The Vanishing Redskins

I

The Red Indians of the northeastern portion of Canada and the United States are so fast disappearing before the march of modern life that before very long they will be nothing more than a name and a memory. This is a very striking fact when you think how it seems so short a time since the settlers and backwoodsmen of Canada were never safe from scalping raids and midnight attacks; how the deep woods constantly echoed the dreaded war-whoops; and the blue lakes and rivers of that wild country were often covered with great war canoes, loaded with prisoners and stained with the blood of red and white men alike. But conditions change very rapidly in these days of discovery and education, and the old races are bound to keep up with the march, or else to die out. And the old Red Indians are dying out⁠—fast! I have travelled a great deal in Canada, especially in the eastern parts, and the first time I saw a Red Indian I experienced a dreadful shock⁠—of disappointment. It was in Toronto. The man was undersized and walked with a shuffling gait. He was dressed⁠—I hardly like to tell you-in a faded old frock-coat and a top-hat, with baggy striped trousers and brown boots, and he was selling grass handmade articles such as mats for teapots, little workbaskets, and needle cases. I went up close and looked at him, and he turned up a weak and half-tipsy face into mine, and gazed at me out of rather bleary eyes, and asked me in his broken English if I would buy a mat or a needle case. It was a pathetic sight, and all day I was haunted by the apparition, and kept thinking of the tall, strong, eagle-eyed men who only a few years before had the scent of a fox and the speed of a deer and the endurance and courage of the wolf. It was, as I said, a great shock! This particular Indian had come down from the great Government Reservation among the Lake-and-Island region a hundred miles north of Toronto, where the Indians have large tracts of land reserved for their special use, and where they live, fishing, hunting, making canoes, paddles and the like, and where the women make knick-knacks out of the sweet-scented grass called abaznoda and send down the “braves” in summer to sell what they can among the white folk of the towns. It is a crime punishable with very heavy fines indeed for anyone to sell whisky or intoxicating liquor to the Reservations, but once the Redskins get into the demoralising atmosphere of the towns they are not so easy to look after, and they drink the “firewater” whenever they can get it. The main body of Indians who still dwell in this eastern part of the American continent are the Wabanaki branch of the once great Algonquin stock, and they consist of tribes known as the Passamaquoddies (meaning “Spearers of Pollock fish”), Penobscots, Abenaki (Land of the Dawn), Micmacs, and Delawares. They are disappearing so quickly now before the white men that, as Professor Prince of New York says, they are a race “which fifty years from now will have hardly a single living representative.” Some of their lesser tribes number now but a mere handful of twenty or thirty men, and when the last of these are dead there will have passed away an entire race of men whose memory will always live on to stir the thoughts and imaginations of readers and thinkers for long centuries after. “No man can ever know now whence the Algonquin races came,” says Professor Prince. “Whether they with other peoples were emigrants from palaeolithic Europe, crossing by way of some long since vanished land bridge, or whether they wandered into their present habitat from the western part of our own continent (America), having had their origin in prehistoric Asia, it is impossible to say.” And this is a problem that no one will ever be able to solve. Before the coming of the white men these Wabanaki Indians waged incessant warfare with the Iroquois nation of whom the Mohawks were the principal representatives. They were bitter foes of one another, and on the slightest provocation they would send out marauding bands to destroy the crops, burn the villages, and carry off as many women as they could seize. The Mohawks treated their prisoners with the most merciless severity, showing no pity even to the women and children. A favourite torture which they practised was to build a large fire of hemlock coals, into the flames of which they drove their captives, compelling them to walk up and down over the red-hot embers until relieved by death. One of the surviving Passamaquoddy chieftains told Professor Prince that there is no single case on record where a brave of the Wabanaki succumbed to the fearful pain and begged for mercy.