Indians pay great respect to old age. They will tremble before a grandfather, and submit to his injunctions with the utmost alacrity. With them, especially with the young, the words of the ancient part of the community are esteemed as oracles, and their sayings regarded with the veneration paid of yore to the leaves of the Sybil. If they take during their hunting parties any game that is reckoned by them uncommonly delicious, it is immediately presented to the eldest of their relations.
From their infancy they are taught to be kind and attentive to aged persons, and never let them suffer for want of necessaries and comforts. The parents spare no pains to impress upon the minds of their children the conviction that they would draw down upon themselves the anger of the Great Spirit, were they to neglect those whom in his goodness he had permitted to attain such an advanced age. It is a sacred principle among the Indians, that the Great Spirit made it the duty of parents to maintain and take care of their children until they should be able to provide for themselves, and that, having while weak and helpless received the benefits of maintenance, education, and protection, they are bound to repay them by a similar care of those who are labouring under the infirmities of old age. They do not confine themselves to acts of absolute necessity; it is not enough that the old are not suffered to starve with hunger or perish with cold, but they must be made as much as possible to share in the pleasures and comforts of life.(Heck. 152, 153.) He goes on to remark that they are frequently carried to the chase on a horse, or in a canoe, that their spirits may be revived by the sight of a sport in which they can no longer participate. 153. "At home the old are as well treated, and taken care of, as if they were favourite children. They are cherished, and even caressed, indulged in health, and nursed in sickness, and all their wishes and wants attended to. Their company is sought by the young, to whom their conversation is considered an honour. Their advice is asked on all occasions, their words are listened to as oracles, and their occasional garrulity, nay even the second childhood often attendant on extreme old age, is never with the Indians a subject of ridicule or laughter."
Age is every where much respected, for, according to their ideas, long life and wisdom are always connected together.
Young Indians endeavour by presents to gain instruction from the aged, and to learn from them how to attain to old age. Loskiel, part I, p. 15
Age seemed to be an object of great veneration among these people, for they carried an old woman by turns on their backs, who was quite blind and infirm, from the very advanced period of her life. Mackenzie, 293.
(7) God of War.—p. 8.
The terms, Great Spirit and God of War, are synonimous with many of the Indian tribes, but not with all. The Hurons call him Areskoui; the Iroquois, by a slight deviation, Agreskoui. Other nations have adopted other names.
(8) He went to the woman, laid his hand on her, and wept.—p. 14.
Being then out of all hopes of surprising their enemies, three or four of the eldest of them laid their hands on my head, and began to weep bitterly, accompanying their tears with such mournful accents as can hardly be expressed; while I, with a very sorry handkerchief I had left, made shift to dry up their tears; to very little purpose however, for, refusing to smoke in our calumet, they thereby gave us to understand that their design was still to murder us. (Hennepin's Voyage, printed in Transactions of American Ant. Soc. Vol. I. page 83, and see page 85 of the same vol.)
This "imposition of hands," accompanied with tears, was for the purpose of exciting compassion for the recent loss of their relations in conflict, and thus procuring revenge.
I am by no means certain that the above is a correct explanation of the practice, though, in the tale or tradition in which I have introduced it, I have considered it so. Tonti, in his relation of De La Salle's Expedition, supposes it to arise from a more subdued feeling. The passage, as the reader will see, is replete with poetical beauty. His words are—"We arrived in the midst of a very extraordinary nation, called the Biscatonges, to whom we gave the name of weepers, in regard that upon the first approach of strangers, all these people, as well men as women, usually fall a-weeping bitterly: the reason of this practice is very particular; for these poor people imagining that their relations or friends deceased are gone a journey, and continually expecting their return, the remembrance of 'em is renewed upon the arrival of new passengers; but forasmuch as they do not find in their persons those whose loss they lament, it only serves to increase their grief. That which is yet more remarkable, and perhaps even very reasonable, is that they weep much more at the birth of their children than at their death, because the latter is esteemed only by 'em, as it were a journey or voyage, from whence they may return after the expiration of a certain time, but they look upon their nativity as an inlet into an ocean of dangers and misfortunes."
(9) A great man whose head nearly reached the sky.—p. 26.
The God of the Indians has always a corporeal form, and is generally of immense stature. He is chiefly represented as a man possessed of great dimensions and mighty corporeal strength. Sometimes however he takes the shape of a beast. Charlevoix says: "Almost all the Algonquin nations have siren the name of the Great Hare to the first spirit. Some call him Michabou, i.e. God of the Waters; others Atoacan, the meaning of which I do not know. The greatest part say that, being supported on the waters with all his court, all composed of four-footed creatures like himself, he formed the earth out of a grain of sand taken from the bottom of the ocean, &c. Some speak of a God of the Waters, who opposed the design of the Great Hare, or at least refused to favour it. This God is, according to some, the Great Tiger." Charlevoix, ii, 107, 108. And see tradition supra. The Hurons believe him to be the sun. Ibid. The same author remarks (page 109) that "the Gods of the savages have, according to their notions, bodies and live much in the same manner as we do," &c.
Carver says "the Indians appear to fashion to themselves corporeal representations of their Gods, and believe them to be of a human form." Wennebea, one of the Indian chiefs seen by Long in his expedition to the source of St. Peter's River, thought the Great Spirit had a human form, and wore a white hat. It surely cannot after this be held that the "ideas of an Indian have always a degree of sublimity."
I have never seen an Indian who believed the Supreme Being to have other than a human form, or to be of less than Almighty power and dimensions. An Indian, who was in the service of the Author during the entire period between childhood and manhood, and used to delight and astonish him with his sublime though most natural conceptions of Infinity and the Godhead, always called him the Great Good Man. The "Prince of the power of the air," he very appositely called the "Little Bad Man."
POMATARE, THE FLYING BEAVER.
Pomatare rose and said:—"Brothers, a very great while ago, the ancestors of the Shawanos nation lived on the other side of the Great Lake, halfway between the rising sun and the evening star. It was a land of deep snows and much frost; of winds which whistled in the clear cold nights, and storms which travelled from seas no eye could reach. Sometimes the sun ceased to shine for moons together, and then he was continually before our eyes for as many more. In the season of cold, the waters were all locked up, and the snows overtopped the ridge of our cabins; then he shone out so fiercely that men fell down stricken by his fierce beams, and were numbered with the snow which had melted, and run to the embrace of the rivers. It was not like the beautiful lands, the lands blessed with soft suns and ever-green vales, where we now dwell. Yet it was well stocked with deer, and the waters with fat seals and great fish, which were caught just when the people pleased to go after them. Still our nation were discontented, and wished to leave their barren and inhospitable shores. The priests had told them of a beautiful world beyond the Great Salt Lake, from which the glorious sun never disappeared for a longer time than the duration of a child's sleep, where snow-shoes were never wanted—a land clothed with eternal verdure, and bright with never-failing gladness. The Shawanos listened to these tales till their minds came to loathe their own simple comforts; they even forgot the spot which contained the ashes of their ancestors; all they talked of, all they