Читать книгу Canada - Jean Newton McIlwraith - Страница 5

HE oldest Canadians are the Indians. For many hundreds of years before white men had set foot upon the western continent red men had found homes there, both in North and South America.

Where did they come from at the first? Their high cheek-bones, Roman noses, small, deep-set eyes, and straight hair make them very unlike the darker, woolly-haired negroes from Africa, and very different also from the white-skinned races of Europe. It is among the Tartars and other wild tribes of Eastern Asia that are seen faces which might pass for North American Indians, and that is one reason why some of the men who have made a study of the subject think that the first people of America came from Asia.

The two continents are so close together up at the north-west, it is not hard to cross from one to the other on the ice at Behring Strait. Probably the Eskimos came that way. These natives are the same, whether on the Siberian or the Alaskan side of the Strait, and they occupy also the Arctic regions of North America, coming as far south as the shores of Hudson's Bay, and eastward to the coasts of Greenland and Labrador.

The name Eskimo is an Indian word, meaning "Eaters of raw flesh," and these people consume much fat and oil too, but very few vegetables. An Eskimo might pass for a white man if his face were washed, but he thinks that many layers of grease keep out the cold; and he does not believe in house-cleaning either. He is generally under five feet in height, has a flat, broad face, and a stay-at-home disposition. He would rather live in his snow hut up in the frozen north and hunt the whale and the walrus for his food and clothing than come southward to sunnier climes to quarrel with the Indian for his hunting grounds. It may have been the Indian who drove him up there in the first place, but most students think that the Eskimo was the last comer.

No one knows, but there are reasons for imagining, that if the people of Asia did cross to America they did not all come at once. There would be a family, perhaps, of one tribe driven from island to island of the Pacific Ocean which landed at last on some part of North or South America. This may have happened many ages ago, before the seas and the continents had settled into their present form, when there may have been less open water to cross. The currents of the Pacific Ocean run towards America, and most of the winds blow in that direction.

Whether landed by accident or driven out of their early homes by war or by want of food, it is probable that these emigrants settled some of the islands of the Pacific and came even so far as South America before the less fertile parts of Asia were filled up. The first people of America have been there a very long time. The earliest arrivals were not so wild and savage as the later lot. When the Spaniards landed on the coast of South America they were astonished at the wealth and cleverness of the natives, many relics of which are still to be seen. In North America it is the Mound-builders who have left traces of their work, even so far north as Lake Superior, where they worked the copper mines. The mounds of earth they threw up, and which one sees in different parts of the United States, may have been churches or burial-places, though they were more probably defences against their enemies. These enemies would likely be the first of the Indians, who would drive the Mound-builders farther and farther south, and at last put an end to them altogether.

These are some of the guesses white men have made on how the red men came to America, but nothing can be told with certainty about it, because the Indians of old could not write and did not keep any stories of their race in a form that can be understood by the people of to-day. We study the Indian skull, his religion, his language, his features, his habits, and some of us think he came from Asia, while some think he did not. All that is known for certain is that he was there when the first Europeans landed. Those bold sailors were looking for a passage to the East Indies, and when they found land where no land was known to be, they thought it must be some part of India, and so they called the natives Indians.

There were a great many different tribes, speaking a great many different tongues, but those that lived in the country now called Canada were mostly of the Algonquin family, who bore the name of Micmacs in Nova Scotia, Abenakis in New Brunswick, Ottawas and Montagnais in the province of Quebec, Ojibwas in Ontario, Blackfeet and Crees in the North-west. Tribes of the same family, settled farther south, used to till the soil, but the Canadian Algonquins lived by hunting, and when they had killed with their bows and arrows all the game birds, the deer, and the bears within a certain district they would roll up their tents, which were merely skins stretched on poles, and move elsewhere. Sometimes they moved for another cause—the Iroquois.

This was the family of Indians who lived to the south of Lake Ontario in what is now the northern part of the State of New York, between the Hudson and the Genesee rivers. There were five divisions of them, and therefore they were called the Five Nation Indians—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. Though not nearly so large a family as the Algonquin, the Iroquois gained strength by their union, and they were the most fierce and cruel, as well as the bravest and wisest, of all the Indians. If they had joined hands with the Algonquins, instead of fighting them to the death, they might have kept the white men from settling this country for a century or two. But to go to war was the most important part of an Indian's life; he cared for nothing else; and the aim of the Iroquois was to kill off every other nation but his own five.

Family fights are always more bitter than those between strangers, and so the wars between the Iroquois and Hurons were the most savage on record because both belonged to the same stock. The Hurons, who lived between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, made friends with the Algonquins to gain their help against the Iroquois, but the Neutral Nation would not join them. That family was also related to the Iroquois, and lived between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. They were called neutral by the French because they did not side with either the Hurons or the Iroquois in their wars. It might have been safer for themselves to have joined the stronger party, because in the end the Iroquois killed or adopted the whole of them.

Captives from other nations kept up the number of the Iroquois, whose losses by war were, of course, very great. If a brave who went out to fight did not come back, his parents or his wife, his brother or his sister would usually adopt in his place one of the prisoners brought in by the war party, and this man would be bound to make his own the family which had thus saved him from a horrible death by torture, even though he should have to fight against his own friends ever afterwards. White men were sometimes adopted by the Indians in this way, and often they did not want to leave them, even when they had the chance.

The Hurons and Iroquois lived a more settled life than the Algonquins. They grew Indian corn around their villages and laid some of it up for winter use. Their houses were made so long that seven or eight families, and even so many as twenty could live under one roof. The sides of these lodges were made of long poles, slim enough to be bent together at the top, and to be placed also along the sides, crossways, to make a frame for the big pieces of bark that were tied on to keep out the rain and snow. The inside was a long, wide passage, with an open skylight the full length of the roof to let out the smoke, for down the middle were the fires, one between every two families, to warm them in winter and to cook their food all the year round. On either side, next the wall, was the long, low platform on which the Indians slept in the same clothes, made of the skins of animals, that they wore by day.

There was always a head man in each tribe, and he took counsel of others noted for being either great fighters or wise thinkers, but he never did more than advise or persuade the warriors. Each one could go on the war-path when he saw fit, alone or with two or three of his fellows, and the smaller the party the more glory was gained by the scalps they brought home. The custom of taking off the skin and top hair of an enemy arose, so say the Indians, at the time that a famous chief promised to give his beautiful daughter to the man who would bring him the dead body of the chief of another tribe, whom he hated. The young man who killed the enemy was hotly pursued by the friends of the dead chieftain when he was bringing him home to the living one to claim the reward, and as the body seemed to become heavier and heavier he cut it down lighter, bit by bit, till he arrived before his employer with only the scalp-lock in his hand. That was enough to show that he had done the deed.

Another custom of long standing among the Indians was the use of wampum, which was first made from bits of shells, but afterwards from beads got from white men. Necklaces of wampum were highly prized by warriors and squaws alike, and every clause of a treaty or agreement of any sort had to be sealed with a belt of wampum or it did not hold good. It was used as money too.

If a man killed one of his own tribe he was not killed himself, but was obliged to make presents of wampum and other things to the family of the man he had murdered. So when he wanted a wife he bought her from her father, and she became his drudge and slave for the rest of her life. It was the squaws who planted the corn when any was planted; they who made those marvels of lightness and toughness, the birch-bark canoes, as well as the bows and arrows for their lords, and carried the heaviest burdens at the portages. That name was given by the French to the places where canoes and all they contained had to be lifted out of the water and carried through the woods, to avoid rapids and waterfalls, or to reach the next one of the lakes and streams which were the only roads.

Indian babies were tied up between two stout strips of bark and carried about on their mothers' backs. Lame or sickly children died young—often helped out of the way. So were the old people, who sometimes begged their sons and daughters to make an end to them when they were no longer strong enough to endure the long, hard marches in search of food. In spite of these customs, the Indians were fond of their parents, their brothers and sisters, and indeed of the whole clan to which they belonged. This was shown in the strong, though useless, means they used to cure a sick person, the savage way they would fight to revenge one who was killed, and the care they took of the bodies of friends, after death.

Every ten or twelve years there was a great Feast of the Dead, when all the different clans of a tribe would bring the bones of their relations to one spot, where speeches would be made, relating how brave and how useful these people had been when alive. All the bones, as well as the bodies of more recent dead, would then be buried together in a deep pit lined with furs, and beside them would be placed bows and arrows, kettles, food, wampum, trinkets—anything that the spirits might be likely to need on their journey to the land of the hereafter. No Indian believed that a man died like a dog; he was more likely to believe that his dog lived for ever, like a man.

The natives on the Pacific coast of the continent are a lower type than the Eastern tribes. They flatten the heads of their children by tying boards on the front of their skulls while still soft, and when they grow up they seem to have no foreheads. The men are not tall and sinewy, like the tribes of the plains to the east of the Rocky Mountains, but are short and thick-set, with very strong arms, gained by generations of paddling, for they live chiefly by fishing. The boat is not the birch-bark canoe but the dug-out, made from a single log of one of the big trees of the country, and sometimes it is ornamented at the bow or stern by a rude carving of bird or beast. With a mild climate and plenty of fish and game near by, the "Siwash," as the British Columbia Indian is called, has never been such a rover nor such a fierce fighter as his brother to the eastward used to be.

Against all the scalping and burning and torturing that white men have suffered from Indians must be placed the evil done to the red men by strong liquor and by the small pox, both unknown before Europeans came. It must be remembered, too, how much the early settlers learned from them. The First Families never despaired of doing a thing for want of proper tools; they made tools out of what was at hand, and that was the beginning of American cleverness at invention. The Indians taught them how to trap and to shoot fur-bearing animals, and to fish through holes in the ice; how to follow a trail through the forest which ordinary eyes could not see, and how to find their way out if lost in the woods, by examining the bark of the trees to see on which side it grew thickest, for that was the north; how to smoke tobacco and to grow potatoes; how to raise Indian corn under the standing forest trees to keep themselves from starving until such time as the fields needed for the smaller grains could be ploughed and planted, and how, in many ways to adapt themselves to the climate and circumstances of a new country.