 | CHAPTER I. The Shoshonee Valley |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
There unnamed mountains hide their peaks in mist,
And devious wild streams roll.
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.
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.
Their common hunting grounds are on the wide
grass plains, stretching from their native mountains to
the western sea. Elk, antelopes, mountain sheep,
deer and water fowls are their most abundant game
on their own side of the mountains. Along their
smaller streams and mountain torrents they trap the
beaver, otter and muskrat. Ermine, sables, and four
species of foxes, constituted the chief material of
their peltries. They had often descended the Oregon
to pursue seals and the other hairy dwellers in the
depths of the sea. The traces of their footsteps, and
their temporary huts were frequently seen amidst the
dark hemlock forests on the Pacific shore. These
free rangers of the deserts, as they saw the immense
fronts, range behind range, of the ocean surf rolling
onward, to whiten, and burst on the sand at their feet,
had their own wild conceptions of the illimitable
grandeur, and the mysterious and resistless power of
the ever heaving element. They nerved their Herculean
frames by bathing in the pure waters.
Variety and change are indispensables in the sum
of their wants. To diversify their range and their
monotonous thoughts, they set their faces towards the
rising sun, and marched gaily along the grass plains,
to scale the cold summits and breast the keen air of
the mountains interposing between them and the hundred
branches of the long Missouri, along whose valleys
they purposed to course the buffalo. Hence
their wide range of survey, the variegated modes of
their existence, their different objects of pursuit, their
alternate converse with ocean, river, valley and mountain,
and the various mental tension necessary to diversify
their meditations, according to their range and
object, gave them the intellectual superiority, in
comparison with the more stationary Indians, of travellers
capable of a certain amount of reasoning, comparison
and abstraction.
Their chief village, or metropolis, will be hereafter
described. The great body of their nation dwelt
near it, so that the mass of the people could be assembled,
on an emergency, in half a day. Their free
domain comprised an extent of five hundred leagues.
The country of their compact and actual settlement
is a vale, than which the earth cannot show one more
beautiful or more secluded, the vale of the Sewasserna.
This stream, in which the poets would have
placed the crystal caves of the Naiads of the ancient
days, comes winding down in a clear, full, strong, and
yet equable and gentle tide, from the mountains. Up
its pure and ice formed waters ascend, in their season,
countless numbers of the finest salmon; and in its
deep and circling eddies play trout, pike, carp, tench,
and all the varieties of fish of cold mountain rivers.
The Indian, as he glides down the stream, sees the
shining rocks at the bottom, covered with tresses of
green waving moss, at the depth of twenty feet. This
circumstance, along with its transparency, unquestionably
furnishes the etymology of its name, which imports
gold fishes, and beautiful and undescribed finny
tribes, dart from their coverts along the white sand,
flit from the shadow of the descending canoe, or turn
their green and gold to the light, as they fan, as it
were, with their purple wings, or repose in the sun
beams that find their way through the branches that
overhang the banks.
A splendid variety of wild ducks, the glossy grey
mallard, the beautiful, blue winged teal, the green
crested widgeon, the little active dippers, the brilliant
white diver, appropriate to those waters, in numbers
and diversities, which the naturalist only could class,
the solitary loon, raising his lugubrious and ill omened
note in unsocial seclusion, the stately swan, sailing in
his pride and milky lustre slowly along the stream,
the tall, sand hill crane, looking at a distance precisely
like a miniature camel, the white pelican with
his immense pouch in front, innumerable flocks of
various species of geese, in short an unknown variety
of water-fowls with their admirable sailing structures,
their brilliant, variegated and oiled vestments, their
singular languages and cries, were seen gliding among
the trees, pattering their broad bills amidst the grasses
and weeds on the shores; or, roused by the intrusion
of man among them, their wings whistle by in two disparting
flocks, the one tending up, and the other down
the stream.
It would be useless to think of enumerating the
strange and gay birds, that sing, play, build, chide
and flutter among the branches of the huge sycamores
and peccans. Among the more conspicuous is the
splendid purple cardinal, with its glossy and changeable
lustre of black crest, the gold colored oriole,
looking down into its long, hanging nest, the flamingo
darting up the stream, like an arrow of flame, the
little peacock of trees, the wakona, or bird of paradise,
the parti-colored jay, screaming its harsh notes, as in
`tapping the hollow beech tree,' the ortolan
in countless flocks, in plumage of the most exquisite
softness of deep, shining black, the paroquets with
their shrill screams, and their splendor of green and
gold, numberless humming birds, plunging their
needle-shaped bills into the bignonia, bustards, grouse,
turkies, partridges, in a word an infinite variety of
those beautiful and happy tenants of the forest and
the prairie, that are formed to sing through their
transient, but happy day among the branches.
The mountains, on either side of the valley, tower
into a countless variety of peaks, cones, and inaccessible
rocky elevations, from six to ten thousand feet
high. More than half of them are covered with the
accumulated snows and ices of centuries, which, glittering
in mid air, show in the sun beams in awful contrast
with the black and rugged precipices, that arrest
the clouds. From these sources pour down the thousand
mountain torrents, that fill the Sewasserna with
waters of such coldness, that, even in the high heats
of summer, if you bend from your position under the
shade of the peccan, and dip your hand in the water,
thus collected from numberless and nameless mountains,
the invigorating chill is, as if you plunged it in
ice-water. The rocks, cliffs and boulders, partly of
granite and partly of volcanic character, black and
rugged in some places; in others porphyritic, needle,
or spire shaped, shoot up into pinnacles, domes and
towers, and still in other places, lie heaped up in huge
masses, as though shook by earthquakes from the summits,
where they had originally defied the storms;
and now show, as the ruins of a world. Yet between
these savage and terrific peaks, unvisited, except by
the screaming eagle, are seen the most secluded
and sweet valleys in the world. Here and there appear
circular clumps of hemlocks, spruces, mountain
cedars, silver firs, and above all the glorious Norwegian
showing like a level, cultivated meadow, covered with
a rich and short grass, an infinite variety of plants and
flowers, among which wild sage, ladies' slippers, columbines,
and blue violets are the most conspicuous.
The breeze, that is borne down from the mountains,
always sighs through these ever-green thickets, playing,
as it were, the deep and incessant voluntary of nature
to the Divinity. Under the dark brown shade
of these noble trees repose, or browse, elk, antelopes
and mountain sheep. In numerous little lakes and
ponds, where the trout spring up, and dart upon the
fly and grasshopper, the verdure of the shores is
charmingly re-painted, in contrast with the threatening
and savage sublimity of the mountain, whose summits
shoot down as deep in the abyss, as they stand
forth high in the air. As you turn your eyes from
the landscape, so faithfully pencilled on these sleeping
waters, to see the substance of these shadows, the
view dazzled with the radiance of the sun beams,
playing on the perpetual snows in the regions of mid
air, reposes with solace and delight on the deep blue
of the sky, that is seen between, undimmed, except by
the occasional passing of the bald eagle, or falcon
hawks, as they cross your horizon, sailing slowly from
the summit of one mountain to another.
In a valley of this sort, spreading ten leagues in
length, from south to north, and sustaining an average
width of a league, dwelt the Shoshonee, and their
subdued allies, the Shienne. Beside the bisection of
the Sewasserna, it is separated into two regular belts,
or terrace plains. The partition between the two
terraces is a prodigious, brilliant colored lime stone
wall, rising fifty paces east of the Sewasserna, which
meanders through the valley from south to north,
seeking its junction with the Oregon. This singular
wall, from a tradition, that a large party of Black-feet
savages were once driven, after a severe defeat, to
more than fifty of them were dashed in pieces, is
called in Shoshonee Wes-ton-tchalee, or the fatal
leap. It has a general elevation of at least three
hundred feet; and shoots up among the hemlocks and
cedars into turrets, pinnacles, spires, cupolas and
domes, as though here were the remains of some ancient
and depopulated city, with its temples and towers,
defying time, in everlasting stone. Conforming
to a common analogy of such walls, when they form
the bluff of a river in an alluvial valley, it had an
immense curvature within, and the summit projected
in the form of a half arch, nearly a hundred feet beyond
the perpendicular of the base, forming for a
distance of many miles an alcove of inexpressible
grandeur, shielded from all the inclemencies of the
seasons, except in front, and even that was walled in
with the ever-green branches and the lofty columns
of hemlocks and pines, of a thickness and depth of
verdure, to create a solemn twilight at noon day.
One would think, that the very court and throne of
echo was held in this vast rotunda. The solemn and
swelling whisper of the breeze, as it rose, and sunk
away in the ever-greens, was magnified here to the
anthem stops of an organ. The traveller in the wilderness
sees a thousand places, where nature has
method in her seeming play. The showing in this
strange spot was, as of a succession of ancient castles
and alcoves, the grandeur and extent of which mocked
all the petty contrivances of human art.
The Shoshonee and Shienne, with a tact and calculation
very unlike the general heedlessness and
want of forecast of the savages, had selected their winter,
and what might be called their permanent habitations,
in this noble range of rotundas. Trees, with
straight and branchless shafts of an hundred feet,
marked the divisions between family and family. A
divisions, and extended to the base. The ceiling was
of bark, and wrought with that dexterity and neatness,
which that people always put in requisition,
when they intend ornament. Vistas, cut at regular
intervals through the thicket and quite to the banks
of the Sewasserna, at once gave light to the dwellings,
furnished a view and a path to the river and the green
and open plain on the opposite bank, and marked
off the bounds and the compartments of the different
families. Screens of beautifully painted rush work
were sometimes used to exclude the inclemency of
some of the winter days. But, such was the depth
and security of the shelter from the extremes of heat,
or cold, such the extent of the provision in this
work of nature for habitancy, that the temperature
in this generally equable climate must be severe indeed,
when artificial exclusion of the cold, or kindling
of fires was necessary for comfort. Such were their
winter dwellings. Their summer houses were on the
upper belt, overhung by the eastern mountains on the
right, and looking down upon the Sewasserna and the
green vale below on the left. Here they pitched
large and cone-shaped tents, neatly formed either of
rushes, or buffalo skins. The terrace above was an
alluvial plain of a soil still richer, and of a mould still
blacker and more tender, than that below. Noble
peccan and persimon trees shaded their tents. Paw-paw
shrubberies marked off their limits in long
squares; and here, amidst a profusion of wild flowers,
and under the embowering foliage of wild grape-vines,
they passed their summers. At present they
dwelt secure from the fear of any foe. But it had
not always been so. The Indians of the remote north,
united with the Blackfeet, and finding friends in their
immediate neighbors, the Shienne, had formerly been
formidable enemies; and in the days of their fore-fathers,
hide, and, appended from the hemlock trunks above,
had constituted a rope ladder, by which, when danger
was apprehended, they fled from their summer
tents to their ropes, and, like opossums evading their
pursuers, they all dropped in a few moments to the
unassailable fastnesses of their winter retreats.
Nature furnished them with inexhaustible supplies
of prairie potatoes and other esculent roots, grapes,
wild fruits, and strawberries. In summer they speared
an ample supply of salmon, with which the Sewasserna
abounded, pickled their buffalo humps and
tongues, and smoked and jerked their elk and deer's
flesh and hams. Sea fowl, turkies, bustards, and the
smaller kinds of game and fresh venison rarely failed
them at any period of the year. But in the winter,
their provisions all laid in, their tallow, their seal and
sea lion's oil provided for lights, and, in addition, a
huge supply of the splinters of fat pine, they gave
themselves up to visiting, journies of amusement,
trapping the otter, beaver and muskrat, and just so
much hunting, as furnished fresh venison, and offered
diversion. The vast alcove, that arched over them,
defied the storms; and during the long evenings, was
brightly illuminated by the burning pine, and their
lamps, formed of the large, purple sea-shells. Here
the old men smoked, talked over the story of their
young days, and settled in council, when the moon of
flowers should return, whether they had best pursue
seals in the great salt lake, or scale the mountains, and
follow the buffalo over the measureless verdure of the
Missouri prairies. The young men and women sat
apart, and whispered, and laughed and made appointments,
and circulated scandal, and managed love much
in the same way, and to the same effect, as white people
in towns during the same season.
The Shienne, incorporated, intermarried and amalgamated
they had once been a powerful people. But they
were subdued, and compelled to live in the immediate
vicinity and constant survey of their conquerors; and
necessity and policy taught them to smother deep in
their bosoms their proud and revengeful feelings, and
to wait for a time auspicious to more decisive manifestation.
The chief town, if four hundred habitations,
ranging under this arching battlement of stone
might be so called, was nearly in the central point of
the valley. An interval of a mile divided between it,
and the central residences of the Shienne. But, as
happens among the whites, there were clans within
clans; there were large family connexions; there were
associations of like-minded people; there were single
solitary families, that preferred to live alone; there
were families, who could not endure the more comfortable
dwellings of the villages, and chose to live in
rude bark or log cabins, like the Black-feet. Hence
there were villages on the declivities of the mountains,
and on the margins of the streams, that entered the
Sewasserna from them; and there were hamlets, and
detached and solitary habitations sprinkled over the
whole extent of the valley.
In summer the numerous tents on the upper terrace
showed at a distance, like communities of bee
hives. In winter, the traveller, who sauntered along
the eastern bank of the Sewasserna, marking the
flights of wild fowls, hovering over the dark-rolling
stream, or the summits of the mountains alternately
showing black peaks, or glittering masses of ice, observed,
indeed, this grand and singularly curved wall
on the right. He marked numberless smokes streaming
above the tops of the pines. He noted the straight
columns of their trunks in front of the nature-built battlement.
He saw from this grand and enduring
structure spires and domes of stone surmount the
the pines and the frequent tracks of human feet. He
saw cattle, asses, mules and horses grazing, or browsing
on the upper and lower terraces. He heard the
shrill notes of domestic fowls, and the barking and
baying of numberless dogs. But, were it not, that
here and there Indian boys were seen shooting with
the bow, a woman passing to the river for water, or a
warrior listlessly stretching his arms in the sun, he
would not have known, that he was passing by the
proud metropolis of the Shoshonee, which, like Rome,
had its tributary and subdued nations; which, like
every place, where men and women congregate, had
its ambition, intrigue, love, broil, exalted and humble
aspirations, in short the real, equal, though miniature
correspondence—as the Swedenborgians say—of all,
that was in Rome, or is in Pekin or Petersburg, Paris,
London, or Washington.
The Shoshonee capitol ought not, however, to be
altogether pretermitted in description. Being the
only permanent building, that was entirely artificial,
they had exhausted their industry, skill, wealth and
ornament upon it. It was at least three hundred
feet in length, its centre resting upon the trunks of
lofty pines; its sides supported by shafts of cedar
trunks, planted deep in the earth. It was roofed
with bark; and elsewhere covered with boards, split
from the pine. Every idea of Indian taste had been
put in requisition, to embellish the Shoshonee council-house.
Beautifully painted buffalo robes, ornamented
with the totems of the chiefs and of the tribe,
were suspended as a kind of interior hangings from
the walls. Articles of Spanish furniture—Spanish
flags, crucifixes and other church ornaments, attested
that they had made successful incursions into the
Spanish settlements. Every thing, in fact, that Indian
ingenuity could invent, or Indian wealth supply,
It was all neatly carpeted with rush matting, marked
off in compartments of blue and red, except a large
circle round the council fire in the centre, which was
medicine ground, and within which none but the aristocracy
of the tribe might enter.
A more important appendage still to their establishment
was the common field. It was along the
western bank of the Sewasserna, some miles in length,
and three quarters of a mile in depth. A living
hedge of pawpaw fenced it on three sides, and the
river on the fourth. It was a friable, black, level
alluvion, inexhaustibly fertile, and of a loamy and
tender texture, easy to be tilled. At intervals nature
planted sycamores, and peccans threw out their verdant
and sheltering arms, to shade the weary laborers,
as they tended their maize under the high heats
of summer. Here waved their maize. Here were
their squashes and melons, and such other esculent
plants, as they cultivated; and every Shoshonee had
his limits marked off, and was assessed an amount of
labor, corresponding to his extent of ground. Those,
who were too indolent to labor, shared not in the
harvest. Those, who preferred solitary and individual
exertion, selected such a spot, as pleased them,
and cultivated, and labored little or much, at their
own choice. The same council-house was common
to the Shoshonee and Shienne; but the latter with
their sympathies of nationality, cultivated a second
common field, in front of their own chief village.
Here would be the place, to describe their government,
in form a fierce democracy; but in efficiency a
strong monarchy, or rather despotism, in which all the
emblems of power, all the badges of authority, and all
the words of injunction, and prescriptions of law were
inaudible and invisible. Here might be given the
ceremonies of their worship of the Wah-con-dah, or
their marriages, their modes, their traditions, their
manner of intercourse, and the numberless details,
that belonged to their interior and domestic existence.
But this would require an extent and compass of
details foreign to the purpose of this history; and besides
such development of these subjects, as is material
to the narrative, will naturally be interwoven with
it in the proper place.
Here, in these quiet and green retreats, secluded
from that world, which calls itself civilized, and by eminence
the great world, by nameless inaccessible peaks
of a line of mountains, stretching along the western
front of the American continent, had lived successions
of the Shoshonee for countless generations.
Their traditions reached not to the time, when their
tribe had a commencement. Their minds had not
grasped the idea, that it had not been, as they believed,
an eternal chain. Their recent history, in its
public details, showed almost unbroken annals of successful
incursions and attacks, or of peace, abundance
and prosperity, and their general holiday was the
whole period of the year.
Happy for them, if an impassable gulf, a Chinese
wall, an adamantine barrier could for ever have protected
them from the ingress and communication of
the white race, their gold and their avarice, their lawless
love and their withering influence, their counsels
and their new train of thoughts, their excitements,
schemes and passions, their new habits and necessities
originating from them; their power to inspire in
these simple people disrelish and disgust with their
ancient ways, without imparting better, and, above
all, their accursed besom of destruction, in the form
of ardent spirits. But, in a disastrous era for them,
the white men had found their way into these mysterious
hiding places of nature. Their ever restless
Their traps had been already set upon the remotest
mountain torrent of the Sewasserna. This ingress
had been cloaked by as many ostensible pretexts as
there had been immigrants. But every motive had
been a direct appeal to the unsuspecting, instinctive
and ample hospitality of the Shoshonee. Some had
come among them, as suppliants, and really emaciated
with hunger; and perishing with exposure,
toil and disease, had appealed to their pity and humanity.
The unwieldy Spanish fire arms, with
which they had been partially supplied, were exchanged
for British guns and American yagers,
brought among them by itinerant trapping traders.
Guns and gunpowder and blankets and trinkets and
vermilion and looking glasses were in a little time
almost regular articles of supply from the mouth of
the Oregon. Unhappily, all the visitants concurred
in bringing ardent spirits, to neutralize, and mar all
the questionable advantages of their intercourse.
For some years their most frequent visitants had
been of those strange, fearless, and adamantine men,
the hunters and trappers of the Rocky Mountains,
who followed the steps of the intrepid Lewis and
Clarke from the regions of the rising sun. Wandering
alone, or in pairs, eight hundred leagues from the
habitations of civilized men, renouncing society, casting
off fear, and all the common impulses and affections
of our nature—seeing nothing but mountains,
trees, rocks, and game, and finding in their own ingenuity,
their knife, gun and traps, all the Divinity, of
which their stern nature and condition taught them
the necessity, either for subsistence or protection,
they became almost as inaccessible to passions and
wants, and as sufficient to themselves, as the trees, or
the rocks with which they were conversant; they
came among the Shoshonee more adroit, and more
capable of endurance, than themselves.
Not long after, boats rowed by white men, were
seen ascending the Oregon and the Sewasserna, from
the Western sea. The dwellers in these secluded
valleys, though separated by immense distances from
the Spaniard on the one hand, and the Muscovite on
the other, and the shores of the widest sea on the
globe at the west, and the eight hundred leagues of
the lower courses of the Missouri on the east, from
other inhabited regions, began to find it necessary, in
order to account for these strange visits of different
people from such remote and opposite quarters, to
resort to their ancient and vague traditions, that `the
little white men of the mountains,' had filled all the
world with pale faces; and had left them, the Black-feet,
and the other tribes of red men, with whom they
were acquainted, in these delightful solitudes—as in
a vast and happy island, to which the restless pale
faces were laboring to attain from all points of the
compass.
The views of these visitants were as various, as
their characters. Most came to hunt, and trap, and
trade, and barter with the Indians, and gather peltries
and furs, with the leading inducement to make
money. Some of these sojourners, no doubt, looked
about them with a certain degree of enthusiasm and
excited thought, a certain half chill sensation of the
awful and sublime, as from the green vale and its devious
stream they surveyed the frowning peaks, rising
in their savage grandeur to the region of eternal
storm and ice. Others saw all this with perceptions,
probably, less keen, than the wild deer, that bounded
among the trees. Some loved the images of unrestricted
love, of licensed polygamy, of freedom from
the legal ties of marriage, of free and untramelled
roving. But all the adventurers were, more or less,
imbued with an instinctive fondness for the reckless
savage life, alternately indolent and laborious, full and
and amours, interdicted by no laws, or difficult
morals, or any restraints, but the invisible ones
of Indian habit and opinion. None know, until they
have experimented, for how many people, who would
be least suspected to be endowed with such inclinations,
this life has its own irresistible charms. People,
who have long been soldiers, it is well known,
are spoiled for every other profession. They, too,
who have long reclined on the grass in Indian tents,
who have gambled, and danced, and feasted, and
jeoparded life in murderous rencounters and unforeseen
battles and exterminating wars, and who have
contemplated the varieties of prospect and event in
their interminable expeditions, seldom return with
pleasure to the laborious and municipal life of the
whites.
Among the traders, some had come up the Sewasserna
with an assortment, such as they could bring
in one, or perhaps two periogues, rowed by hired Indians.
Others had packed their commodities, brought
by water to the sources of the Missouri, on horses
over the mountains. A new, and previously unknown
avenue to their country had been recently
practised, through a singular gap, or chasm in the
Rocky Mountains, and over the wide and beautiful
lake of Bueneventura. By far the most abundant
supply of goods, however, arrived from the mouth of
the Oregon, to which the Indians made frequent trips,
to sell furs, and bring back goods, and trade with the
ships in the river, and supply themselves with ardent
spirits. The frequency and uniformity of this intercourse
almost equalled the regularity of a mail. The
great amount of furs, peltries, dried salmon, jerked
venison and smoked deer's hams, though sold for very
inadequate values of barter, in a short time introduced
among the Shoshonee most of the common and
wants of such a people.
But though, what is known in these countries by
the common term Indian goods, made a considerable
proportion of the stock in this trade, the greatest
amount, cost and consumption was still in the article
of ardent spirits. They, who brought the greatest
abundance of that, were always most welcome. It
was to no purpose, that an occasional white sojourner,
of higher principles and better thoughts, warned them
of the fatal influence of that seductive poison upon
their race. It was in vain, that their intelligent and
moral chief remonstrated against the introduction
and use of the bewitching mischief. The Indian
trader had not yet been seen among them, who possessed
sufficient amount of principle, or capability of
moral resistance, to stand out against the entreaties
and menaces of the Indians, and the profits of the
trade. Whatever quantity of this article he brought,
it was soon consumed. But the quantity was generally
so small, in comparison to the multitudes, among
whom it was to be distributed, that individual intoxication,
for a considerable time after the introduction
of ardent spirits, was an uncommon spectacle. Enough
was drunk for the most part, only to thaw out the cold,
stern and saturnine bosoms of this strange people to
unwonted hilarity, ardor, and kindness of feeling.
Hence the coming of a new trader among them, who
brought a quantity of this pernicious beverage, not
unaptly denominated in their language, `the fire medicine,'
was an era of general excitement and festivity.
Hence, too, the visits of the whites to their nation
were always associated with these ideas, and were
eagerly welcomed. The visitants, of course, were
always at first in high favor. A temporary wife
from the tribe was either offered by the chiefs, who
regulated the introduction and citizenship of the
If he conducted with any degree of decent
conformity to their immemorial customs and modes of
thinking, the stranger was at once free of the tribe,
and had a range of inclination and choice, as wide
and unmolested, as the Indians themselves. As furs,
peltries and salmon were quite abundant, and easily
transported down the Sewasserna and Oregon, the
traders were seldom long, in selling out their stock of
goods and spirits, at a profit almost to the extent of
their very flexible consciences.
| CHAPTER I. The Shoshonee Valley | |