Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/436

 404 AMERICAN INDIANS ing their weapons. Blood-letting and cupping were not unknown. In asthma they smoked tobacco and drank infusions of spicewood, sassafras, and skunk cabbage; in coughs, slip- pery elm and mallow tea, and decoctions of the twigs of the pine and spruce ; in renal af- fections, bearberry, spicewood, and gooseberry root ; in diarrhoeas of all kinds, decoctions of the low blackberry, cranesbill, hardback, white oak bark, partridge berry, and American ipe- cacuanha or Indian physic (gillenia) ; in drop- sy, the bark of the prickly ash and wild goose- berry, and externally a sweat in heated earth ; in amenorrhcea, sassafras, spice, and worm- wood decoctions; in haemorrhage, powdered puff balls, and astringents firmly bound on the wound. Incised wounds they sewed together with strings from the inner bark of basswood or fibres from the tendons of deer ; diseases of the skin were treated with yellow dock, and abscesses by poultices of onions. In their in- tercourse with the Indians the Spanish govern- ment educated the sons of princes and chiefs and gave them rank as Spanish nobles, so that to this day distinguished families boast their descent from Mexican and Peruvian monarchs ; and among those who governed Mexico as vice- roys under the kings of Spain several bore the name of Montezuma. The lower orders of In- dians were assimilated with those of the Span- ish emigrants, and at an early period were ad- mitted to the same civil rights. The wilder tribes were gradually formed to civilization by missionaries under the system of reductions, a presidio of soldiers being assigned to each. The children of the first converts soon mingled with the more civilized Indians. The con- sequence is that the great mass of the peo- ple of Spanish America are of Indian origin, some towns being almost exclusively so ; and it would be almost impossible from our present data to give the exact Indian, white, and mixed population. The late president of Mexico, Juarez, was a pure Indian ; and so have been many of the presidents of Central America. The number of wild tribes is consequently much less in proportion to the whole Indian popula- tion in Spanish America than in the United States. Of the missions on the plan of reduc- tions the most famous were those of Paraguay. The French, settling in Canada and subse- quently Louisiana, had less civilized tribes to deal with ; but they acquired a permanent as- cendancy over them without wars. The Iro- quois, occupying the present state of New York, were the great enemies of the French and their allies. French missionaries, however, repeatedly established missions even among the Iroquois, and the descendants of their con- verts form three towns in Canada. Missions begun at the commencement of the French set- tlements among the Nasquapees, Montagnais, Algonquins, Chippewas, and Ottawas are still maintained among the surviving remnants of those tribes. New missions under Catholic and Protestant direction have been established among the Crees, who had been incidental- ly reached by the old missionaries, and the Athabascan tribes and those in British Colum- bia and Oregon. The efforts of the French government to elevate the social condition of the Indians were unremitting ; provision was made for their naturalization as citizens ; but these efforts failed, although often re- newed, and the most experienced gave up the task as hopeless. Their intestine wars were arrested, agriculture was introduced or improved slightly, and morality raised to a higher standard, so that they resemble the lower grade of peasantry, simple, indolent, and unambitious. Though some chiefs bore French commissions, and the convents educated some girls who became capable teachers and even entered religious orders as nuns, there is no example of men attaining admission to any civil profession. The diminution of game, de- stroyed for furs, and the influence of intoxicat- ing liquors have steadily diminished the numbers of the Indians in the British possessions. The English who colonized the present United States were not, like the colonists from Spain and France, under a system devised and maintained by the home government. There was no In- dian policy, and between the English settlers and the natives there was a strong degree of incompatibility. From the moment the set- tlers were able to dispense with Indian aid in supplying Indian corn and game in return for trinkets or arms, down to the present day, the prevailing instinct of the Anglo-Saxon in America seems to have been to remove the Indian as far as possible from him. In the early times this influenced the austere religious Puritan of New England as much as it did the careless settler of Virginia, New England missions were early begun by the Mayhews on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, Eliot among the Naticks at Newton, Mass., Cotton and others at Plymouth, and Sergeant and his fel- low laborers in Connecticut. But these efforts were almost entirely individual, and they have left us monuments of their zeal and ability in Eliot's Indian Bible and other works pre- pared for the converts. The most extensive ef- forts to Christianize the natives of what is now the United States were those starting from the French and Spanish colonies. The settlement of Florida was followed by permanent and ben- eficial missions among the Timuquas and Appa- laches, which lasted till they were almost exter- minated by the people of Carolina. Texas, New Mexico, and California were also seats of very extended missions, under which the Indians were instructed, preserved from evil influences, and made self-supporting. The Mexican revo- lution overthrew the system, and the whole structure was destroyed in a few years. The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico alone remain, much degenerated from their condition of a century ago. The French missions within our territory embraced those among the Abenakis of Maine, now represented by the Catholic