The Old Santa Fe Trail: The Story of a Great HighwayInman, Henry
History
The Old Santa Fe Trail: The Story of a Great Highway
Inman, Henry
Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); New Mexico -- History; Santa Fe National Historic Trail
When a village is to be moved, it is an interesting sight. The young and
unfledged boys drive up the herd of ponies, and then the squaws catch
them. The women, too, take down the lodges, and, tying the poles in two
bundles, fasten them on each side of an animal, the long ends dragging
on the ground. Just behind the pony or mule, as the case may be, a
basket is placed and held there by buffalo-hide thongs, and into these
novel carriages the little children are put, besides such traps as are
not easily packed on the animal's back.
The women do all the work both in camp and when moving. They are doomed
to a hopeless bondage of slavery, the fate of their sex in every savage
race; but they accept their condition stoically, and there is as much
affection among them for their husbands and children as I have ever
witnessed among the white race. Here are two instances of their
devotion, both of which came under my personal observation, and I could
give hundreds of others.
Late in the fall of 1858, I was one of a party on the trail of a band of
Indians who had been committing some horrible murders in a mining-camp
in the northern portion of Washington Territory. On the fourth day out,
just about dusk, we struck their moccasin tracks, which we followed all
night, and surprised their camp in the gray light of the early morning.
In less than ten minutes the fight was over, and besides the killed we
captured six prisoners. Then as the rising sun commenced to gild the
peaks of the lofty range on the west, having granted our captives half
an hour to take leave of their families, the ankles of each were bound;
they were made to kneel on the prairie, a squad of soldiers, with loaded
rifles, were drawn up eight paces in front of them, and at the instant
the signal--a white handkerchief--was dropped the savages tumbled over
on the sod a heap of corpses. The parting between the condemned men and
their young wives and children, I shall never forget. It was the
most perfect exhibition of marital and filial love that I have ever
witnessed. Such harsh measures may seem cruel and heartless in the
light of to-day, but there was none other than martial law then in the
wilderness of the Northern Pacific coast, and the execution was a stern
necessity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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