Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/570

550 tribes at one council have found their endurance taxed to the utmost, and the soldiers would at times have much preferred the excitement of a campaign.

The council must be deliberately agreed upon and prepared for with stately preliminaries. The squaws in the Indian villages must be set to work in making the wampum belts, with their symbolic colors, blendings, and hieroglyphics; and the whites must as busily, and with more cost, prepare and transport the presents. In many tribes a wampum belt is necessary in the statement or ratification of each rhetorical certification of the speech, and of each proposition or term in the covenant. There are solemn pauses and silences in which the parties might be supposed, by an onlooker, to be holding a Quaker meeting. There are the complimentary exchanges of handshaking with the greasy and grotesquely arrayed Stoics of the woods, with solemn and demure watchfulness against the wandering of eye or thought, to the let-down of stateliness or dignity. Then comes the squatting on the grass in concentric circles, or the stiff seating on the skin-covered bushes, — age and wisdom, and repute as a brave, giving title to sit in the innermost circle, while those who have yet to win their spurs as renowned warriors look over the heads of the inmost groups from outside. The passing round of the pipe is another wearying interval. When speech-making is reached, the work goes on with tedious slowness, no interruptions or interlocutions being sufferable. Never is the business finished at one sitting. The answering party must take a night for deliberating on the reply for the next, or some subsequent day.

Besides the original and radical error of our National Indian policy, — so long continued, and so impracticable as to compel us to violate our own covenants with them, — the policy of making treaties to last “forever” with them as independent, sovereign nations, we have made many other mistakes which have had very serious consequences.