1859.] CURIOUS HEREDITARY COMPLEXIONS. 221 Feather, the Turkey, Sour John, The Tough, Flying Buffalo, Spring Frog, Big Head, John Jolly, and Soft-Shell Turtle. The Creeks are less advanced in civilization. In summer after working part of a day they often seek some cool shallow spot in the river, and lie in the water for hours. Thus old travelers relate that dwellers on the Isle of Ormus were wont to sleep in wooden cisterns immersed in water up to their heads. They are famous pedestrians, often walking sixty or seventy miles a day. With a little sack of dried meat suspended from his neck, and his pockets filled with cakes of pulverized potatoes and beans, carefully wrapped in husks, the Creek starts on a tour of two or three hundred miles, and leaves the hardiest horse behind. The Choctaws used to flatten their foreheads artificially. From the extreme of barbarism they have advanced steadily in civilization since 1831, when they removed from Alabama to this region. They are honest faithful and peaceable, owning all lands in common, but permitting any one of their tribe to remain undisturbed on the tract which he cultivates. Most are of unmixed Indian blood, though whites who have married Choctaw wives and been adopted into the tribe, enjoy all the privileges of citizenship save eligibility to the three highest offices. Where the father is of pure white blood and the mother an Indian or half-breed, or vice versa, five of the children may be entirely white, with Saxon features, and a sixth will have unmixed Indian lineaments, with a skin dusky as the darkest Comanche or Pueblo. The Choctaws produce much cotton in their rich valleys. Stock raising is the most lucrative employment. I found oxen selling at fifty dollars per yoke, cows at ten dollars each, and horses at twenty dollars apiece. Calves and colts branded with the owner's mark run at large, require no feeding in winter, and in two or three years are ready for the market. Every citizen's brand is registered in the public records, so that stray animals are easily reclaimed. According to Marco Polo the same system existed among the Tartars in the thirteenth century: 'Every man who owns oxen or other cattle marks them with his seal and then turns them out upon the plains or among the mountains; and whoever finds one straying brings it to him whose mark is upon it.' 222 NOVEL BOARDING SCHOOL FREAKS. [1859. The Choctaw language though rude and rudimentary is often poetic. Fingers are 'sons of the hand,' and leaves 'tree-hair.' A river is a water-road,' and the moon, 'the night-traveling sun.' Arrows are 'cane-bullets, and bows 'wooden guns.' In sharp contrast to their white Arkansas neighbors the Choc. taws appropriated money freely for the education of their children. At ten large mission boarding schools six hundred pupils were studying. After graduating here promising boys were sent to eastern colleges at the public expense. In a girls' school superintended by a Methodist clergyman, the sixty pupils all slept in a long hall. Sometimes at the dead of night one would strike up a sacred hymn; one by one all the little sleepers would wake and join her, until the building rang with their voices. Next some little copper-hued girl in night-gown would mount a chair for a religious exhortation. Others would follow, till the little devotees with their groans, sobs and shrieks, rivaled a camp meeting. At other times a single girl would wake and begin some low weird song. One after another all would rouse and join her, the chant swelling until all these little throats roared forth the old war whoop of the Choctaw tribe! The teachers could not prevent these midnight entertainments even by whipping. The girls acquired language readily, were intelligent and in average capacity equaled white children. The constitution of the Choctaws contained this provision: 'The tenure of all offices shall be for some limited period of time, if the person appointed or elected thereto so long behave well! Elections were by ballot. The legislative debates were in Choctaw but the records in English. Neither atheists nor 'persons not believing in future rewards and punishments' could hold office. Murderers were almost invariably caught, and publicly shot ten days after conviction. The penalty for stealing negroes, horses, mules, or jackasses' was 'one hundred lashes well laid on the bare back' for the first offense, and death for the second. Kidnappers were branded with the letter T (thief) on the forehead, and received a hundred lashes, also 'well laid on.' Excessive cruelty to animals was punishable by fine and thirty-nine lashes; treason, by death; 1859.] CRINOLINE AMONG INDIAN WOMEN. 223 manslaughter by one hundred lashes; grand larceny by one hundred lashes, and the second offense by death; libel, by 'Such number of lashes on the bare back, well laid on, as the court in its discretion may adjudge, having regard to the nature and enormity of the offense.' Obviously this was no place for a roving journalist; and I took the coach going west. It was filled with passengers, including a loquacious Californian who in troduced himself as General without stating upon what bloody fields he won the title. Our road led among wooded hills and park-like forests and across rich prairie openings, alive with hundreds of grazing cattle often white as snow. Men women and children of all hues between alabaster and ebony, lounged upon the long porticoes or on the grass under the tall trees. Some Indian girls wore the latest city modes with enormous crinolines. How absolute the sway of that gentle empress whose silent com. mands from her silken chambers go forth over sea and land, even penetrating the primeval forest and ruling the dusky daughters of an unknown race! A CHARMED LINE. Many farmers had superb corn-fields. In early days the untamed Choctaws raised only grain enough for their subsistence. The first night after planting a corn patch, the hunter's wife walked around it, trailing her night-gown upon the ground, thus encircling it with a charmed line which neither voracious worm nor noxious insect could cross. The brave fancied that, Byron-like, the destroyers of his grain venerated a petticoat: 'A garment of a mystical sublimity, No matter whether russet silk or dimity.' 224 THE CHICKASAWS LOSE THEIR LAWS. [1859. The second day, we had left the mountains behind and were among beautiful prairies. Boggy Depot capital of the Choctaw nation contained two trading houses and half a dozen dwellings. It is near the country of the Chickasaws who have a separate government. A few years ago their legislature abrogated all existing laws and passed a fresh code. They sent the new manuscript laws into Texas to be printed, without retaining a copy. The messenger lost them while fording a river; and they were never recovered. The courts were in a muddle which would have surprised Stephen Blackpool himself, until a new legislature supplied the deficiency. Approaching Texas we sang with the jolly German travelers: 'Nut-brown maids and bread that's white, Maids of white and bread of brown, Shall greet us in to-morrow's town.' The Indian Territory, nine time times larger than Massachusetts, is better watered and timbered than Kansas or Illinois; has a delightful climate, a soil unsurpassed in the world, and enormous fields of coal. Adapted to every product from cotton to Indian corn, it is the most beautiful farming country under our flag, and when. the railroad shall penetrate it, will leap into the condition of a populous and powerful State. Before seeing its inhabitants I was skeptical about the possibility of civilizing Indians. But these once cruel and barbarous tribes were now governing themselves, educating their children, protecting life and property far better than adjacent Arkansas and Texas, and rapidly assuming the habits of enlightened man. At Preston we crossed the Red river into Texas. Lightdraught steamers have sometimes ascended to Preston; but the river is really navigable only to Shreveport, Louisiana. Thirty miles above Shreveport begins the great 'Raft'-an immense collection of trees and drift-wood half imbedded in the earth and firmly wedged together. It extends for seventy miles up the channel, sometimes spreading out to a width of thirty miles, and dividing the stream into many branches which do not all reunite for a hundred miles. 1859.] NEWS OF BRODERICK'S DEATH. 225 CHAPTER XIX. ONE authority derives 'Texas' from Teha, (happy hunting ground) applied by the Aztecs who fled thither after the subjugation of their country by Cortez. According to another tradition. it is an Indian word signifying 'friend.' Before daylight on the first morning we met the California mail, with six smoking horses on a swift run through the drenching rain, and the passengers lustily singing: 'Down upon the Suwanee river.' Every day thereafter we encountered a stage from San Francisco, always stopping a moment to exchange gossip and newspapers. At midnight one coach-load sent a thrill of horror through our little company by intelligence that Broderick the favorite Free Soil senator from California had fallen in a duel. Judge Terry, Broderick's adversary, was charged with foul play in the selection of weapons of the very finest trigger, with which he had practised for months, while Broderick had never seen them before. Five years later, Terry himself was killed while serving as an officer in the rebel army. Five Our first Texan town was Sherman, capital of Grayson county, on a high rolling site, with a population of five hundred. hours later we breakfasted at Gainesville, in Cook county, another pleasant village. Beyond stretched undulating prairies with soil as black and rich as that of Kansas-a good stock region though liable to destructive drowths, which ruin grass and sometimes compel the farmers to fatten their cattle on wheat. During the day we passed but five or six farms; and night overtook us on a barren soil among thin groves of low scrubby oaks. |