University of Virginia Library

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.]

the great sacrifice he has made for her, while he joyfully drinks in all her flattery, smiles and laughs, and, puffing, chats, telling her how he would sooner have died in the fight than to have lost her, his first and only choice. And so the contest goes on, until each man goose in turn is the acknowledged hero of the remaining flock, and marches in turn with the oldest woman goose as his bride, all of which laugh and chat together, apparently well satisfied with the result; when all have paired off but the remaining woman goose, who may be a handsome bright-eyed maiden, the last man goose takes her as his bride with a disappointed heart, while she, poor maiden, accepts him through force of circumstances, with saddest of feelings, cheered by hopes alone that the time will come when on account of her age she will be sought for as her older sisters have been.

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.]

if there are any left of the flock of either sex unprovided for, they tag around after the last pair as mourners of the unhappy marriage. I have closely watched these husbands and wives as they have commenced housekeeping, have seen them pluck the down from their bodies and line their nests, talking over with each other the prospects of the future, and when the eggs were laid amid the softest down, have seen both man and wife guard them with equal care. In childhood, I thought this mode of securing wives would lead to disagreement and discord; yet not having known of a case of divorce among them, I watched them still closer and have not heard an unkind word or seen an unkind look. Have watched them when their gosling children were first hatched, and seen each guard them with greatest care, and with their bended necks stretched over their little brood, with chats and laughs tenderly lead them to some pond or river side, then into the water with them swim.

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

may read. That shall be my most solemn protest and prayer against the introduction of alcohol in any form among my people; and to accomplish that desire of my heart I see no hope except by the complete overthrow of the rum-shop and the destruction of all that can intoxicate, together with cigarettes, the father and mother of palsy and cancer.

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:

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

civilizations. Moreover, if one calls to mind the methods which marked the terrible religious struggle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, and will remember how human ingenuity was taxed to its utmost to devise methods of horrible torture which were remorselessly meted out by those claiming to be Christians to others claiming to be Christians, he will, I think, feel it wisest to pass very lightly over the charge of excessive cruelty on the part of those he flippantly terms savages. Had the Indian submitted more tamely he would have been characterized by this same self-engrossed class, who delight in echoing the brutally false phrase that "there is no good Indian but a dead Indian," as cowardly and unworthy of the land which for unnumbered generations had been the land of his fathers.