On Canada's Frontier: Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of Western Canada — John Shaqi
On Canada's Frontier: Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of Western CanadaRalph, Julian
History
On Canada's Frontier: Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of Western Canada
Ralph, Julian
Hudson's Bay Company -- History; Indians of North America -- Canada; Northwest, Canadian -- Description and travel
When Crowfoot talked, he made laws. While he spoke, his nation listened
in silence. He had killed as many men as any Indian warrior alive; he
was a mighty buffalo-slayer; he was torn, scarred, and mangled in skin,
limb, and bone. He never would learn English or pretend to discard his
religion. He was an Indian after the pattern of his ancestors. At eighty
odd years of age there lived no red-skin who dared answer him back when
he spoke his mind. But he was a shrewd man and an archdiplomatist.
Because he had no quarrel with the whites, and because a grand old
priest was his truest friend, he gave orders that his body should be
buried in a coffin, Christian fashion, and as I rode over the plains in
the summer of 1890 I saw his burial-place on top of a high hill, and
knew that his bones were guarded night and day by watchers from among
his people. Two or three days before he died his best horse was
slaughtered for burial with him. He heard of it. "That was wrong," he
said; "there was no sense in doing that; and besides, the horse was
worth good money." But he was always at least as far as that in advance
of his people, and it was natural that not only his horse, but his gun
and blankets, his rich robes, and plenty of food to last him to the
happy hunting-grounds, should have been buried with him.
There are different ways of judging which is the best Indian, but from
the stand-point of him who would examine that distinct product of
nature, the Indian as the white man found him, the Canadian Blackfeet
are among if not quite the best. They are almost as primitive and
natural as any, nearly the most prosperous, physically very fine, the
most free from white men's vices. They are the most reasonable in their
attitude towards the whites of any who hold to the true Indian
philosophy. The sum of that philosophy is that civilization gets men a
great many comforts, but bundles them up with so many rules and
responsibilities and so much hard work that, after all, the wild Indian
has the greatest amount of pleasure and the least share of care that men
can hope for. That man is the fairest judge of the red-skins who
considers them as children, governed mainly by emotion, and acting upon
undisciplined impulse; and I know of no more hearty, natural children
than the careless, improvident, impulsive boys and girls of from five to
eighty years of age whom Crowfoot turned over to the care of Three
Bulls, his brother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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