University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

My only title to the office of editor in the present case is some
practice in such matters, with a very warm interest in all, whether
relating to past or present, that concerns our western country. Mrs.
Eastman,—wife of Captain Eastman, and daughter of Dr. Henderson,
both of the U. S. army,—is thoroughly acquainted with the
customs, superstitions, and leading ideas of the Dahcotahs, whose
vicinity to Fort Snelling, and frequent intercourse with its inmates,
have brought them much under the notice of the officers and ladies
of the garrison. She has no occasion to present the Indian in a
theatrical garb—a mere thing of paint and feathers, less like the
original than his own rude delineation on birch-bark or deer-skin.
The reader will find in the following pages living men and women,
whose feelings are in many respects like his own, and whose motives
of action are very similar to those of the rest of the world,
though far less artfully covered up and disguised under pleasant
names. “Envy, hatred and malice, and all uncharitableness,” stand
out, unblushing, in Indian life. The first is not called emulation,
nor the second just indignation or merited contempt, nor the third
zeal for truth, nor the fourth keen discernment of character.
Anger and revenge are carried out honestly to their natural fruit
—injury to others. Among the Indians this takes the form of
murder, while with us it is obliged to content itself with slander,
or cunning depreciation. In short, the study of Indian character
is the study of the unregenerate human heart; and the writer of
these sketches of the Dahcotahs presents it as such, with express

and solemn reference to the duty of those who have “the words
of eternal life” to apply them to the wretched condition of the
red man, who is, perhaps, with all his ignorance, quite as well prepared
to receive them as many of those who are already wise in
their own eyes. The very degradation and misery in which he
lives, and of which he is not unable to perceive some of the causes,
prepare him to welcome the instruction which promises better
things. Evils which are covered up under the smoothness of
civilization, stand out in all their horrible deformity in the abandon
of savage life; the Indian cannot get even one gleam of light, without
instantly perceiving the darkness around him. Here, then, is
encouragement to paint him as he is, that the hearts of the good
may be moved at his destitute and unhappy state; to set forth his
wants and his claims, that ignorance may no longer be pleaded as
an excuse for withholding, from the original proprietor of the soil,
the compensation or atonement which is demanded at once by
justice, honor, and humanity.

Authentic pictures of Indian life have another and a different
value, in a literary point of view. In the history and character of
the aborigines is enveloped all the distinct and characteristic poetic
material to which we, as Americans, have an unquestioned right.
Here is a peculiar race, of most unfathomable origin, possessed of
the qualities which have always prompted poetry, and living lives
which are to us as shadowy as those of the Ossianic heroes; our
own, and passing away—while we take no pains to arrest their
fleeting traits or to record their picturesque traditions. Yet we love
poetry; are ambitious of a literature of our own, and sink back
dejected when we are convicted of imitation. Why is it that we
lack interest in things at home? Sismondi has a passage to this
effect:—

“The literature of other countries has been frequently adopted
by a young nation with a sort of fanatical admiration. The genius
of those countries having been so often placed before it as the perfect
model of all greatness and all beauty, every spontaneous movement

has been repressed, in order to make room for the most servile
imitation; and every national attempt to develop an original character
has been sacrificed to the reproduction of something conformable
to the model which has been always before its eyes.”

This is certainly true of us, since we not only adopt the English
view of everything, but confine ourselves to the very subjects and
imagery which have become consecrated to us by love and habit.
Not to enter into the general subject of our disposition to parrotism,
our neglect of Indian material in particular may be in part accounted
for, by our having become acquainted with the aborigines
after the most unpoetical fashion, in trying to cheat them out of
their lands, or shooting them when they declined being cheated;
they, in their turn, driven to the resource of the weak and the ignorant,
counterplotting us, and taking, by means of blood and fire,
what we would not give them in fair compensation. This has made
our business relations very unpleasant; and everybody knows that
when this becomes the case, it is hard for parties to do justice to
each other's good or available qualities. If we had only read
about the Indians, as a people living in the mountain-fastnesses of
Greece, or the broad plains of Transylvania, we should without
difficulty have discovered the romantic elements of their character.
But as the effect of remoteness is produced by time as well as
distance, it is surely worth while to treasure up their legends for
our posterity, who will justly consider us very selfish, if we throw
away what will be a treasure to them, merely because we cannot
or will not use it ourselves.

A prominent ground of the slight regard in which the English
hold American literature, or at least one of the most plausible
reasons given for it, is our want of originality, particularly in point
of subject matter. It is said that our imitativeness is so servile,
that for the sake of following English models, at an immeasurable
distance, we neglect the new and grand material which lies all
around us, in the sublime features of our country, in our new and
striking circumstances, in our peculiar history and splendid prospects,

and, above all, in the character, superstitions, and legends
of our aborigines, who, to eyes across the water, look like poetical
beings. We are continually reproached by British writers for the
obtuse carelessness with which we are allowing these people, with
so much of the heroic element in their lives, and so much of the
mysterious in their origin, to go into the annihilation which seems
their inevitable fate as civilization advances, without an effort to
secure and record all that they are able to communicate respecting
themselves.

And the reproach is just. In our hurry of utilitarian progress,
we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon
him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything
else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just
enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into
leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and
virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but
send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong
to get drunk and murder his neighbor. To look upon the Indian
with much regard, even in the light of literary material, would be
inconvenient; for the moment we recognize in him a mind, a heart,
a soul,—the recollection of the position in which we stand towards
him becomes thorny, and we begin dimly to remember certain
duties belonging to our Christian profession, which we have sadly
neglected with regard to the sons of the forest, whom we have
driven before us just as fast as we have required or desired their
lands. A few efforts have been made, not only to bring the poetry
of their history into notice, but to do them substantial good; the
public heart, however, has never responded to the feelings of those
who, from living in contact with the Indians, have felt this interest
in them. To most Americans, the red man is, to this day, just
what he was to the first settlers of the country—a being with soul
enough to be blameable for doing wrong, but not enough to claim
Christian brotherhood, or to make it very sinful to shoot him like
a dog, upon the slightest provocation or alarm. While this feeling

continues, we shall not look to him for poetry; and the only
imaginative writing in which he is likely to be generally used as
material, will be kindred to that known by the appropriate title
of “Pirate Literature.” Mr. Cooper and Miss Sedgwick are,
perhaps, alone among our writers in their attempts to do the Indian
justice, while making him the poetical machine in fiction.

Missionaries, however, as well as others who have lived among
the aborigines for purely benevolent purposes, have discovered in
them capabilities and docility which may put to the blush many
of the whites who despise and hate them. Not only in individual
cases, but in more extended instances, the Indian has been found
susceptible of religious and moral instruction; his heart has warmed
to kindness, like any other man's; he has been able to perceive the
benefits of regular industry; his head has proved as clear in the
apprehension of the distinction between right and wrong as that
of the more highly cultivated moralist; and he receives the fundamental
truths of the gospel with an avidity, and applies them—at
least to the lives and characters of his neighbors—with a keenness,
which show him to be not far behind the rest of mankind in sensibility
and acuteness. Without referring to the testimony of the
elder missionaries, which is abundant, I remember a most touching
account, by Rev. George Duffield, jr., of piety in an Indian wigwam,
which I would gladly transfer to these pages did their limits
admit. It could be proved by overwhelming testimony, that the Indian
is as susceptible of good as his white brother. But it is not necessary
in this place to urge his claim to our attention on the ground
of his moral and religious capabilities. Setting them aside, he has
as many qualifications for the heroic character as Ajax, or even
Achilles. He is as brave, daring, and ruthless; as passionate, as
revengeful, as superstitious, as haughty. He will obey his medicine
man, though with fury in his heart and injurious words upon
his lips; he will fight to the death for a wife, whom he will afterwards
treat with the most sovereign neglect. He understands and
accepts the laws of spoil, and carries them out with the most chivalric

precision; his torture of prisoners does not exceed those which
formed part of the “triumphs” of old; his plan of scalping is far
neater and more expeditious than that of dragging a dead enemy
thrice round the camp by the heels. He loves splendor, and gets
all he can of it; and there is little essential difference, in this regard,
between gold and red paint, between diamonds and wampum.
He has great ancestral pride—a feeling much in esteem for
its ennobling powers; and the totem has all the meaning and use
of any other armorial bearing. In the endurance of fatigue, hunger,
thirst, and exposure, the forest hero has no superior; in military
affairs he fully adopts the orthodox maxim that all stratagems
are lawful in war. In short, nothing is wanting but a Homer to
build our Iliad material into “lofty rhyme,” or a Scott to weave it
into border romance; and as we are encouraged to look for Scotts
and Homers at some future day, it is manifestly our duty to be
recording fleeting traditions and describing peculiar customs, before
the waves of time shall have swept over the retreating footsteps of
the “salvage man,” and left us nothing but lake and forest, mountains
and cataracts, out of which to make our poetry and romance.

The Indians themselves are full of poetry. Their legends embody
poetic fancy of the highest and most adventurous flight;
their religious ceremonies refer to things unseen with a directness
which shows how bold and vivid are their conceptions of the
imaginative. The war-song—the death-song—the song of victory
—the cradle-chant—the lament for the slain—these are the over-flowings
of the essential poetry of their untaught souls. Their
eloquence is proverbially soaring and figurative; and in spite of
all that renders gross and mechanical their ordinary mode of marrying
and giving in marriage, instances are not rare among them
of love as true, as fiery, and as fatal, as that of the most exalted
hero of romance. They, indeed, live poetry; it should be ours to
write it out for them.

Mrs. Eastman's aim has been to preserve from destruction such
legends and traits of Indian character as had come to her knowledge

during long familiarity with the Dahcotahs, and nothing can
be fresher or more authentic than her records, taken down from
the very lips of the red people as they sat around her fire and
opened their hearts to her kindness. She has even caught their
tone, and her language will be found to have something of an Ossianic
simplicity and abruptness, well suited to the theme. Sympathy,—feminine
and religious,—breathes through these pages, and
the unaffected desire of the writer to awaken a kindly interest in
the poor souls who have so twined themselves about her own best
feelings, may be said to consecrate the work. In its character of
æthetic material for another age, it appeals to our nationality;
while, as the effort of a reflecting and Christian mind to call public
attention to the needs of an unhappy race, we may ask for it the
approbation of all who acknowledge the duty to “teach all nations.”