Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/178

158 near them they might occasionally have recourse to it as a medicine. But they did universally depend upon that annual alternation of their residence just referred to, which for them served as an interchange of city and country; and this, too, independently of their tramps on the warpath or the hunt. Those of the tribes were most favored who had ready access to the ocean shores, especially to the greater variety of fish in the briny waters, and those larger products of the sea which yielded blubber and more serviceable bones.

There were many other significant and ingenious tokens and devices by which our native races put themselves into sympathetic relations with Nature around them, and with natural objects, — scenery, animals, and birds, — as if they were themselves vital parts of the same organism, its elements and products. The names which they took for themselves and gave to their children and to each other illustrate this statement. The names borne by Indians, though so fantastic and not euphonious to us, are generally far more appropriate and characteristic than those in use among civilized people. Nature, its aspects and objects, were drawn upon by the red men for names of groups and individuals, often with admirable aptness. These names of theirs have in many cases become vulgarized to us, as grotesque and disagreeable; for the most part, however, they are simply meaningless, fragments of a wild jargon. Not so with those who bore them. The name assigned to a child was given in view of some trait or feature in him which suggested a natural scene or object, or instinctive prompting; or it had reference to some quality which it was hoped he might develop, or in which he was to be trained. We all recognize the appropriateness of the designation, made familiar to us by Walter Scott, by which a clan in a peculiarly foggy region of the Highlands were known as “Children of the Mist.” So in every feature of a natural landscape, — mountain, hill, meadow, valley,