| | 1 | Author: | Flint
Timothy
1780-1840 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Shoshonee Valley  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 | | | | Description: | The Shoshonee are a numerous and powerful
tribe of Indians, who dwell in a long and narrow vale
of unparalleled wildness and beauty of scenery, between
the two last western ridges of the Rocky Mountains,
on the south side of the Oregon, or as the inhabitants
of the United States choose to call it, the Columbia.
They are a tall, finely formed, and comparatively
fair haired race, more mild in manners, more
polished and advanced in civilization, and more conversant
with the arts of municipal life, than the contiguous
northern tribes. Vague accounts of them by
wandering savages, hunters, and coureurs du bois, have
been the sources, most probably, whence have been
formed the western fables, touching the existence of
a nation in this region, descended from the Welsh.
In fact many of the females, unexposed by their condition
to the sun and inclemencies of the seasons, are
almost as fair, as the whites. The contributions,
which the nation has often levied from their neighbors
the Spaniards, have introduced money and factitious
wants, and a consequent impulse to build after the
fashions, to dress in the clothes, and to live after the
modes of civilized people, among them. From them
they have obtained either by barter or war, cattle,
horses, mules, and the other domestic animals, in abundance.
Maize, squashes, melons and beans they supposed
they had received as direct gifts from the Wah-condah,
or Master of Life. The cultivation of these,
and their various exotic exuberant vegetables, they
had acquired from surveying the modes of Spanish
industry and subsistence. Other approximations to
civilization they had unconsciously adopted from numerous
Spanish captives, residing among them, in a
relation peculiar to the red people, and intermediate
between citizenship and slavery. But the creole
Spanish, from whom they had these incipient
germs of civilized life, were themselves a simple and
pastoral people, a century behind the Anglo Americans
in modern advancement. The Shoshonee were,
therefore, in a most interesting stage of existence, just
emerging from their own comparative advancements
to a new condition, modelled to the fashion of their
Spanish neighbors. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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