Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/222

202 more serious affairs, among their own tribes or with the whites. As first known to the whites through the Indians near the coast, these “Belts,” called “Wampum,” were often used as currency and ornaments. There they were made of little fragments of sea-shells; in the interior, of other hard and glittering fragments, — glass, beads, etc. The laying them down or passing them from hand to hand marks emphatic points in an address, or impresses its close. The intent is that these belts shall be preserved and identified with the occasion and pledge in giving and receiving them. The nomadic and inconstant habits of the natives do not favor this preservation. But in some instances they have been cherished and handed down through careful transmission in a tribe, and acquire sacred associations.

The Indians over our whole northern continent, at least, are indebted to the Europeans for the addition to their own natural resources of what is now the most valuable of their possessions, — a compensation for much which they have lost, and a facility admirably adapted to their use in perfect keeping with their own wild life. This is the horse. Whatever support may be assured for the theory that the horse was at any time indigenous on either section of this continent, or whether, as has been asserted, its bones have been found among fossils, it is certain that the present stock of the animals is from the increase from foreign importations, — first and chiefly by the Spaniards through Florida and California. How marvellous has been the change which time and circumstances have wrought since the simple natives of our islands and isthmus quailed in panic dread and awe at the first sight of those frightful monsters, with their steel-clad and death-dealing riders, till now when the useful and almost intelligent beast has become the Indian's plaything in sportive pastime, and his indispensable resource in the chase and in his skirmishes with the white man! The rifle and the horse have spanned the chasm between the two races in most of the occasions on which they now confront