Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/214

194 of previous and recent conflicts, and traditions of others running back into undated periods. It would indeed be difficult to say whether more of havoc had been wrought among the Indians in their internecine strifes than by the white man in his comprehensive warfare against them. From the formation of our own National Government its humane services have been often engaged in very embarrassing and sometimes costly efforts to repress the hostilities between various tribes. These strifes have generally been hereditary, with a long entail. The Indian's memory, reinforced by faithful transmission through the traditions of the elders, is for these matters an equivalent substitute for records. Only within quite recent years our Government came as an umpire and a pacificator into one of these hereditary feuds between the Sioux, or Dakotas, and the Chippeways, in the Northwest. Neither of the parties could date the beginning of the alienation; or, at least, each of them referred it to a different cause in its origin. The successive forts built by our Government at the junction of Western rivers and other strategic points, while mainly designed to aid its own purposes, have often served to overawe or prove a refuge for a prowling or a hounded tribe of hostiles against hostiles.

With such training for the field of conflict and blood the savages were always ready in preparation for any new scene and enterprise. They had, as well as white men, their military code, with rules and principles, their system of signals, their challenges, — except where a bold surprise was essential, — their conditions and flags of truce, their cartels, and terms of peace through reparation and tribute. We are familiar enough with the aboriginal figures of speech, the “burying” or the “lifting” the hatchet. “Laying down the hatchet” signified the temporary suspension of fighting, as in a truce. “Covering the hatchet” was condoning a cause of feud by presents. It is probably a mistake to suppose that the savages in their own tribal