In their turn, some display of oratory was required. They avoided the tedious, long-drawn style of argument, and spoke, as was their wont, briefly to the point. "It is good of you," said they, "to cross the big water, and to follow the Indian's trail, that ye may relate to us what ye have related. Now listen to what our mothers told us. Our first father, after killing a beast, was roasting a rib before the fire, when a spirit, descending from the skies, sat upon a neighboring bluff. She was asked to eat. She ate fat meat. Then she arose and silently went her way. From the place where she rested her two hands grew corn and pumpkin; and from the place where she sat sprang tobacco!"
The missionaries listened to the savage tradition with an excusable disrespect, and, not unnaturally, often interrupted it. This want of patience and dignity, however, drew upon them severe remarks. "Pooh!" observed the Indians. "When you told us what your mothers told you, we gave ear in silence like men. When we tell you what our mothers told us, ye give tongue like squaws. Go to! Ye are no medicine-men, but silly fellows!"
Besides their superstitious belief in ghosts, spirits, or familiars, and the practice of spells and charms, love-philters, dreams and visions, war-medicine, hunting-medicine, self-torture, and incantations, the Indians had, it appears to me, but three religious observances, viz., dancing, smoking, and scalping.
The war-dances, the corn-dances, the buffalo-dances, the scalp-dances, and the other multiform and solemn saltations of these savages, have been minutely depicted and described by many competent observers. The theme also is beyond the limits of an essay like this.
Smoking is a boon which the Old owes to the New World. It is a heavy call upon our gratitude, for which we have naturally been very ungrateful.
"Non epulis tantum, non Bacchi pascimur usu,
Pascimur et fumis, ingeniosa gula est."
We began by calling our new gift the "holy herb;" it is now, like the Balm of Gilead, entitled, I believe, a weed. Among the North American Indians even the spirits smoke; the "Indian summer" is supposed to arise from the puffs that proceed from the pipe of Nanabozhoo, the Ojibwa Noah. The pipe may have been used in the East before the days of tobacco, but if so it was probably applied to the inhalation of cannabis and other intoxicants.[1] On the other hand, the Indian had no stimulants. He never invented the beer of Osiris, though maize grew abundantly around him;[2] the koumiss of the Tartar was beyond his mental
- ↑ The word tobacco (West Indian, tobago or tobacco, a peculiar pipe), which has spread through Europe, Asia, and Africa, seems to prove the origin of the nicotiana, and the non-mention of smoking in the "Arabian Nights" disproves the habit of inhaling any other succedaneum.
- ↑ It has long been disputed whether maize was indigenous to America or to Asia; learned names are found on both sides of the question. In Central Africa the ce-
