The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866

Of course it is no purpose of this paper to uphold or attack these peculiar ideas. A meagre presentation of a few facts not generally known is all that is aimed at. Whether the system of Indian medicine be a variety of Mesmerism, Magnetism, Spiritualism, or what not, others may inquire and determine. One bred a Calvinist, as was the writer, may be supposed to have viewed with suspicion the exhibitions of medicine power that almost daily presented themselves. And while, in very numerous instances, they proved to be but the impudent pretensions of charlatans, it must be conceded, if credible witnesses are to be believed, that sometimes there is a power of second-sight, or something of a kindred nature, which defies investigation. Instances of this kind are of frequent occurrence, and easily recalled, I venture to say, by every one familiar with the Indian in his native state. The higher powers claimed for medicine are, in general, doubtfully spoken of by the Indians. Not that they deny the possibility of the power, but they question the probability of so signal a mark of favor being bestowed on a mere mortal. Powers and medicine privileges of a lower degree are more readily acknowledged. An aged Indian of the Assinaboin tribe is very generally admitted, by his own and neighboring tribes, to have been shown the happy hunting-grounds, and conducted through them and returned safely to the camp of his tribe, by special favor of the Great Spirit. He once drew a map of the Indian paradise for me, and described its pleasant prairies and crystal rivers, its countless herds of fat buffalo and horses, its perennial and luxuriant grass, and other charms dear to an Indian's heart, in a rhapsody that was almost poetry. Another, an obscure man of the Cathead Sioux, is believed to have seen the hole through which issue the herds of buffalo which the Great Spirit calls forth from the centre of the earth to feed his children.

Medicine of this degree is not unfavorably regarded by the masses; but instances of the highest grades are extremely rare, and the claimants of such powers few in number. The Black Snake and the Kootenai, before referred to, are, if still alive, the only instances with which I am acquainted of admitted and well-authenticated powers so great and incredible. The common use of medicine is in affairs of war and the chase. Here the medicine-man will be found, in many cases, to exhibit a prescience truly astounding. Without attempting a theory to account for this, a suggestion may be ventured. The Indian passes a life that knows no repose. His vigilance is ever on the alert. No hour of day or night is to him an hour of assured safety. In the course of years, his perceptions and apprehensions become so acute, in the presence of constant danger, as to render him keenly and delicately sensitive to impressions that a civilized man could scarce recognize. The Indian, in other words, has a development almost like the instinct of the fox or beaver. Upon this delicate barometer, whose basis is physical fear, impressions (moral or physical, who shall say?) act with surprising power. How this occurs, no Indian will attempt to explain. Certain conjurations will, they maintain, aid the medicine-man to receive impressions; but how or wherefore, no one pretends to know. This view of minor medicine is the one which will account for many of its manifestations. Whether sound or defective, we will not contend.

The medicine-man whom I knew best was Ma-què-a-pos (the Wolf's Word), an ignorant and unintellectual person. I knew him perfectly well. His nature was simple, innocent, and harmless, devoid of cunning, and wanting in those fierce traits that make up the Indian character. His predictions were sometimes absolutely astounding. He has, beyond question, accurately described the persons, horses, arms, and destination of a party three hundred miles distant, not one of whom he had ever seen, and of whose very existence neither he, nor any one in his camp, was before apprised.

On one occasion, a party of ten voyageurs set out from Fort Benton, the remotest post of the American Fur Company, for the purpose of finding the Kaimè, or Blood Band of the Northern Blackfeet. Their route lay almost due north, crossing the British line near the Chief Mountain (Nee-na-stà-ko) and the great Lake O-màx-een (two of the grandest features of Rocky Mountain scenery, but scarce ever seen by whites), and extending indefinitely beyond the Saskatchewan and towards the tributaries of the Coppermine and Mackenzie Rivers. The expedition was perilous from its commencement, and the danger increased with each day's journey. The war-paths, war-party fires, and similar indications of the vicinity of hostile bands, were each day found in greater abundance.

It should be borne in mind that an experienced trapper can, at a glance, pronounce what tribe made a war-trail or a camp-fire. Indications which would convey no meaning to the inexperienced are conclusive proofs to the keen-eyed mountaineer. The track of a foot, by a greater or less turning out of the toes, demonstrates from which side of the mountains a party has come. The print of a moccasin in soft earth indicates the tribe of the wearer. An arrow-head or a feather from a war-bonnet, a scrap of dressed deer-skin, or even a chance fragment of jerked buffalo-meat, furnishes data from which unerring conclusions are deduced with marvellous facility.

The party of adventurers soon found that they were in the thickest of the Cree war-party operations, and so full of danger was every day's travel that a council was called, and seven of the ten turned back. The remaining three, more through foolhardiness than for any good reason, continued their journey, until their resolution failed them, and they too determined that, after another day's travel northward, they would hasten back to their comrades.

On the afternoon of the last day, four young Indians were seen, who, after a cautious approach, made the sign of peace, laid down their arms, and came forward, announcing themselves to be Blackfeet of the Blood Band. They were sent out, they said, by Ma-què-a-pos, to find three whites mounted on horses of a peculiar color, dressed in garments accurately described to them, and armed with weapons which they, without seeing them, minutely described. The whole history of the expedition had been detailed to them by Ma-què-a-pos. The purpose of the journey, the personnel of the party, the exact locality at which to find the three who persevered, had been detailed by him with as much fidelity as could have been done by one of the whites themselves. And so convinced were the Indians of the truth of the old man's medicine, that the four young men were sent to appoint a rendezvous, for four days later, at a spot a hundred miles distant. On arriving there, accompanied by the young Indians, the whites found the entire camp of "Rising Head," a noted war-chief, awaiting them. The objects of the expedition were speedily accomplished; and the whites, after a few days' rest, returned to safer haunts. The writer of this paper was at the head of the party of whites, and himself met the Indian messengers.

Upon questioning the chief men of the Indian camp, many of whom afterwards became my warm personal friends, and one of them my adopted brother, no suspicion of the facts, as narrated, could be sustained. Ma-què-a-pos could give no explanation beyond the general one,—that he "saw us coming, and heard us talk on our journey." He had not, during that time, been absent from the Indian camp.

A subsequent intimate acquaintance with Ma-què-a-pos disclosed a remarkable medicine faculty as accurate as it was inexplicable. He was tested in every way, and almost always stood the ordeal successfully. Yet he never claimed that the gift entitled him to any peculiar regard, except as the instrument of a power whose operations he did not pretend to understand. He had an imperfect knowledge of the Catholic worship, distorted and intermixed with the wild theogony of the red man. He would talk with passionate devotion of the Mother of God, and in the same breath tell how the Great Spirit restrains the Rain Spirits from drowning the world, by tying them with the rainbow. I have often seen him make the sign of the cross, while he recounted, in all the soberness of implicit belief, how the Old Man (the God of the Blackfeet) formed the human race from the mud of the Missouri,—how he experimented before he adopted the human frame, as we now have it,—how he placed his creatures in an isolated park far to the north, and there taught them the rude arts of Indian life,—how he staked the Indians on a desperate game of chance with the Spirit of Evil,—and how the whites are now his peculiar care. Ma-què-a-pos's faith could hardly stand the test of any religious creed. Yet it must be said for him, that his simplicity and innocence of life might be a model for many, better instructed than he.

The wilder tribes are accustomed to certain observances which are generally termed the tribe-medicine. Their leading men inculcate them with great care,—perhaps to perpetuate unity of tradition and purpose. In the arrangement of tribe-medicine, trivial observances are frequently intermixed with very serious doctrines. Thus, the grand war-council of the Dakotah confederacy, comprising thirteen tribes of Sioux, and more than seventeen thousand warriors, many years since promulgated a national medicine, prescribing a red stone pipe with an ashen stem for all council purposes, and (herein was the true point) an eternal hostility to the whites. The prediction may be safely ventured, that every Sioux will preserve this medicine until the nation shall cease to exist. To it may be traced the recent Indian war that devastated Minnesota; and there cannot, in the nature of things, and of the American Indian especially, be a peace kept in good faith until the confederacy of the Dakotah is in effect destroyed.

The Crows, or Upsàraukas, will not smoke in council, unless the pipe is lighted with a coal of buffalo chip, and the bowl rested on a fragment of the same substance. Their chief men have for a great while endeavored to engraft teetotalism upon their national medicine, and have succeeded better than the Indian character would have seemed to promise.

Among the Flat-Heads female chastity is a national medicine. With the Mandans, friendship for the whites is supposed to be the source of national and individual advantage.

Besides the varieties of medicine already alluded to, there are in use charms of almost every kind. When game is scarce, medicine is made to call back the buffalo. The Man in the Sun is invoked for fair weather, for success in war or chase, and for a cure of wounds. The spirits of the dead are appeased by medicine songs and offerings. The curiosity of some may be attracted by the following rude and literal translation of the song of a Blackfoot woman to the spirit of her son, who was killed on his first war-party. The words were written down at the time, and are not in any respect changed or smoothed.

"O my son, farewell!You have gone beyond the great river,Your spirit is on the other side of the Sand Buttes;I will not see you for a hundred winters;You will scalp the enemy in the green prairie,Beyond the great river.When the warriors of the Blackfeet meet,When they smoke the medicine-pipe and dance the war-dance,They will ask, 'Where is Isthumaka?—Where is the bravest of the Mannikappi?'He fell on the war-path.Mai-ram-bo, mai-ram-bo."Many scalps will be taken for your death;The Crows will lose many horses;Their women will weep for their braves,They will curse the spirit of Isthumaka.O my son! I will come to youAnd make moccasins for the war-path,As I did when you struck the lodgeOf the 'Horse-Guard' with the tomahawk.Farewell, my son! I will see youBeyond the broad river.Mai-ram-bo, mai-ram-bo," etc., etc.

Sung in a plaintive minor key, and in a wild, irregular rhythm, the dirge was far more impressive than the words would indicate.

It cannot be denied that the whites, who consort much with the ruder tribes of Indians imbibe, to a considerable degree, their veneration for medicine. The old trappers and voyageurs are, almost without exception, observers of omens and dreamers of dreams. They claim that medicine is a faculty which can in some degree be cultivated, and aspire to its possession as eagerly as does the Indian. Sometimes they acquire a reputation that is in many ways beneficial to them.

As before said, it is no object of this paper to defend or combat the Indian notion of medicine. Such a system exists as a fact; and whoever writes upon American Demonology will find many fruitful topics of investigation in the daily life of the uncontaminated Indian. There may be nothing of truth in the supposed prediction by Tecumseh, that Tuckabatchee would be destroyed by an earthquake on a day which he named; the gifts of the "Prophet" may be overstated in the traditions that yet linger in Kentucky and Indiana; the descent of the Mandans from Prince Madoc and his adventurous Welchmen, and the consideration accorded them on that account, may very possibly be altogether fanciful; but whoever will take the trouble to investigate will find in the real Indian a faith, and occasionally a power, that quite equal the faculties claimed by our civilized clairvoyants, and will approach an untrodden path of curious, if not altogether useful research.

THE DEATH OF SLAVERY

O thou great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years,Didst hold thy millions fettered, and didst wieldThe scourge that drove the laborer to the field,And look with stony eye on human tears,Thy cruel reign is o'er;Thy bondmen crouch no moreIn terror at the menace of thine eye;For He who marks the bounds of guilty power,Long-suffering, hath heard the captive's cry,And touched his shackles at the appointed hour,And lo! they fall, and he whose limbs they galledStands in his native manhood, disenthralled.A shout of joy from the redeemed is sent;Ten thousand hamlets swell the hymn of thanks;Our rivers roll exulting, and their banksSend up hosannas to the firmament.Fields, where the bondman's toilNo more shall trench the soil,Seem now to bask in a serener day;The meadow-birds sing sweeter, and the airsOf heaven with more caressing softness play,Welcoming man to liberty like theirs.A glory clothes the land from sea to sea,For the great land and all its coasts are free.Within that land wert thou enthroned of late,And they by whom the nation's laws were made,And they who filled its judgment-seats, obeyedThy mandate, rigid as the will of fate.Fierce men at thy right hand,With gesture of command,Gave forth the word that none might dare gainsay;And grave and reverend ones, who loved thee not,Shrank from thy presence, and, in blank dismay,Choked down, unuttered, the rebellious thought;While meaner cowards, mingling with thy train,Proved, from the book of God, thy right to reign.Great as thou wert, and feared from shore to shore,The wrath of God o'ertook thee in thy pride;Thou sitt'st a ghastly shadow; by thy sideThy once strong arms hang nerveless evermore.And they who quailed but nowBefore thy lowering browDevote thy memory to scorn and shame,And scoff at the pale, powerless thing thou art.And they who ruled in thine imperial name,Subdued, and standing sullenly apart,Scowl at the hands that overthrew thy reign,And shattered at a blow the prisoner's chain.Well was thy doom deserved; thou didst not spareLife's tenderest ties, but cruelly didst partHusband and wife, and from the mother's heartDidst wrest her children, deaf to shriek and prayer;Thy inner lair becameThe haunt of guilty shame;Thy lash dropped blood; the murderer, at thy side,Showed his red hands, nor feared the vengeance due.Thou didst sow earth with crimes, and, far and wide,A harvest of uncounted miseries grew,Until the measure of thy sins at lastWas full, and then the avenging bolt was cast.Go then, accursed of God, and take thy placeWith baleful memories of the elder time,With many a wasting pest, and nameless crime,And bloody war that thinned the human race;With the Black Death, whose wayThrough wailing cities lay,Worship of Moloch, tyrannies that builtThe Pyramids, and cruel creeds that taughtTo avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt,—Death at the stake to those that held them not.Lo, the foul phantoms, silent in the gloomOf the flown ages, part to yield thee room.I see the better years that hasten byCarry thee back into that shadowy past,Where, in the dusty spaces, void and vast,The graves of those whom thou hast murdered lie.The slave-pen, through whose doorThy victims pass no more,Is there, and there shall the grim block remainAt which the slave was sold; while at thy feetScourges and engines of restraint and painMoulder and rust by thine eternal seat.There, 'mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes,Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Ecce Homo: a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The merits of this book are popular and obvious, consisting in a strain of liberal, enlightened sentiment, an ingenious and original cast of thought, and a painstaking lucidity of style which leaves the writer's meaning even prosaically plain. There is a good deal of absurd and even puerile exegesis in its pages, which makes you wonder how so much sentimentality can co-exist with so much ability; but the book is vitiated for all purposes beyond mere literary entertainment by one grand defect, which is the guarded theologic obscurity the writer keeps up, or the attempt he makes to estimate Christianity apart from all question of the truth or falsity of Christ's personal pretensions towards God. The author may have reached in his own mind the most definite theologic convictions, but he sedulously withholds them from his reader; and the consequence is, that the book awakens and satisfies no intellectual interest in the latter, but remains at best a curious literary speculation. For what men have always been moved by in Christianity is not so much the superiority of its moral inculcations to those of other faiths, as its uncompromising pretension to be a final or absolute religion. If Christ be only the eminently good and wise and philanthropic man the author describes him to be, deliberating, legislating, for the improvement of man's morals, he may be very admirable, but nothing can be inferred from that circumstance to the deeper inquiry. If he claim no essentially different significance to our regard, on God's part, than that claimed by Zoroaster, Confucius, Mahomet, Hildebrand, Luther, Wesley, he is to be sure still entitled to all the respect inherent in such an office; but then there is no a priori reason why his teaching and influence should not be superseded in process of time by that of any at present unmentionable Anne Lee, Joanna Southcote, or Joe Smith. And what the human mind craves, above all things else, is repose towards God,—is not to remain a helpless sport to every fanatic sot that comes up from the abyss of human vanity, and claims to hold it captive by the assumption of a new Divine mission.

The objection to the mythic view of Christ's significance, which is that maintained by Strauss, is, that it violates men's faith in the integrity of history as a veracious outcome of the providential love and wisdom which are extant and operative in human affairs. And the objection to what has been called the Troubadour view of the same subject, which is that represented by M. Renan, is, that it outrages men's faith in human character, regarded, if not as habitually, still as occasionally capable of heroic or consistent veracity. We may safely argue, then, that neither Strauss nor Renan will possess any long vitality to human thought. They are both fascinating reading;—the one for his profound sincerity, or his conviction of a worth in Christianity so broadly human and impersonal as to exempt it from the obligations of a literal historic doctrine; the other for his profound insincerity, so to speak, or an egotism so subtile, so capacious and frank, as permits him to take up the grandest character in history into the hollow of his hand, and turn him about there for critical inspection and definite adjustment to the race, with absolutely no more reverence nor reticence than a buyer of grain shows to a handful of wheat, as he pours it dexterously from hand to hand, and blows the chaff in the seller's face.7 But both writers alike are left behind us in the library, and are not subsequently brought to mind by anything we encounter in the fields or the streets.

The author of Ecce Homo does no dishonor to the Christian history as history, however foolishly he expatiates at times upon its incidents and implications; much less to the simple and perfect integrity of Christ as a man, but no more than Strauss or Renan does he meet the supreme want of the popular understanding, which is to know wherein Christianity has the right it claims to be regarded as a final or complete revelation of the Divine name upon the earth. We think, moreover, that the reason of the omission is the same in every case, being the sheer and contented indifference which each of the writers feels to the question of a revelation in the abstract or general, regarded as a sine qua non of any sympathetic or rational intercourse which may be considered as possible between God and man. We should not be so presumptuous as to invite our readers' attention to the discussion of so grave a philosophic topic as the one here referred to, in the limited space at our command; but surely it may be said, without any danger of misunderstanding from the most cursory reader, that if creation were the absolute or unconditioned verity which thoughtless people deem it, there could be no ratio between Creator and creature, hence no intercourse or intimacy, inasmuch as the one is being itself, and the other does not even exist or seem to be but by him. In order that creation should be a rational product of Divine power, in order that the creature should be a being of reason, endowed with the responsibility of his own actions, it is imperative that the Creator disown his essential infinitude and diminish himself to the creature's dimensions; that he hide or obscure his own perfection in the creature's imperfection, to the extent even of rendering it fairly problematic whether or not an infinite being really exist, so putting man, as it were, upon the spontaneous search and demand for such a being, and in that measure developing his rational possibilities. And if this be so,—if creation philosophically involve a descending movement on the Creator's part proportionate to the ascending one contemplated on the creature's part,—then it follows that creation is not a simple, but a complex process, involving equally a Divine action and a human reaction, or the due adjustment of means and ends; and that no writer, consequently, can long satisfy the intellect in the sphere of religious thought, who either jauntily or ignorantly overlooks this philosophic necessity. This, however, is what Messrs. Strauss and Renan and the author of Ecce Homo agree to do; and this is what makes their several books, whatever subjective differences characterize them to a literary regard, alike objectively unprofitable as instruments of intellectual progress.

The Masquerade and Other Poems. By John Godfrey Saxe. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

It was remarked lately by an ingenious writer, that "it never seems to occur to some people, who deliver upon the books they read very unhesitating judgments, that they may be wanting, either by congenital defect, or defect of experience, or defect of reproductive memory, in the qualifications which are necessary for judging fairly of any particular book." To poetry this remark applies with especial force.

By poetry we do not understand mere verse, but any form of literary composition which reproduces in the mind certain emotions which, in the absence of an epithet less vague, we shall call poetical. These emotions may be a compound of the sensuous and the purely intellectual, or they may partake much more of the one than of the other. (The rigorous metaphysician will please not begin to carp at our definition.) These emotions may be excited by an odor, the state of the atmosphere, a strain of music, a form of words, or by a single word; and, as they result largely from association, it is obvious that what may be poetry to some minds may not be poetry to others,—may not be poetry to the same mind at different periods of life or in different moods. The most sympathetic, most catholic, most receptive mind will always be the best qualified to detect and appreciate poetry under all its various forms, and would as soon think of denying the devotional faculty to a man of differing creed, as of denying the poetical to one whose theory or habit of expression may chance to differ from its own. Goethe was so apt to discover something good in poems which others dismissed as wholly worthless, that it was said of him, "his commendation is a brevet of mediocrity." Perhaps it was his "many-sidedness" that made him so accurate a "detective" in criticism.