Chapter II

Description of the Indians. Their manners, habits, mode of
life, &c. Efforts to convert them, previous to Eliot’s labors.

Some account of the manners and habits of the Indians, as our forefathers and their successors found them, will be necessary that we may appreciate the labors and self-denial which were required of those who instructed these sons of the forest in religion and civilization. A correct knowledge of their original condition dispels the romantic associations which many have with the name of a North American Indian. The lowest degradation had been reached by these savages. The laws of a people are a true picture of the people, and some of the laws which the Indians enacted when they began to be civilized, reveal the misery and filthiness from which they began at last to be recovered. This will be illustrated as we proceed.

We will speak first of the personal appearance of the Indian.

Their skin was of a tawny color, a yellowish, dark complexion. Their form and limbs were well proportioned, and it was seldom that a crooked person was found among them. Their hair was long, black, and coarse, without curling; their eyes black, without lustre. In their general appearance they were so much like the Moors of Africa, that many have supposed them to have come originally from that part of the world.

They had many wives, but one of them was chief in her husband’s regard. They put away their wives, and the wife also left her husband when offended with him.

Their revengeful disposition is proverbial. The relatives of an injured or murdered Indian regarded his wrong as done to them, and they sought satisfaction in the death of the offender, or in the payment of wampum, (or shells,) which passed with them for money.

They were an idle race, especially the men. Tillage was chiefly performed by the women, though to but little extent. The women also carried burdens, as in removing from place to place. They also prepared the food.

Their wigwams were made with slim poles fixed in the ground, bent, and fastened at the top with the bark of trees. The best of them were made tight and warm with the whole barks of trees, pressed when green by a heavy weight of timber. A common sort of bulrushes woven together, made mats for the covering of the poorer houses. The houses varied in size, from twenty to forty feet square, and some were from sixty to a hundred feet long, and thirty feet broad. In the smaller houses a fire was kindled in the centre, but in the larger, several fires were made for the convenience of the inmates. A hole in the top of the house served the place of a chimney, and on the top of the house a mat was suspended, to serve the purpose of a ventilator to the smoke, being set to the windward side. Their bedsteads were made of rude boards split from the tree, and raised about a foot from the ground, covered with skins, or with mats of woven grass, or bulrushes.

Their principal food was a kind of pottage in which it would be difficult to say what article prevailed. Indian corn, kidney beans, all kinds of flesh and fish, cut in small pieces with the bones, many kinds of roots, artichokes, ground-nuts, squashes, oak acorns, walnuts, and chestnuts, were boiled together. The nuts being dried, and powdered, were used as flour to thicken the mess. They made a cake of parched corn, which they called nokake. This they took with them in their travels, and is said to have been so hearty a kind of food, that they subsisted on it many days in their wanderings from place to place.

Their household utensils corresponded in simplicity to their food, and mode of cooking. The pots were made of clay, in the shape of an egg without the top. They were glad to receive pots of metal, as the earth of which they made their brittle vessels was scarce and dear. They used a kind of wood which was not liable to split, for dishes, spoons, and ladles. Their water pails were made of birch bark, folded square, with a handle or bail. Some of them held two or three gallons, and they could make one of them in the space of an hour. They wrought pictures of birds, beasts, fishes and flowers of divers colors in their baskets, which were made of corn husks, silk grass, and wild hemp.

They formerly used no drink but water, though they soon learned from the settlers the manufacture and use of cider. When they became acquainted with intoxicating drinks, they showed a violent love for them, by which their savage passions and propensities were fearfully excited.

Their clothing was, at first, of skins, and some had mantles of birds’ feathers, twilled together. Even the most barbarous of them were decent in covering their persons, and were never seen naked in public.

One of their principal remedies in sickness was, to put the patient, and sometimes several patients together, in a rude stone house, which they would heat by building fires round it, and having thus put the sick into a violent perspiration, they would plunge them into a neighboring brook.

They divided time into sleeps, and moons, and winters. It is a curious fact that they called the Constellation, Charles’ Wain, by the same name with the English, the Bear. Like the early eastern nations, they seem to have pondered the face of the heavens, and to have made figures of the stars.

Their money consisted of shells, or strings of shells, the black being double in value to the white. The _mints_ of their money seem to have been at Block Island, and Long Island, upon whose sandy flats and shores, these welk shells were chiefly found. It was called wompompeague, or, wompeague, and by contraction, wompum, or, wampum. They redeemed captives, paid tribute, made satisfaction for wrongs, and murders, and purchased peace of their more powerful neighbors, with strings of this wampum.

Their weapons were bows and arrows, clubs, tomahawks, made of wood like a pole axe, with a sharp stone in the head. They used targets or shields of bark.

They formerly smeared their skin with bears’ grease, but when the English swine afforded them lard, they used it as a substitute, and thus having anointed themselves, they painted their faces with vermilion, or red, and powdered their heads. Sometimes they painted one half of the face black, and the other white, and so, with various colors, deformed their visages, the women, especially, doing this, and the warriors thereby making themselves hideous in battle. Widows, mourning for their husbands, painted their faces wholly black. The men preparing for war put their hair in a roll, and surmounted it with turkey’s or eagle’s feathers, with other fantastic and showy decorations.

They took great pleasure in dancing, the men only dancing, and they singly, (except in the war dance,) with uncouth and antic gestures and movements of the whole body, the spectators singing or whooping. The dancer took off his ornaments one by one as he danced, and gave them away to those who looked on, and when he had given away all that he had upon him, and was weary, another would succeed him, and thus succeeding each other they would spend the nights of a whole week together, sleeping by day. At such dancings accompanied with revelings, chiefly held after harvest, they were addicted to many evil practices.

They were a hospitable race. Strangers were furnished with the best food and lodging, and were served before themselves.

Their government was for the most part monarchical, the chief sachem or sagamore making his will the law, though there were chief men associated with him as counselors. In some of the tribes the influence of the head men was greater than in others, making the government a mixture of monarchy and aristocracy.

They had no idols made with hands, but being ignorant of the true God, they adored natural objects; the sun, the moon, the earth, fire, and other things. They supposed that every thing in nature has a god in it, or belonging to it, but fire they believed to be itself a god. They believed that there was one god in the southwest, who was the chief deity.

The Indians had priests or powows, or, powaws, who were conjurers, who, with horrid rites and incantations, told their fortunes, advised them in their affairs, yelled over them in their sick and dying moments, and performed religious worship with terrific noises and actions,

“Like stabled wolves or tigers at their prey,
Doing abhorred rites to Hecate.”

The Indians believed in the immortality of the soul, that the good are admitted to a splendid entertainment, and the wicked wander in agony forever, and that there is no resurrection of the body for good or bad.

As to the origin of the Indians, Roger Williams has well expressed the truth on the subject, in his Key into the language of the Indians of New England.[6]

“From Adam and Noah that they spring, it is granted on all hands. But for their later descent, and whence they came into these parts, it seems hard to find, as to find the well-head of some fresh stream which running many miles out of the country to the salt ocean, hath met with many mixing streams by the way.”

Mr. Williams gives many particulars of their manners and customs; some of which are here added.

Their nokake, or nokehick, parched meal, was carried by each man on a journey, or in war, in a basket, fastened to his back, or in a hollow belt. With a spoonful of this meal, and a spoonful of water from the brook, Mr. Williams says he has many a time made a good supper. This parched meal, boiled with water, he says, is the wholesomest diet they have. _Nawsaump_ was a kind of meal pottage unparched, and from this the English derived their _samp_, or Indian corn, broken and boiled, and eaten, hot or cold, with milk or butter; “which are mercies beyond the natives’ plain water, and which is a dish exceeding wholesome for the English bodies.”

Tobacco was in general use among them, and was the only plant which the men cultivated, the women attending to the rest. The following remark, by Mr. Williams, is in good illustration of former views and feelings with regard to the use of spirituous liquors. “I never see any take tobacco so excessively as I have seen men in Europe; and yet excess were more tolerable in them, because they want the refreshing of beer and wine, which God had vouchsafed Europe.”[7]

They made up a fire, when they were lying down to sleep, summer and winter. “Their fire,” says Williams, “is instead of our bed clothes. And so themselves, and any that have occasion to lodge with them, must be content to turn often to the fire, if the night be cold; and they who first wake must repair the fire.”

Bad dreams they considered as threatenings from God; and when they happened to them, they would engage in prayer at all times of the night. An Indian once dreamed that the sun, whom they worship as a god, darted a beam into his breast. This he took for an admonition of his death. He called his friends and neighbors together, and prepared some refreshment for them; but himself remained awake, and fasting, for ten days and nights in great humiliation and distress.

“The women nurse all the children themselves; yet a rich or high woman maintains a nurse to tend the child.”

“They have amongst them natural fools, either so born, or accidentally deprived of reason.”

“The toothache is the only pain which will force their stout hearts to cry. I have never heard any cries among them like those of men in the toothache. In this pain they use a certain root dried, not much unlike our ginger.”

“They are most skillful in cutting off the heads of their enemies in fight. I know the man, yet living, who pretended to fall from his own camp to the enemy, proffered his service in the front with them against his own army. He drew them out to battle, keeping in front; but, on a sudden, shot their chief leader and captain, and, in a trice, fetched off his head, and returned immediately to his own again. His act was false and treacherous; yet herein appear policy, stoutness, and activity.”

“Their desire of and delight in news, is great as the Athenians. A stranger that can relate news in their own language they will style him manittoo, a god.”

In hearing news they sit in a circle, two, three, or four deep. “I have seen near a thousand in a round where English could not well near half so many have sitten.”

They frequently inquired “Why came the Englishmen hither?” The explanation most commonly believed among themselves at first was, that the English wanted fire-wood, and so removed to these parts, as the Indians remove when they have used up the wood around them.

They kept the time of the day and the night with great accuracy, by observing the sun, moon, and stars. Living abroad in the fields and sleeping much out of doors, even the young children were expert in telling the time. The Indians were punctual in their promises as to time. Mr. Williams says they once charged him with lying for not being punctual, though necessarily delayed.

English travelers were struck with the paths which the bare and tough feet of the Indians had made in stony places. One writer says that he has known many of them to run between eighty and a hundred miles in a summer’s day, and return within two days. He says they were so thoroughly acquainted with the interior of the country by means of hunting, that they have guided travelers forty miles without any path. They coveted horses above other beasts, preferring the ease of riding even to the comfort of milk and butter from the cow. On meeting with one another in travel, they were very happy and joyful; and striking fire, with stones or sticks, took tobacco, and set down to talk. It was quite rare to meet an old man or a lame man with a staff, their constitutions being generally robust.

The English settlers were greatly struck with the purity of the air and of the water in New England.[8] But as New England is about twelve degrees south of England, the greater cold of this region is explained, Mr. Williams thinks, by the fact that main lands and continents are colder than islands. “England’s winds are sea winds, which are commonly more thick and vapory, and warmer winds. The northwest wind, which occasioneth New England cold, comes over the cold, frozen land, and over many millions of loads of snow. And yet the pure wholesomeness of the land is wonderful, and the warmth of the sun such in the sharpest weather, that I have often seen the natives’ children run about stark naked in the coldest days, and the Indian men and women lie by a fire in the woods in the coldest nights; and I have often been out myself such nights without fire, mercifully and wonderfully preserved.”

It is observed by many writers that the Indians had a considerable mixture of sadness in their disposition. Though nature here was profuse in wild animals for food, and fish, and fowl, and fruits, the savages were subject to much suffering from causes which they had no knowledge to understand nor skill to prevent. Their superstitions joined with their savage vices made them afraid. It would seem also, in noticing the proofs of this disposition to melancholy, that the coming event of their disappearance as a race had cast its shadow upon their spirits. Mr. Williams says that they dislike cloths inclining to white, “but preferred to have a sad color, without any whitish hairs, suiting with their own natural temper, which inclines to sadness.”[9]

In the spirit with which our forefathers came hither, seeking the conversion of the red race, good men from time to time pursued different measures for their spiritual good. But while other men deserve great praise for their zeal and industry in this benevolent work, it was reserved to JOHN ELIOT to gain for himself the name of the Apostle to the Indians. The way in which he obtained it will now appear, and also some account of his life and character, with further notices respecting the Indians.

Though individuals had incidentally labored among the Indians for their spiritual good before the Apostle Eliot began his efforts to give them the Gospel, and some useful impressions had been made on some of their minds, the first systematic efforts for their conversion were made by him. Roger Williams’ narrative was printed in London, in 1643. Eliot began to preach in the Indian tongue in 1646. Mr. Williams says,

“Many solemn discourses I have had with all sorts of nations of them, from one end of the country to the other, so far as opportunity, and the little language I have, could reach.

“I know there is no small preparation in the hearts of multitudes of them. I know their many solemn confessions to myself, and one to another, of their last wandering conditions.

“I know not with how little knowledge and grace of Christ the Lord may save; and therefore neither will despair, nor report much.

“Two days before the death of Wequash, the Pequot captain, as I passed up to Quunnihticut (Connecticut) river, it pleased my worthy friend, Mr. Fenwick, whom I visited at his house in Saybrook fort, at the mouth of that river, to tell me that my old friend Wequash lay very sick. I desired to see him, and himself was pleased to be my guide two miles where Wequash lay.

“Amongst other discourses concerning his sickness and death, in which he freely bequeathed his son to Mr. Fenwick, I closed with him concerning his soul. He told me that some two or three years before, he had lodged at my house, where I acquainted him with the condition of all mankind, and his own in particular; how God created man and all things; how man fell from God, and his present enmity against God and the wrath of God against him till repentance. Said he, your words were never out of my heart to this present; and, said he, ‘Me much pray to Jesus Christ.’ I told him so did many English, French, and Dutch, who had never turned to God nor loved him. He replied in broken English: ‘Me so big naughty heart: me heart all one stone!’ Savoring expressions using to breathe from compunct and broken hearts, and a sense of inward hardness and unbrokenness. I had many discourses with him in this life; but this was the sum of our last parting, until our general meeting.”[10]

We now come to the history of the man by whom the work of converting and civilizing the Indians was carried out with the most signal success.