My Native Land: The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People; with Descriptive Notes, Character Sketches, Folk Lore, Traditions, Legends and History, for the Amusement of the Old and the Instruction of the YoungCox, James
History
My Native Land: The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People; with Descriptive Notes, Character Sketches, Folk Lore, Traditions, Legends and History, for the Amusement of the Old and the Instruction of the Young
Cox, James
Indians of North America; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
The Utes play with two bones in each hand, one of which is wrapped about
with a string. The game is to guess the hand that holds the wrapped
bone. The plum-stone game is played by the plains Indians. It is only
another name for dice throwing. The plum-stones are graved with
hieroglyphics, and counts are curiously made in a way that often defies
computation by white men. The women gamble quite as much as the men,
when they dare, and grow even more excited over the game than their
lords. Their game, as witnessed among the Cheyennes, is played with
beads, little loops and long horn sticks made of deer foot.
The children look on and learn to gamble from their earliest childhood,
and soon learn to cheat and impose on their juniors. Their little
juvenile gambling operations are done principally with arrows. Winter
breeds sloth, and sloth begets gambling, and gambling, drink. There is
no conviviality in Indian drinking bouts. The Indian gets drunk, and
dead drunk, as soon as he possibly can, and finds his highest enjoyment
in sleeping it off. His nature reacts viciously under drink, however, in
many cases, and he is then a dangerous customer.
The women of many tribes are a most pitiable lot of hard working, ragged
and dirty humanity. Upon them falls all the drudgery of the camp; they
are "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and bend under immense
burdens piled upon their backs, while thousands of ponies browse,
undisturbed, in every direction. As the troops are withdrawn, the squaws
swoop down upon the deserted camps, and rapidly glean them of all that
is portable, for use in their domestic economy. An Indian fire would be
considered a very cheerless affair by the inmates of houses heated by
modern appliances; but such as it is--a few sticks burning with feeble
blaze and scarcely penetrating the dense smoke filling the tepee from
the ground to the small opening at the top--it consumes fuel, and the
demand is always greater than the supply, for the reason that an Indian
has no idea of preparation for future necessities. If the fire burns,
all right; when the last stick is laid on, a squaw will start for a
fresh supply, no matter how cold and stormy the weather may be.
The poetical Indian maiden may still exist in the vivid imagination of
extreme youth, but she is not common to-day. The young girls affect gay
attire, and are exempt from the hardships of toil which are imposed on
their elder sisters, mothers and grandams, but their fate is infinitely
worse. Little beauty is to be discerned among them, and in this regard
time seems to have effaced the types which were prevalent a few years
ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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