or otherwise civilized, still continued to some extent.
From Mr. Yarrow's paper I here insert the translations of Schiller's "Nadowessiers Todtenlied". This translation is said to be by Bulver, and is as close as could be expected.
BURIAL OF THE CHIEFTAIN.
See on his mat, as if of yore, How life-like seats he here; With the same aspect he wore When life to him was dear. But where the right arm's strength, and where The breath that used to breathe
To the Great Spirit aloft in air The peace-pipe's lusty wreath ?
And where the hawk-like eye, alas! That wont the deer pursue, Along the waves of rippling grass,. Or fields that shone with dew ? Are these the limber, bounding feet That swept the winter's snows? What startled deer was half so fleet Their speed outstripped the roe's.
These hands that once the sturdy bow Could supple from its pride, How stark and helpless hang they now, Adown the stiffened side!
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Yet weal to him! at peace he strays Where never fall the snows, Where o'er the meadow springs the inaize, That mortal never sows.
Where birds are blithe in every brake Where forests teem with deer, Where glide the fish through every lake One chase from year to year. With spirits now he feasts above All left us, to revere
The deeds we cherish with our love; The rest we bury here.
Here bring the last gifts; loud and shrill Wail death-dirge of the brave!
What pleased him most in life may still Give pleasure in the grave. We lay the axe beneath his head He swung when strength was strong, The bear on which his hunger fed- The way from earth is long !
And here, new-sharpened, place the knife Which severed from the clay,
From which the axe had spoiledthe life, The conquered scalp away. The paints that deck the dead bestow, Aye, place them in his hand, That red the kingly shade may glow Amid the spirit land.
It is impossible to enlarge upon all the customs of burial mentioned in the paper of Mr. Yarrow, extending as it does not only to the Indians of the United States or the Great Northwest, but to those of Alaska, Central and South America, and to peoples of similar habits and degrees of civilization, or the want of it, in Africa and Australia, of present and past times. But as an ex- ample of a burial, romantically conceived, and carried out to the fullest possible extent with the ante-mortem wishes of the dead, we quote here from George Catlin " Manners, Customs, etc., of North American Indians," the description of the obsequies of Blackbird, the great Chief of the Omahas: "He requested them to take his body down the river to his favorite haunt, and on the pinnacle of a towering bluff to bury him on the back of his favorite war-horse,
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which was to be buried alive under him, from whence he could see, as he said, "the Frenchmen passing up and down the river in their boats". He owned, among many horses, a noble white steed, that was led to the top of the grass-covered hill, and with great pomp and ceremony. in the presence of the whole nation, and several of the fur-traders, and the Indian agent, he was placed astride of his horse's back, with his bow in his hand, and his shield and quiver slung, with his pipe and his medicine bag, with his supply of dried meat, and his tobacco pouch replenished to last him through the journey to the beautiful hunting grounds of the shades of his fathers, with his flint, his steel, and his tinder to light his pipe by the way; the scalps he had taken from his ene- mies' heads could be trophies for nobody else, and were hung to the bridle of his horse. He was in full dress, and fully equipped, and on his head waved to the last moment his beautiful head- dress of war-eagles' plumes. In this plight, and the last funeral honors having been performed by the medicine-men, every war- rior of his band painted the palm and fingers of his right hand with vermillion, which was stamped and perfectly impressed on the milk-white sides of his devoted horse. This all done, turfs were brought and placed around the feet and legs of the horse, and gradually laid np to its sides, and at last over the back and head of the unsuspecting animal, and last of all over the head, and even the eagle plumes of its valiant rider, where all together have smouldered and remained undisturbed to the present day."
I cannot close this relation of Indian burials without some reference to related customs among prehistoric people in the Old World. Mounds and regular graveyards are not entirely wanting there, but discoveries have been made of burials in swamps, bogs and temporarily overflowed places, of which I could learn nothing similar in this country. Burials in cairns, that is piles of stones were common to the northern parts of Europe, notably England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula. Burial in dolmens or stone-graves, the stones being ar- ranged to form boxes or rude sarcophagi, seems to have been practised from the Baltic to across the Mediterranean, but by no means exclusively. Cairns seems to have served the same pur- pose in some parts of the West, notably in the Dakota country, but dolmens seem to be missing entirely in this country, or have
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so far escaped detection. Cremation prevailed among the prehis- toric Greeks, but the ashes were covered with mounds, as appears from the Iliad and Odyssee, but whether the pyre and the mound were confined to kings and heroes, while common inhumation was the lot of other mortals, we may surmise, but could hardly prove. The Etruscans, the predecessors of the Romans in the occupancy of the Latin parts of Italy, may or may not have practised the same burial customs as the Greeks, but this is not yet conclusively decided. The Arians had a diversity of ways in this matter, as the " Suttee," still in use among the " Hindustanee" seems to point to cremation, and other circumstances would indicate inhumation. The Parsees still bury in "living sepulchers," exposing their dead to be devoured by vultures in the towers of silence.
With these relations we close the relation of the burials, and turn to tha mourning observances among Indians. These observ- ances consisted of wailings, sacrifices, feasts, offering of food, dan- ces, songs, games, graveposts, fires and other ceremonies. Among the Natchez, and probably among some other Indians west of the Mississippi, the favorite wife of a departed chief had to accompany him to the land of the hereafter. Among other nations one or more horses were sacrificed. Sioux, Crows, Blackfeet and perhaps other tribes inflict wounds upon their arms, legs, and other parts of their bodies, amputate a joint of a finger, tear out their hair, cut it short. The description of mourning for a Crow chief in the autobiography of James Beckwourth is very lively and even revol- ting, but it is probably exaggerated, and possibly all invented. The eastern Indians mourned about one year, and at the feast of the dead, of course, repeated their wailings. Dances and songs were common methods of expressing their grief, sometimes games of a gymnastic character with competition for prizes accompanied the funeral, and there may have been some fervor in all these pro- ceedings if the deceased really was of much consequence to the tribe. Food was offered to the corpse before and after burial for some time; some tribes had the custom of maintaining a fire upon the grave, or under the scaffold, probably some longer or shorter time, according to the rank of the dead, or as convenience might serve. The men do not seem to have been obliged to mourn very long, though it might have suited them well enough, or at least some of them, to have an extra spell of idleness on pretense of
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mourning. Chippewa men signified their mourning by blackening their faces, in other tribes similar customs may have prevailed. Among the Choctaws, a southern tribe, the mourning occupied one moon and during that time the husband or widow went every morning and evening to the grave which was kept (partially at least) open for that length of time. At the end of that moon he or she went in the evening to do some niore vehement wailing; that was the last cry. In the mean time neighbors and friends had gathered at the house for a feast of eating, dancing and general revelry in which the mourner was expected to participate, and this expectation was probably met promptly. After that ceremony the relict might mary again as soon as convenient.
Quite different it is among the Chippewas. A widow, es- pecially a young one, is expected to take a stick of wood, some- thing like two to three feet long and about five inches in diameter, dress it in her best clothes, while she must wear her worst, and this is henceforth her husband for at least a year, though she may at any time, even at the grave, become the wife of an unmarried brother-in-law, if he demands her. This badge of mourning she must carry until some member of her husband's family requests her to deliver it up, when she is released from further mourning and allowed to marry again. If, as might naturally be expected, she gets tired of that rag-baby, and begins to flirt, or even contracts a marriage outside of the prescribed family circle, she is punished by her female relatives, here as among other nations always ready to mind what is none of their business. Funeral feasts, like other feasts of the Indians, were performances of immoderate eating, followed, and sometimes preceded, by dancing as immoderate. The superstitions imputed to the Indians they probably possessed to at least some extent, but very often does the imputation betray the narrowmindedness of the person making it. As to the dances, they occur at every expected or unexpected occasion, and quite likely there was a dance for the dead among them, peculiar, it is probable to every tribe. Their deadsongs were wails, sometimes degenerating into howling, common to all, or many barbarous na- tions. The games connected with burials were formerly of gym- nastic kind among the Iroquois-Huron confederacies, but in other places they seem to have been mere gambling, as among the Wahpe- ton and Sisseton Sioux. This gambling was carried on by throw-
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ing up marked plum stones, but card playing has been substituted for it. They call it the ghost-gamble. The prizes are small but many, so as to give each Indian invited a chance to win some- thing. One Indian represents the ghost and plays against each of the others. As soon as one Indian has beaten the ghost at the game, he takes his prize and another is called in. Gambling has been the besetting sin of Indians and all other peoples of barbarous habit, and those just emerging from that state of society. That it still adheres to the human race in the highest degrees of civiliza- tion can not be denied, but in states of that character the more dangerous practices of it are prohibited by law. How much, or how little such laws effect, we know. The Indians, if they knew it, might be proud of their successful imitation of their white breth- ren. But those who wish to get an insight into the game of Bowl and Counters which is a sort of dice-throwing, will find a satisfac- tory description of it, in Chapter XVI of the Song of Hiawatha entitled " Pau-puck-keewis." With the exception of the names of the pieces, the description will probably apply to most Indian tribes. That they are not dismayed at the losses in gambling ap- pears from a notice by one of the early Jesuit missionaries, that some Hurons of his village returned stark naked at night through three feet of snow from such a gambling expedition, laugh- ing and jesting, just as if they had been in luck.
So far we have contemplated the Indians at peace and in their social and civic relations. But with most of them the condition of peace was not very frequently enjoyed, though perhaps, our imag- ination misleads us in supposing that they were constantly at war. We see from the treatise nn " Wyandot Government", that every ablebodied Indian owed military service to his tribe in times of war, but we might still have some doubt, whether in all their war- like expeditions they called on every man to participate. It ap- pears that sometimes only small bands under temporary chiefs went abroad, mostly against hereditary enemies, but occasionally against tribes, with whom their own tribe was at a truce, or at actual peace. It frequently happened that a tribe had to apolo- gize and to make reparation for depredations committed by such predatory bands or single individuals, in order to avoid a gen- eral war.
A great many of the earlier Indian wars were undoubtedly
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the result of a mistaken policy on the part of the Whites. A notable instance of this is the long series of wars carried on by the Iroquois against the French and all their Indian allies. The policy of Champlain and most of his successors was to create en- mity among the Canadian Indians and those farther south, so as to prevent the diversion of the fur-trade to the Dutch and English settlements. The French themselves were probably friendly enough to the Indians within their own territory, but this policy of theirs accomplished, in the course of time the destruction of those whom they pretended to love and promised to protect. It is true that it also served to diminish and finally almost to an- nihilate the victors, but at the time this result was reached, the French were no longer in the position to profit by it. When Can- ada and the Great West had to be surrendered to the victorious British, it was certainly done with the mental reservation, to take it from them again at the first favorable opportunity. It may, however, be admitted that the French government did not by any overt act encourage the resistance of the Indians, which culmin- ated in the conspiracy of Pontiac, for even if it had wanted to prevent it, the power to do so was for the time gone. Not so with the personal influence of those French, fur-traders, and their de- pendents, who remained in the country, and to whom the Indians were wont to look for advice and assistance. This influence re- mained, and, the Indians being convinced by time that the res- toration of the French power in the northern country would no longer be possible, this same influence was enlisted by Great Bri- tain in its war against the United States, and continued after the surrender of the country east of the Mississippi, west of Lake Huron and south of Lake Superior to the United States. The ac- tion of the British in retaining the principal forts in the western territories for nearly thirteen years after the peace of Paris of 1783 showed clearly that the transfer was considered only temporary. The actual sufferers by this state of uncertainty were, of course, the Indians, who relied still on the power of Great Britain for pro- tection and considered the forts and the traders as their natural support. When, finally, this illusion was dispersed, most of the French still remained hostile to the United States, and took the first occasion to manifest this hostility by openly assisting the Eng- lish in the surprise and capture of Mackinaw, Green Bay and
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Prairie du Chien. They could rely on the Indians. But indepen dent of political intrigues, the Indians were always in the way of getting involved in war. Their own political organization, so to speak, was founded on the responsibility of the clan for the acts of an individual. They chose to apply this principle to their rela- tion or intercourse with Europeans. If any one of these hap- pened to offend them they retaliated upon the first individual of that race, sometimes, perhaps, because the retaliation of the state or country to which the victim belonged was slow to overtake them. But, whatever may have been the causes of war in the many thousand different cases, it must be conceded that the Indi- ans very readily accepted the offer of it, and were but seldom em- barrassed for a cause or pretext. We can not expect that they should always have observed the ceremony of announcing their hostile intentions to their enemies. Their mode of warfare did not favor this way of proceeding. Most of them were undoubt- edly personally brave, but they knew the value of a surprise, and that the art of war consists in being the strongest at a given op- portunity. The chase of the wild animals, too, had at the time when their weapons were inadequate to killing game at a distance, habituated them to lie in ambush and to approach as stealthily as possible. Their number being never very large, they were prone to prevent the possibility of losses, even if they were sure of a numerical superiority at a given time.
Hence they avoided a pitched battle, if they could, fought from cover, if the situation afforded any, and were frequently sub- ject to sudden panics. Superstition, also, had a marked influence upon their mode of fighting and their stratagems. It is usually considered that they had no fortifications, but the French and Hurons learned to their surprise and damage, that the villages of the Iroquois were not only fortified, but also provided with such ammunition for defense as the occasion of a siege might demand, and circumstances did afford. Most permanent villages had a palisade, which sometimes was only a single row of posts set into the ground upright, but among the tribes of the Iroquois-Huron relationship the palisades were often double and treble, interlaced at the top and almost a wooden wall, especially as there was often a sheeting of the heaviest bark procurable on the inside of the palisade. A ditch, too, was often around such palisades and, con-
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sidering their imperfect tools, we must admire their art as well as their perseverence in the construction of such defenses. Very often, however, the savages trusted too much to natural advantages, leaving certain sides of their fortifications unfinished, or entirely undefended, because approach to them was naturally difficult, or seemed impossible, on account of a deep and rapid stream, or a broad lake or pond, or because the unfinished part formed a rocky precipice. But not only had they learned to build these perma- nent fortifications, for at the time when better tools, procured from the Europeans, enabled them to execute the work rapidly enough, they fortified even their temporary camps, and fought from a space enclosed with an abattis, or from walls made of logs hasitly thrown together. This may have been the tactics of such tribes as inhabited wooded countries, the tribes of the prairies could but seldom resort to them. Crude and weak as such defenses would appear in modern warfare, they were most decidedly efficient against portable weapons, bows and arrows and even muskets. The soldiers in the war or the Rebellion often made use of similar constructions for purposes of defense. One weak point the Indi- ans presented in their excursions, and, as might be inferred, at home. They never set any guards. They lay down to sleep, all equally tired, and equally sure that no. attack would happen dur- ing the night. According to their own custom they were right but in their wars with civilized men they often found themselves outwitted on account of this neglect. As the Indian went into the fight for revenge and his passions excited to the highest pitch, he fought desperately, cruelly and mercilessly. It must, however, be admitted, that the necessity of fighting at close range, brought the alternative of either to kill or to be killed. He might deprive the foe in his front of one weapon and then spare his life, but that foe might still attack him with some other weapon; the foe must therefore be killed as soon as possible. To be taken prisoner was, in most cases worse than to be killed, hence the defense was as desperate as the attack. Prisoners were nevertheless taken, usu- ally after the main fight was over, or when defense was impossible and not attempted. The dead were scalped, and cases of scalping those who only seemed dead, must have been frequent.
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