Greater Britain - Charles Wentworth Dilke

Скачать книгу

upon the bill; the latter, the Washington-sent governor of the Territory. Gilpin is a typical pioneer man, and the descendant of a line of such. He comes of one of the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding States. He himself, after taking an active share in the foundation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the head of the pioneer army which explored the parcs of the Cordilleras and the Territory of Nevada. He it was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing Colorado half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never, in the history of the world, was a grander idea than this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have given Colorado the “natural” frontier, and have tried for the glory of the foundation of two States instead of one. The consequence would have been, lasting disunion between the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a possible future break-up of the country. As it is, this commonwealth, little as it at present is, links sea to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong.

      The city swarms with Indians of the bands commanded by the chiefs Nevara and Collorego. They are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with the Pawnees – with all the plain Indians, in short. Now, as the Pawnees are also at war with the six tribes, there is a pretty triangular fight. They came in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, and dressed in a gaudy costume, half Spanish, half Indian, which makes their filthiness appear more filthy by contrast, and themselves carrying only their Ballard and Smith-and-Wesson, but forcing the squaws to carry all their other goods, and papooses in addition, they present a spectacle of unmixed ruffianism which I never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both of us, left London with “Lo! the poor Indian,” in all his dignity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of nobility in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the East, but nothing revolutionized them so rapidly as our three days’ risk of scalping in the plains. John Howard and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themselves would go in for the Western “disarm at any price, and exterminate if necessary” policy if they lived long in Denver. One of the braves of Nevara‘s command brought in the scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last month, and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawnbroker‘s shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by.

      Many of the band were engaged in putting on their paint, which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo round the eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which they wear, gives them the look of the gnomes in the introduction to a London pantomime. One of them – Nevara himself, I was told – wore a sombrero with three scarlet plumes, taken probably from a Mexican, a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the loins and over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and embroidered moccasins. His squaw was a vermilion-faced bundle of rags, not more than four feet high, staggering under buffalo hides, bow and arrows, and papoose. They move everywhere on horseback, and in the evening withdraw in military order, with advance and rear guard, to a camp at some distance from the town.

      I inclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks round the city. Their names are not suited to their beauty; the large white one is “the morning blower,” the most lovely of all, save one, of the flowers of the plains. It grows with many branches to a height of some eighteen inches, and bears from thirty to fifty blooms. The blossoms are open up to a little after sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after sunset. It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser‘s flower; and if it be true that Nature doesn‘t make things in vain, it follows that Nature intended men – or, at all events, some men – to get up early, which is a point that I believe was doubtful hitherto.

      For the one prairie flower which I think more beautiful than the blower I cannot find a name. It rises to about six inches above ground, and spreads in a circle of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare; its flower-bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter; and its buds pink and pendulent.

      All our garden annuals are to be found in masses acres in size upon the plains. Penstemon, coreopsis, persecaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold, and sunflower, all are flowering here at once, till the country is ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our gardens they call the “rosin-weed,” and say that it forms excellent food for sheep.

      The view of the “Cordillera della Sierra Madre,” the Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of Denver is sublime; that from the roof at Milan does not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mountains rise abruptly from the plains. Piled range above range with step-like regularity, they are topped by a long white line, sharply relieved against the indigo of the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother Sierra are in sight from our veranda; to the south, Pike‘s Peak and Spanish Peak; Long‘s Peak to the north; Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views are limited only by the curvature of the earth, such is the marvelous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect at once of the distance from the sea and of the bed of limestone which underlies the plains.

      The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as well as loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and cloudless from dawn till noon. In the mid-day heats, cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves of white and purple cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily along the range. “This is a great country, sir,” said a Coloradan to me to-day. “We make clouds for the whole universe.” At dark there is dust or thunder-storm at the mountain foot, and then the cold and brilliant night. Summer and winter it is the same.

      CHAPTER XI

      RED INDIA

      “THESE Red Indians are not red,” was our first cry when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come into the town to be painted as English ladies go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged within a short time after their arrival in daubing their cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything you please except red.

      The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lorette, were French in training if not in blood; the Pottawatomies of St. Mary‘s Mission, the Delawares of Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they can hardly be called red; but still I had expected to have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of the color from which they take their name. Save for paint, I found them of a color wholly different from that which we call red.

      Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tartar-faced, the Indians of the plains are a distinct people from the tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern States. It is impossible to set eyes on their women without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found in the mounds of Missouri and Iowa; but, men or women, the Utes bear no resemblance to the bright-eyed, graceful people with whom Penn traded and Standish fought. They are not less inferior in mind than in body. It was no Shoshoné, no Ute, no Cheyenne, who called the rainbow the “heaven of flowers,” the moon “the night queen,” or the stars “God‘s eyes.” The plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in poetry: they have never even produced a general, and White Antelope is their nearest approach to a Tecumseh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the country in which they dwell, have nothing in them to suggest a reason for their debased condition. The reason must lie in the blood, the race.

      All who have seen both the Indians and the Polynesians at home must have been struck with innumerable resemblances. The Maori and Red Indian wakes for the dead are identical; the Californian Indians wear the Maori mat; the “medicine” of the Mandan is but the “tapu” of Polynesia; the New Zealand dance-song, the Maori tribal scepter, were found alike by Strachey in Virginia and Drake in California; the canoes of the West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther side of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Polynesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island the people who built their mounds and rock temples there, may as easily have been carried on by the Chilian breeze and current to the South American shore. The wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the northern plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamtchatkans, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting their way round by Behring Straits, and then down south, drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia and California. No theory but this will account for the sharp contrast between the civilization of ancient Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which the Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times. Mounds, rock temples, worship, all are alike unknown to the Indians of the plains;

Скачать книгу