Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/645

Rh All those, however, are marks of transition from a savage to a civilized state. If there is a persistency, a reinforcing of effort, with wise helpfulness and guidance from the white man, the experiment slowly advances. The increase of mortality is arrested after some ten or a dozen years.

One of the instigating and most helpful agencies in the transition from savagery to civilization is found in the ownership, oversight, and breeding of domestic animals. They create an interest and responsibility which are humanizing; they demand and foster forethought and discretion; they prompt to the making of fences, barns, and sheds; they require stay-at-home habits, and the provision for winter food. Indeed, one might construct a scale of degrees to mark progress towards civilization through these tokens of a transition from barbarism. The Indian pony, — accommodating himself in his reversion from the Spanish stock to the habits of his new owners, shaggy, ungroomed, unshod, and tangled in tail and mane and hide with brambles and briars, — has greatly advanced the Indian. He is property. He sets a standard for values. As the wild buffalo disappears from the plains, the less wild domestic cattle, with their herders, come in by thousands. The semi-civilized tribes win that epithet not so much because of their own personal habits as because of the roosters that crow around their barn-yards, the cattle, sheep, and hogs which indicate farms, sheds, and pens. The Pueblo Indians claim to have perpetuated their stage of civilization by the same tokens. The Navahoes go a stage beyond, with their vast herds for breeding, and their goats and donkeys. The Apaches would have a lower place on this scale; because, though they have horses and mules, instead of increasing them from their stock, they cook all their own animals in the winter, and steal a new supply in the spring. The chief Ouray was regarded as the richest Indian in the country, having, beside his annual pension of a thousand dollars from the Government, large