"An Interesting Representative of a Vanishing Race | ||
AN INDIAN'S OBSERVATION ON THE MATING OF GEESE.
Having studied the habits and languages of beasts, birds, and insects of forest and field since early childhood, I have obtained a knowledge of them not learned in books.
In this article I shall present a few interesting peculiarities of the goose family. In springtime of each year these fowls have their courtship and marriage. All the geese-men select the oldest goose-woman of the flock or society, age being admired above all other qualifications of a good wife. Hence, in view of so many suitors for the oldest goose-woman, it can only be settled in a fair field fight in single combats. Everything must be fair on both sides. Two men geese march out in front of the flock, straighten up in front of each other, firmly grasping in their bills the feathers on each other's necks, while they commence pounding each other with their wings in a most brutal manner, being cheered by the flock in wild strains of admiration. When one gives up the contest, another takes his turn, and so on until there is but one acknowledged hero, and he, amid cheers and shouts, marches off with his choice, the oldest dame goose of the flock, who congratulates him on his success, telling him how long and well he fought, and how proud she is of him; promising how she will strive to be a good wife, on account of
Fac-simile of letter written by the chief of the Pottawatomie Indians.
[Description: A hand-written letter from Simon Pokagon to B.O. Flowers.]After the last pair have reluctantly agreed to become man and wife,
Indian mat made of birch bark, colored quills, and sweet grass, and presented with napkin ring to Mrs. Flower by Chief Pokagon.
[Description: An oval-shaped woven mat decorated with stitched fir branches and pine cones.]I have admired the first opening flowers of spring, and joyed to see young lambs skip and play, yet never has my admiration with joy been so moved as when I've seen these infant goslings by their parents led into the waters of some stream or lake, and gently, with their parents, float about as if moved by some power divine, the very semblance of themselves just beneath the surface of the rippling waves.
And to myself oft have said, "How strange it is!" Before the
marriage vow is said these geese-men select their wives without
their consent and fight it out against all rivalry, but when
settled down in life all "man's rights" are laid aside and "woman's
rights" are never born, but "equal rights" are all in all.
CHIEF POKAGON.
Author of "Red Men's Greeting,"
Hartford, Mich.
Mrs. Flower had prepared notes for a sketch of the life of this venerable head of a once powerful tribe, when she was stricken with a severe illness from overwork. I communicated these facts to the chief, and received the following touching and appreciative letter, which is elsewhere reproduced in fac-simile:
HARTFORD, MICH., Sept. 12, 1895.
MY DEAR SIR:
Your favor of the 9th at hand.
As I read what you said of your wife's illness my heart
responded, "How very sad that one so young, so fair and wise,
should suffer so, and perhaps it has all been brought about in
laboring for others." I am fully satisfied to accept her
intentions for what she intended to say of me.
I am getting to be an old man, passing over the threshold of
my home here into the wigwam beyond where there are many rooms. I
trust and believe that your wife may fully recover, and that she
may be spared many years to benefit her race. If you think it will
not disturb her, say to her that she has my best wishes and the
prayers of my heart.
Very Respectfully yours,
S. POKAGON.
This noble representative of the red man has been a strenuous advocate of temperance and virtue. On one occasion he wrote:
When I am gone I wish no stone to rise above my last resting-place as oft is done, to tell, not what men were, but what they should have been. However, I desire to leave upon the printed page an epitaph which all
In touching upon the subject of the Indian, even in a cursory manner, I cannot forbear expressing my strong convictions in regard to this race, which, as it appears to me, has been so ruthlessly treated by our civilization,—a civilization claiming to be based on a universal brotherhood. To me few subjects are at once so humiliating, pathetic, and essentially tragic as the history of the Indian so rapidly disappearing from our continent in the light of the treatment received by him from a civilization which claims to follow the meek and lowly Galilean.
It has been observed that the early Spanish conquerors of the Western Hemisphere used the sword and the cross; the writer sagely remarking that after the sword had done its work the cross was raised over the lifeless form. Nor have we of the more northern climes much to boast of over the Spaniards. It is true that the treatment meted out to the Indians by such Christ-like souls as William Penn and Roger Williams stands in bright relief against the inky background of betrayal, appropriation of the Indian's land and slaughter of his people; but such instances, while revealing the potentiality of conquest on the spiritual plane, its feasibility and practicability, are merely the exceptions to the rule which mark the savagery of a civilization which claims to follow the mandates of the Sermon on the Mount. It is true that the Indian retaliated, and was in many cases the aggressor, if we can call people the aggressors who object to having their native land taken from them by aliens. This sentiment has been well put from the Indians' point of view in the following stanza:
you struck out from wild creation's face?
Freedom!—the self-same freedom you adore—
Bade us defend our violated shore.
Of the savagery and brutality exhibited by the Indian in many cases, I would merely observe that it is manifestly unfair to judge them by the standards of a people who have enjoyed Christian civilization for many centuries and who have behind them the lessons and warnings, the glory and the gloom of Roman, Grecian, Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian
The News of Plymouth, Mich., on Feb. 8, 1893, observed editorially that "the elder Pokagon was one of the chiefs to whom was ceded by treaty the ground on which Chicago now stands, and which was afterward conveyed back to the government through conniving of the swindling agents, for a consideration that amounted to about three cents per acre."
"An Interesting Representative of a Vanishing Race | ||