Little Abraham was put in a cleft stick by this artful orator. He could not refuse to drink tea without discourtesy to Miss Molly, who was sitting there in the quality of a Christian matron, not an Indian squaw; yet he feared that to partake of the beverage would constitute a declaration in favour of the British side in the conflict, and that the Americans would have news of it, and cease to give him presents.
He said, in halting English, that the Madeira wine had so confused his wits that he did not know with which part of his face to drink, and that therefore he would abstain.
Thayendanegea pressed his advantage – and it was remarkable that, from courtesy to his overlord, he never failed to rise from his chair whenever he spoke so much as a word in his presence: ‘My father, were you to embrace the Christian faith and read our Scriptures, you would learn into what shameful dangers the sin of intemperance is apt to lead such venerable old men as the patriarch Noah and yourself; nor would you drink anything but tea, avoiding the fermented juice of the grape. I will send you a present, tomorrow, of fifty pounds’ weight of superior tea, to refresh your whole household.’
Cornplanter, who was of Little Abraham’s way of thinking, spoke up in his behalf; he had not Thayendanegea’s command of English, but was not without eloquence. He said, in substance: ‘My brother and ally, I thank you. Your words are very pretty. But we would not wish the Colonel to think that his wines are either so worthless or so injurious to us that we reject them and call for tea; which is no more than boiling water poured upon a dried herb. To call upon him for tea at such a social time would be to violate the custom of the white officers, with which I am well acquainted.’
Thayendanegea smiled pleasantly: ‘My dear friend, do as you think fit, and no doubt my revered father, Little Abraham, will do likewise. But avoid provoking the Colonel to laughter. You talk of your knowledge of the white officers’ customs, yet know no better than to eat that peach unpeeled!’
Leaving his two opponents, both now thoroughly disconcerted, to please themselves whether they drank tea or no, Thayendanegea dismissed the matter as settled. He waved a greeting to Corporal Reeves and myself with his pipe and asked us directly, without preamble, whether we would care to accompany a hunting expedition of his tribe towards the southwest. He said that General Carleton had wished aloud, in his presence, that our light infantry could be acclimatized to American forest life, especially in winter-time, so that they could contend on equal terms with the revolutionaries. Thereupon, said Thayendanegea, he had offered the General to act as schoolmaster to one or two of them at least, who could pass the lesson on to the rest – as in the monitor system now in use in the popular schools of Great Britain. Remembering our names and his debt to us in the matter of Sweet Yellow Head, he had then asked the General whether Colonel Johnson might apply for our temporary release from The Ninth for the purpose of accompanying him; and the General had consented.
Few invitations could have given me keener pleasure, but I had observed that it was regarded as a virtue among the Indians to appear indifferent to good news or bad; that no man would be esteemed a good warrior or a dignified character who openly betrayed any extravagant emotions of surprise, joy, sorrow, or fear on any occasion whatsoever. I replied calmly that if the General approved the plan, it would please me well; and that I and my comrade would be ready to set forth at whatever time was most convenient to him on the following day. Thayendanegea named a rendezvous on the road half-way between Montreal and our barracks, and after the exchange of a few civilities we took our leave.
Colonel Johnson went with us into the ante-room and advised us, if we would have an interesting and prosperous journey, to live as nearly as possible in the Indian style: in which we would find, if we were philosophers, more matter for admiration than for disgust. He said: ‘They are, contrary to what is usually said of them, a sensitive, generous, and poetical people. Their apathy is only assumed, and proceeds from no real want of feeling. No people on earth are more alive to the calls of friendship or more ready to sacrifice everything they possess to help an ally in distress. If they appear greedy, that is no more than the reverse side of their generosity. Do you dress Indian fashion, observe their ways, cultivate their goodwill and forget nothing you learn. The hunting expedition on which you are going is, in reality, a missionary tour undertaken by Thayendanegea to excite the whole confederacy of the Six Nations to take up the hatchet for us in the coming campaign.’
The Colonel was then obliging enough to put us in the hands of his clerk, who undertook to provide us with Indian clothes and necessaries, which we signed for, and to claim the amount thus expended from the paymaster of the Regiment. We both chose to wear round beaver caps with flaps for our ears; deerskin leggings, dark blue cloth breech-clouts, red riding-frocks, and fur-lined half-boots; also whiteish capes of buffalo-skin, reduced to silky softness by a laborious process of dressing them with the brains of the dead beast. Terry fixed in his cap a little silver badge of Britannia seated, which was the device verbally conferred on The Ninth by Queen Anne. This later won him an Indian name which I have forgotten, the significance of which was, at all events, ‘husband-of-the-woman-with-a-fork’. I may here mention that I was complimented for my willingness to indulge in any adventure or prank that was on foot, with the name Otetiani, or ‘always ready’. But often we were called ‘Teri’ and ‘Geri’. Both of us had rifle-guns, that we had picked up during the American retreat from Three Rivers, and which were weapons of precision. With a little practice I could hit a board the size of a man’s head at two hundred and fifty paces.
‘Remember,’ said Colonel Johnson to us in parting, ‘this invitation is a great honour to you, and I would have you remember that your behaviour and bearing will everywhere be remarked, and that if you win the esteem of your hosts this will reflect well upon the British Army as a whole. I may say that I have satisfied myself by inquiries from your commanding officer that you are worthy of the choice.’
The party, who were at the rendezvous the next day, consisted of Thayendanegea, Strong Soup, and four young warriors of rank, with their squaws. Were I to recount our adventures and wanderings of the next three months it would make a volume in itself. I will be brief then, and confine my account to a few particulars. Thayendanegea took us for a tour of the whole territory of the Six Nations, which lies between Lake Ontario and the headwaters of the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. We proceeded first along the shores of Lake Ontario until we came to the Falls of Niagara, and then striking south-west, below Lake Erie, for a short excursion into Wyandot territory, made a circuit through the northern borders of Pennsylvania and so back by the Susquehanna River, the Mohawk valley, and the hills to the westward of Lake Champlain. I was surprised at the high degree of civilization in the several Indian settlements that we visited in the fertile region of the Susquehanna, which must have been very beautiful in the summer. We were everywhere welcomed and feasted and Thayendanegea succeeded by his oratory in persuading many hundreds of warriors to join our standard.
The winter was not expected to be an intensely cold one, nor did it prove so. The approach of intense cold was always known in advance to the Indians by the behaviour of the birds and beasts that migrated in great flocks and droves in the autumn before: bears and pigeons coming down from the northern regions of Canada and swimming or flying over the St Lawrence River into the province of New York, black squirrels, on the contrary, crossing over into Canada at a narrow piece of water just above the Falls of Magara. Nevertheless, it froze very hard already; and on the first night when we encamped in the snowy woods far from any human habitation, Terry Reeves and I stared at each other in fearful surmise, wondering how we should live through the night. The Indians, however, soon cleared away the snow from a place under the shelter of an overhanging rock and piled it up high to form the walls of a hut. The squaws cut and plaited together brushwood hurdles which made the foundation of a roof, over which more snow was heaped, but a small orifice was left to allow the
smoke of our camp-fire to escape. The interior of this dwelling soon became extremely warm, and after dining well upon the fresh pork we had brought with us from the city, seethed with potatoes in an iron kettle suspended above the blaze, we wrapped ourselves in our buffalo capes with our feet to the fire and slept in great comfort until dawn; the squaws taking turns to watch and mend the fire.
Thayendanegea amused us with tales of his first experience of life among the white men at Lebanon; how he was frightened by the way that the family gazed at him as if they wished to kill him, and disconcerted by the fire being built at one end of the house and not in the middle, and scandalized by the wife of the Rev. Dr Wheelock when she ordered her husband to go outside and feed the chickens for her, for she was busy. He blacked his face as a sign of affliction and sat apart from them in the barn for two days; but to please his father, who had sent him to this place, he did not run away, and soon he became reconciled to the white man’s ways. He told us an anecdote of another young Indian, a chief’s son, who had come with him to Lebanon, and was directed by Dr Wheelock’s son to saddle his horse. The Indian refused to do so on the ground that this was a menial office, unbefitting a gentleman’s son. ‘Pray, do you know what a gentleman is?’ young Wheelock had asked. He replied, ‘I do. A gentleman keeps racehorses and drinks Madeira wine. You do neither, nor does your father. Saddle the horse yourself.’
It was fortunate for us that Thayendanegea could speak English perfectly and could teach us a little of the Mohawk tongue. We learned more for ourselves by a study of the Book of Common Prayer, a copy of which he presented to me, printed at New York seven years previously: which we could compare in memory with the English liturgy. It is not generally understood that there is no language common to all the Indians and that often neighbouring tribes speak in a manner as little intelligible one to the other as the English and French. Nor is it always possible to learn by the use of gestures the name of common things, because of misunderstandings. If a savage wishes to teach a traveller the word for ‘head’, and puts his hand upon his crown, it is possible to mistake him: he may be wishing to indicate ‘top’, or ‘hair’, or ‘thought’ as resident in the head. When I offered one of my companions, who enjoyed the peculiar appellation of ‘Kiss Me’, some tobacco from my pouch, and he put out his hand for more, uttering a word which I took to mean ‘give me more’, it proved later that the significance was ‘only a little, please’.
It is said that the very word ‘Canada’ derived from a misunderstanding. It was the reply given by an Indian to the original European discoverer of the mainland, who haughtily asked, ‘What is the name of this desolate country?’ When the first settlers came to study the language, the word proved not to be the name of the country at all, but an injurious expletive.
It was a habit of our hosts upon a march to keep perfectly silent and follow one behind the other, constantly glancing from side to side. To this habit we naturally conformed, and soon I came to understand it as not merely due to caution, the constant fear of being surprised by an enemy, but to a concentration of attention upon the natural features of the landscape; so that Indians never lose themselves in a country through which they have once passed. To a European eye, one wild stretch of forest is much the same as another; to the Indian, a rock, or a withered branch, or a knotted bole, is noted for its unique shape, and its relation to neigh-bouring objects, and becomes an unforgettable landmark.
This was the season when bear, squirrel, wild-cat, and many other beasts of the forest take to their long winter rest in hollow trees or caves, and remain there asleep until the snows melt and the warmth of the sun awakens them. The Indians took pleasure in awakening the beasts before their time, and startling them from their hiding-places to kill them for their fur and flesh. Into such a method of hunting we were soon initiated. One of the party came upon the trail of a bear, which they all agreed was not above three days old; and we followed it for perhaps fifteen miles, though in places it was obliterated by new snow and we had to cast about until we hit it once more. We had three bear-dogs with us, a breed between the bloodhound and mastiff, and when we reached the hollow whiteoak where our quarry was concealed they set up a dismal barking and howling.
We formed a circle around the tree, where the bear’s clawmarks were clearly distinguishable on the bark, and waited for the emergence of our quarry. To rouse him out, the Indians had applied a blazing torch to the hole, at the height of a man’s head, by which he had entered. Soon thick clouds of smoke could be seen, issuing from a small hole a good deal higher up; the fire having caught the pine-branches that the bear had drawn together to stop the lower hole as a protection from the cold. We heard a choking, a coughing, and a grumbling noise. The bear emerged, a large, reddish brute, half-stifled by the smoke, and scrambled out from the upper hole. The Indians all fired at once, but they are as wretched marksmen with a gun as they are wonderful with the blow-pipe or the bow, and the bear was not even wounded. He descended at his ease, and while his enemies darted away behind trees, he stood blinking stupidly. Then Terry, who was posted on the other side of the tree from him, came around and shot him in the shoulder. This roused the bear to fury, and he made a rush for the warrior Kiss Me, whose head he espied behind a bush, but Kiss Me avoided him by springing nimbly aside. The dogs now set upon Bruin. He killed one with a blow of his paw and hugged another to his breast, but was struck down with a dexterously hurled tomahawk from Thayendanegea’s hand, that caught him on the side of the head. I stepped up swiftly and put him out of action with a bullet through his head. The ball that the Canadians used for bear is a very heavy one, of the size of thirty to a pound; but the frontiersmen of New York and Pennsylvania preferred one of half that weight.
The killing of the bear caused much satisfaction, and he was soon flayed with skinning knives, and cut up with tomahawks. The choicest parts were taken off with us, but the rest left where it lay. I noticed that the paws, which are held in great estimation as a delicacy, were gashed with a knife, and were hung in the smoke-hole of our hut that night to dry. Later, we ate them stewed with young puppies, which is a traditional dish on all festive occasions; and not to be despised by Europeans.
It is said that the bear, who never lays in any store of provisions and yet is as fat when the thaw comes in May as when he began his sleep in the previous November, is a good deal subsisted by licking his own greasy paws; but this is an unlikely tale. Natural philosophers believe that the bear, by discontinuing the process of sweating when in this lethargic state, is saved from those losses of the constitution which other animals, not similarly gifted, repair by regular eating and drinking.
When we came into Seneca territory I was greatly astonished with the precision with which the young men of this nation would kill little red squirrels or big black squirrels, such as were not yet a-bed for the winter, with their long blow-pipes, of cane reed. The arrows were not much thicker than the lower string of a violin, headed with tin, and feathered with thistledown. They were propelled through the tube by a sharp puff of the breath, and at fifteen yards these marksmen never missed, but drove them through and through the squirrels’ heads. The effect of these weapons was at first like magic: the tube was placed to the mouth, and the next instant the skipping squirrel on the bough fell lifeless to the ground. North America is remarkable for its variety of squirrels, among which are many that burrow and some that fly.
On one occasion, when we were in need of fresh meat, a number of squirrels were seen at the top of a hollow tree; the trunk was hewn at with tomahawks and the squirrels presently slain as they jumped clear of the toppling tree. We were told that such a practice was permitted by the Great Spirit, but not the felling of a tree for the sake of wild honey, which was unlucky and would result in death.
We hunted a great variety of animals – the stag, the caribou, the elk – and came one day to a colony of beavers, where the Indians, with no thought of compassion for these harmless and social creatures, broke down their dam and s
o drained the water from the artificial lake that they had made in a stream, and left their cabins high and dry. The beavers, hearing a barking from the lake-side, tried to escape from the back doors of the cabins, which led to the woods; where the Indians shot them. The cabins were built upon piles and divided into apartments spread with fir-boughs, each large enough to contain a male and a female. There were also storehouses in each hut proportionate to the number of the company that built it; it is said that each member knows his own store and would scorn to steal from his neighbour. The apartments were very fresh and clean. Beavers are big creatures, weighing from forty to sixty pounds, with a flat, oval tail, rat-like head, and webbed hind-feet. How they sink the piles for the cabins is as absurd a tale as any, but true, nevertheless. Four or five of them gnaw a stake through with their teeth, sharpening one end; with their nailed fore-feet they dig a hole in the bottom of the stream; with their teeth they rest the stake against the bank; with their feet again they raise it and sink it in the hole; and with their tails they whisk clay about it to make it secure. They also interweave branches between the piles to secure them.
The Indians have never considered, as British sportsmen do, the propriety of sparing an occasional pair of any kind of animal for breeding purposes; but have killed all indiscriminately, so that many of the rarer fur-bearing animals are in danger of one day becoming extinct. The most beautiful animal that I saw was the ermine; a squirrel-like creature with fine white fur and a jetty spot at the end of his long, bushy tail. In the summer his tail-tip only would remain unaltered in hue, the rest of his fur turning as yellow as gold. I was shown the track of a marten, which appeared the footstep of a larger animal; but this was occasioned by his jumping along in his pursuit of small birds and giving the marks of both feet at once.