from all sorts of sickness." Of medical science they knew T nothing, except how to cure wounds and hurts. They used for many purposes an oil extracted from the beaver, which also was considered by the Dutch to possess great virtues. Upon the " medicine man, " who was supposed to effect cures by supernatural powers, their reliance in the more serious cases of sickness was mainly placed.
Inured to abstemiousness by the rigors of his lot and but little disposed to sexual gratification, the Indian yet fell an easy victim, and speedily became an abject slave, to strong drink. It was not the taste but the stimulating properties of the white man's rum which enthralled him. Hudson relates that when he first offered the intoxicating cup to his Indian visitors while at anchor in New York Bay, they one and all refused it after smelling the liquor and touching their lips to it. But finally one of their number, fearing that offense might be taken at their rejection of it, made bold to swallow it, and experienced great exhilaration of spirits in consequence, which led his companions to follow his example, with like pleasing effects. Robert Juet, the mate of the " Half Moon,'' gravely says in his journal: " Our master and his mate determined to try some of the cheefe men of the country, whether they had any treachery in them. So they took them down into the cabin, and gave them so much wine and aquae vitae that they were all very merie." Rum, or rather distilled liquor of every kind, soon came to be valued by the savages above every other article ili.it they obtained from the whites, and it played a very important part both in promoting intercourse and in hastening their destruction. A chief of the Six Nations, in a speech delivered before the commissioners of the United States at Fort Stanwix, in 1788, said: "The avidity of the white people for land and the thirst of the Indians for spirituous liquors were equally insatiable; that the white men had seen and fixed their eyes upon the Indian's good land, and the Indians had seen and fixed their eyes on the white man's keg of rum. And nothing could divert either of them from their desired object; and therefore there was no remedy but that the while men must have the land and the Indians the keg of rum."
The Indian character has always been a matter of the most varied accounts and estimates. While there is no room for disagreement or misunderstanding about its more prominent separate traits, views of it in its general aspect are extremely divergent, and extensive as is the literature bearing upon this subject there exists no single presentation of the Indian character in its proportions, at least from a familiar pen, that entirely rills and satisfies the mind. Longfellow's " Hiawatha " and Cooper's Indian actions bring out the romantic and heroic phases; but no powerful conception of the Indian type, except in the department of song and story, has yet been given to literature.
There is one safe starting point, and only one, for a correctly balanced estimate of the Indian. He was essentially a physical being. Believing both in a supreme good deity and an evil spirit, and also in an existence after death, religion was not, however, a predominating factor and influence in his life and institutions. In this respect he differed from most aboriginal and peculiar types. Of a stolid, stoical, and phlegmatic nature, possessing little imagination, he was neither capable of spiritual exaltation nor characteristically subject to superstitious awe and fear. Idolatrous practices he had none. Among all the objects of Indian handiwork that have come down to us— at least such as belong to this section of the country, — including the remains of pre-European peoples, there are none that are suggestive of worship. He appears to have had no fanatic ceremonials except those of the "medicine man," which were extemporized functions for immediate physical ends rather than regularly ordained formularies expressive of a real system of abstractions. He was a pare physical barbarian. His conceptions of principles of right and wrong, of social obligations, and of good and bad conduct, wore limited to experience and customs having no other relations than to physical well-being. Thus there was neither sensibility nor grossness in his character, and thus he stood solitary and aloof from the rest of mankind. All sensitive and imaginative races, like those of Mexico, South America, the West Indies, and the Orient, easily commingle with European conquerors; and the same is true of strictly gross peoples, like the heathenish native tribes of Africa. Sensibility and grossness, like genius and insanity, are, indeed, closely allied; where either quality is present it affords the fundamentals of social communion for cultivated man, but where both are lacking no possible basis for association exists. In these and like reflections may perhaps be found the true key to the character of the Indian.
As we have indicated, the religion of the Westchester and kindred Indians did not rise to the dignity of a defined institution. By the term, the Indian religion, we understand only a set of elementary beliefs, unaccompanied by an establishment of any kind. The Great Spirit of the Indians of this locality was called Cantantowit, who was good, all-wise, and all-powerful, and to whose happy hunting grounds they hoped to go after death, although their beliefs also comprehended the idea of exclusion from those realms of such Indians as were regarded by him with displeasure. The Spirit of Evil they called Hobbaniocko. The home of Cantantowit they located in the southwest, whence came the fair winds; and they accordingly interred their dead in a sitting position with their faces looking in that direction and their valuable possessions, including food for the soul's journey, beside them. The customs and ceremonials attending decease and sepulture are thus described by Ruttenber:
When death occurred the next of kin closed the eyes of the deceased. The men made no noise over the dead, but the women made frantic demonstrations of grief, striking their breasts, tearing their faces, and calling loudly the name of the deceased day and night. Their loudest lamentations were on the death of their sons and husbands. On such occasions they cut off their hair and bound it on the grave in the presence of all their relatives, painted their faces pitch black, and in a deerskin jerkin mourned the dead a full year In burying their dead the body was placed in a sitting posture, and beside it were placed a pot, kettle, platter, spoon, and money and provisions for use in the other world. Wood was then placed around the body, and the whole covered with earth and stones, outside of which palisades were erected, fastened in such a manner that the tomb resembled a little house. To these tombs great respect was paid, and to violate them was deemed an unpardonable provocation.
To review the separate aspects of their social life and economy, including their domestic arrangements, their arts and manufactures, their agriculture, their trade relations with one another, and the like Incidental details, would require much more space than can be given in these pages. For such more minute particulars the reader is referred to the various formal works on the North American Indian. It will suffice to present some of the more prominent outlines.
Their houses, says Ruttenber, were, for the most part, built after one plan, differing only in length. They were formed by long, slender hickory saplings set in the ground, in a straight line of two rows, as far asunder as they intended the width to be, and the rows continuing as far as they intended the length to be. The poles were then bent toward each other in the form of an arch and secured together, giving the appearance of a garden arbor. Split poles were then lathed up the sides and the roof, and over this was bark, lapped on the ends and edges, which was kept in its place by withes to the lathings. A hole was left in the roof for smoke to escape, and a single door of entrance was provided. Barely exceeding twenty feet in width, these houses were sometimes a hundred and eighty yards long. " In those places," says Van der Donck, "they crowd a surprising number of persons, and it is surprising to see them out in open day." From sixteen to eighteen families occupied one house, according to its size.
Of the manufacture of metals they had no knowledge. All their weapons, implements, and utensils were fashioned from stone, wood, shells, bone, and other animal substances, and clay. Their most noteworthy manufactured relics are probably their specimens of pottery. Mr. Alexander C. Chenoweth draws some interesting deductions as to the processes of pottery manufacture prevalent in early times from his examinations of specimens that he has unearthed. He says:
They could fashion earthen jars with tasteful decorations, manufacture cloth, and twist fibers into cords. They had several methods of molding their pottery. One was to make a mold of basket work and press the clay inside. In baking, the basket work was burned off, leaving its imprint to be plainly seen on the outside of the
