WHAT THE WHITE RACE MAY
LEARN FROM THE INDIAN

GROUP OF HOPI MAIDENS AND AN OLD MAN AT MASHONGANAVI.

What the White Race May
Learn from the Indian
BY
GEORGE WHARTON JAMES
Author of “In and Around the Grand Canyon,” “Indian Basketry,” “How
to Make Indian and Other Baskets,” “Practical Basket Making,”
“The Indians of the Painted Desert Region,” “Travelers’ Handbook
to Southern California,” “In and Out of the Old
Missions of California,” “The Story of Scraggles,”
“The Wonders of the Colorado Desert,” “Through
Ramona’s Country,” “Living the Radiant
Life,” “The Beacon Light,” etc.

CHICAGO
FORBES & COMPANY
1908

Copyright, 1908
BY
EDITH E. FARNSWORTH
The Lakeside Press
R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY
CHICAGO

WHAT THE WHITE RACE MAY LEARN FROM THE INDIAN

FOREWORD

I would not have it thought that I commend indiscriminately everything that the Indian does and is. There are scores of things about the Indian that are reprehensible and to be avoided. Most Indians smoke, and to me the habit is a vile and nauseating one. Indians often wear filthy clothes. They are often coarse in their acts, words, and their humor. Some of their habits are repulsive. I have seen Indian boys and men maltreat helpless animals until my blood has boiled with an indignation I could not suppress, and I have taken the animals away from them. They are generally vindictive and relentless in pursuit of their enemies. They often content themselves with impure and filthy water when a little careful labor would give them a supply of fairly good water.

Indeed, in numerous things and ways I have personally seen the Indian is not to be commended, but condemned, and his methods of life avoided. But because of this, I do not close my eyes to the many good things of his life. My reason is useless to me unless it teaches me what to accept and what to reject, and he is kin to fool who refuses to accept good from a man or a race unless in everything that man or race is perfect. There is no perfection, in man at least, on earth, and all the good I have ever received from human beings has been from imperfect men and women. So I fully recognize the imperfections of the Indian while taking lessons from him in those things that go to make life fuller, richer, better.

Neither must it be thought that everything here said of the Indians with whom I have come in contact can be said of all Indians. Indians are not all alike any more than white men and women are all alike. One can find filthy, disgusting slovens among white women, yet we do not condemn all white women on the strength of this indisputable fact. So with Indians. Some are good, some indifferent, some bad. In dealing with them as a race, a people, therefore, I do as I would with my own race, I take what to me seem to be racial characteristics, or in other words, the things that are manifested in the lives of the best men and women, and which seem to represent their habitual aims, ambitions, and desires.

This book lays no claim to completeness or thoroughness. It is merely suggestive. The field is much larger than I have gleaned over. The chapters of which the book is composed were written when away from works of reference, and merely as transcripts of the remembrances that flashed through my mind at the time of writing. Yet I believe in everything I have said I have kept strictly within the bounds of truth, and have written only that which I personally know to be fact.

The original articles from which these pages have been made were written in various desultory places,—on the cars, while traveling between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on the elevated railways of the metropolis, standing at the desk of my New York friend in his office on Broadway, even in the woods of Michigan and in the depths of the Grand Canyon. Two of the new chapters were written at the home of my friend Bass, at Bass Camp, Grand Canyon, but the main enlargement and revision has occurred at Santa Clara College, the site of the Eighth Mission in the Alta California chain of Franciscan Missions. The bells of the Mission Church have hourly rung in my ears, and the Angelus and other calls to prayer have given me sweet memories of the good old padres who founded this and the other missions, as well as shown me pictures of the devoted priests of to-day engaged in their solemn services. I have heard the merry shouts of the boys of this college at their play, for the Jesuits are the educators of the boys of the Catholic Church. Here from the precincts of this old mission, I call upon the white race to incorporate into its civilization the good things of the Indian civilization; to forsake the injurious things of its pseudo-civilized, artificial, and over-refined life, and to return to the simple, healthful, and natural life which the Indians largely lived before and after they came under the dominion of the Spanish padres.

If all or anything of that which is here presented leads any of my readers to a kinder and more honest attitude of mind towards the Indians, then I shall be thankful, and the book will have amply accomplished its mission.

George Wharton James.

Santa Clara, California, November 27, 1907.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE WHITE RACE AND ITS TREATMENT OF THE INDIAN

Ever since the white race has been in power on the American continent it has regarded the Indian race—and by this I mean all the aboriginal people found here—as its inferiors in every regard. And little by little upon this hypothesis have grown up various sentiments and aphorisms which have so controlled the actions of men who never see below the surface of things, and who have no thought power of their own, that our national literature has become impregnated with the fiendish conception that “the only good Indian is the dead Indian.” The exploits of a certain class of scouts and Indian-hunters have been lauded in books without number, so that even schoolboys are found each year running away west, each with a belt of cartridges around his waist and a revolver in his hip pocket, for the purpose of hunting Indians. Good men and women, people of the highest character, are found to be possessed of an antipathy towards the Indian that is neither moral nor christian. Men of the highest integrity in ordinary affairs will argue forcefully and with an apparent confidence in the justice of their plea that the Indian has no rights in this country that we are bound to respect. They are here merely on sufferance, and whatever the United States government does for them is pure and disinterested philanthropy, for which the Indian should be only grateful and humble.

To me this is a damnable state of affairs. If prior possession entitles one to any right in land, then the Indian owns the land of the United States by prior right. The so-called argument that because the Indian is not wisely using the land, and that therefore he stands in the way of progress and must be removed, and further, that we, the people of the United States, are the providentially appointed instruments for that removal, is to me so sophistical, so manifestly insincere, so horribly cruel, that I have little patience either to listen or reply to it.

If this be true, what about the vast holders of land whom our laws cherish and protect? Are they holding the land for useful and good purposes? Are they “helping on the cause of civilization” by their merciless and grasping control of the millions of acres they have generally so unlawfully and immorally secured? Thousands, nay millions, of acres are held by comparatively few men, without one thought for the common good. The only idea in the minds of these men is the selfish one: “What can I make out of it?”

Let us be honest with ourselves and call things by their proper names in our treatment of the weaker race. If the Indian is in the way and we are determined to take his land from him, let us at least be manly enough to recognize ourselves as thieves and robbers, and do the act as the old barons of Europe used to do it, by force of arms, fairly and cheerfully: “You have these broad acres: I want them. I challenge you to hold them: to the victor belongs the spoils.” Then the joust began. And he who was the stronger gained the acres and the castle.

Let us go to the Indian and say: “I want your lands, your hunting-grounds, your forests, your water-holes, your springs, your rivers, your corn-fields, your mountains, your canyons. I need them for my own use. I am stronger than you; there are more of us than there are of you. I’ve got to have them. You will have to do with less. I’m going to take them;” and then proceed to the robbery. But let us be above the contemptible meanness of calling our theft “benevolent assimilation,” or “manifest destiny,” or “seeking the higher good of the Indian.” A nation as well as a race may do scoundrel acts, but let it not add to its other evil the contemptible crime of conscious hypocrisy. The unconscious hypocrite is to be pitied as well as shaken out of his hypocrisy, but the conscious hypocrite is a stench in the nostrils of all honest men and women. The major part of the common people of the United States have been unconscious of the hypocritical treatment that has been accorded the Indians by their leaders, whether these leaders were elected or appointed officials or self-elected philanthropists and reformers. Hence, while I would “shake them up” and make them conscious of their share in the nation’s hypocrisy, I have no feeling of condemnation for them. On the other hand, I feel towards the conscious humbugs and hypocrites, who use the Indian as a cloak for their own selfish aggrandizement and advancement, as the Lord is said to have felt toward the lukewarm churches when He exclaimed: “I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

In our treatment of the Indian we have been liars, thieves, corrupters of the morals of their women, debauchers of their maidens, degraders of their young manhood, perjurers, and murderers. We have lied to them about our good, pacific, and honorable intentions; we have made promises to them that we never intended to keep—made them simply to gain our own selfish and mercenary ends in the easiest possible way, and then have repudiated our promises without conscience and without remorse. We have stolen from them nearly all they had of lands and worldly possessions. Only two or three years ago I was present when a Havasupai Indian was arrested for having shot a deer out of season, taken before the courts and heavily fined, when his own father had roamed over the region hunting, as his ancestors had done for centuries before, ere there were any white men’s laws or courts forbidding them to do what was as natural for them to do as it was to drink of the water they found, eat of the fruits and berries they passed, or breathe the air as they rode along. The law of the white man in reference to deer and antelope hunting is based upon the selfishness of the white man, who in a few generations has slain every buffalo, most of the mountain sheep, elk, moose, and left but a comparative remnant of deer and antelope. The Indian has never needed such laws. He has always been unselfish enough to leave a sufficient number of this wild game for breeding purposes, or, if it was not unselfishness that commanded his restraint, his own self-interest in piling up meat was sacrificed to the general good of his people who required meat also, and must be able to secure it each year. Hence, to-day we shut off by law the normal and natural source of meat supply of the Indian, without any consultation with him, and absolutely without recourse or redress, because we ourselves—the white race—are so unmitigatedly selfish, so mercenary, so indifferent to the future needs of the race, that without such law we would kill off all the wild game in a few short years.

A WALLAPAI BASKET WEAVER.

Then who is there who has studied the Indian and the white man’s relation to him, who does not know of the vile treatment the married women and maidens alike have received at the hands of the “superior” people. Let the story of the devilish debaucheries of young Indian girls by Indian agents and teachers be fully written, and even the most violent defamers of Indians would be compelled to hang their heads with shame. To those who know, the name of Perris—a southern California Indian school—brings up memories of this class of crime that make one’s blood hot against the white fiend who perpetrated them, and I am now as I write near to the Havasupai reservation in northern Arizona, where one of the teachers had to leave surreptitiously because of his discovered immoralities with Indian women and girls. Only a decade ago the name of the Wallapai woman was almost synonymous with immorality because of the degrading influences of white men, and one of the most pathetic things I ever heard was the hopeless “What can we do about it?” of an Indian chief on the Colorado desert, when I spoke to him of the demoralization of the women of his people. In effect his reply was: “The whites have so driven us to the wall that we are often hungry, and it is far easier to be immoral than to go hungry.”

Then, read the reports of the various Indian agents throughout the country who have sought to enforce the laws against whites selling liquor to Indians. Officials and courts alike have often been supine and indifferent to the Indian’s welfare, and have generally shown far more desire to protect the white man in his “vested interests” than to protect the young men of the Indian tribes against the evil influences of liquor. Again and again I have been in Indian councils and heard the old men declaim against the white man’s fire-water. The Havasupais declare it to be han-a-to-op-o-gi, “very bad,” the Navahos da-shon-de, “of the Evil One,” while one and all insist that their young men shall be kept from its demoralizing influence. Yet there is seldom a fiesta at which some vile white wretch is not willing to sell his own soul, and violate the laws of whites and Indians alike, in order to gain a little dirty pelf by providing some abominable decoction which he sells as whisky to those whose moral stamina is not strong enough to withstand the temptation.

A SKILLED HOPI BASKET WEAVER.

And as for perjury in our dealings with Indians: read the records of broken treaties, violated pledges, and disregarded vows noted by Helen Hunt Jackson in her “Century of Dishonor,” and then say whether the charge is not sustained.

Yet, when the Indian has dared to resent the cruel and abominable treatment accorded to him in so many instances and in such fearful variety, he has been called “treacherous, vindictive, fiendish, murderous,” because, in his just and righteous indignation and wrath, he has risen and determined to slay all he could find of the hated white race. No doubt his warfare has not always been civilized. Why should it be? How could it be? He is not civilized. He knows nothing of “christian” principles in a war which “christian” people have forced upon him as an act of self-defense. He is a savage, battling with savage ferocity, savage determination, to keep his home, that of his ancestors, for himself, his children, and their children. Oom Paul Kruger told the British that if they forced a war upon the Boers for the possession of the Transvaal, they would win it at a price that would “stagger humanity.” Yet thousands of good Americans honored Oom Paul for his “bravery,” his “patriotism,” his “god-like determination to stand for the rights of his people.” But if our Indian does the same thing in the defense of his home and slaughters a lot of soldiers sent to drive him away, he is guilty of murderous treachery; his killings are “massacres,” and he must be exterminated as speedily as possible.

Who ever hears any other than the term “massacre” applied to the death of Custer and his soldiers? The “Custer massacre” is as “familiar as household words.” Yet what is a massacre? Webster says: “1. The killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty, or contrary to the usages of civilized people. 2. Murder.” With such definitions in view, look at the facts of the case. I would not have it understood in what I say that I am condemning Custer. He was a general under orders, and as a dutiful servant he was endeavoring to carry them out. (The debatable question as to whether he was obeying or disregarding orders I leave for military men themselves to settle.) It is not Custer, or any other one individual, that I am condemning, but the public, national policy. Custer’s army was ordered to proceed against these men, and forcibly remove them from the place they had chosen as their home—and which had been theirs for centuries before a white man ever trod this continent—and take them to a reservation which they disliked, and in the choice of which their wishes, desires, or comfort had in no way been consulted. The white soldiers were armed, and it is well known that they intended to use these arms. Could they have come upon the Indians by stealth, or by some stratagem, they would have done so without any compunctions of conscience, and no one would ever have thought of administering a rebuke to them, even though in the fight that would undoubtedly have ensued every Indian had been slain. It would have been heralded as a glorious victory, and we should have thanked God for His goodness in directing our soldiers in their “honorable” warfare. But unfortunately, the incident turned in another direction. The would-be captors were the caught; the would-be surprisers were the surprised; the would-be slayers were the slain. Custer and his band of men, brave and gallant as United States soldiers generally are,—and I would resent with heat any slanderous remark to the contrary,—were surrounded, surprised, and slain to a man.

INDIAN BEADWORK OF
INTERESTING DESIGN.

Weep at the grave of Custer; weep at the graves of his men; weep with the widows and orphans of those suddenly surprised and slain soldiers. My own tears have fallen many a time as I have read and reread the details of that awful tragedy; but still, in the weeping do not be dishonest and ungenerous to the victors,—Indians though they were. Upon the testimony of no less an authority than General Charles King, who has known the Sioux personally and intimately for years, they were ever the hospitable friends of the white race, until a post commander,—whose name should be pilloried for the execration of the nation,—imbued with the idea that the only good Indian was the dead Indian, betrayed and slew in cold blood a number of them who had trusted to his promises and placed themselves in his hands. The result was, that the whole tribe took this slaughter to their own hearts, as any true patriots would have done, and from that day to this the major part of the Sioux have hated the white race with the undying, bitter hatred of the vindictive savage.

Again and again when I have visited Indian schools the thoughtful youths and maidens have come to me with complaints about the American history they were compelled to study. In their simple, almost colorless way of expressing themselves, a bystander would never dream of the fierce anger that was raging within, but which I was too experienced in Indian character not to perceive. Listen to what some of them have said: “When we read in the United States history of white men fighting to defend their families, their homes, their corn-fields, their towns, and their hunting-grounds, they are always called ‘patriots,’ and the children are urged to follow the example of these brave, noble, and gallant men. But when Indians—our ancestors, even our own parents—have fought to defend us and our homes, corn-fields, and hunting-grounds they are called vindictive and merciless savages, bloody murderers, and everything else that is vile. You are the Indians’ friend: will you not some time please write for us a United States history that will not teach us such wicked and cruel falsehoods about our forefathers because they loved their homes enough to fight for them—even against such powerful foes as you have been.” And I have vowed that if ever I have time and strength and feel competent to do it, I will write such a history.

INDIAN BEADWORK.

Yet this is by no means all the charge I have to make against my own race in its treatment of the Indian. Not content with depriving him of his worldly possessions, we have added insult to injury, and administered a far deeper and more cutting wound to him by denying to him and his wives and daughters the moral, poetical, and spiritual qualities they possess. To many of the superior (!) race this is utter nonsense. The idea that an Indian has any feelings to be hurt! How ridiculous! Yet I make the assertion, fearless of successful contradiction, that many Indians feel more keenly this ignoring of the good, the poetic, the æsthetic, the religious or spiritual qualities they possess than they do the physical wrongs that have been inflicted upon them. As a race, we are prejudiced, bigoted, and “big-headed” when looking upon any other race. We come by our prejudices naturally. The Englishman looks down upon the “frog-eating Frenchman,” and used to say he could lick ten or a dozen such. The Frenchman and Englishman both scoff at the beer-drinking German and the stolid Dutchman, yet France has to remember Sedan, and England still smarts at the name of Van Tromp. The fact is that no nation can afford to look down upon another, any more than any civilization can afford to crow over another. Each has its own virtues, its own “goods,” its own advantages. France, England, Germany, America, have never equaled, much less surpassed, the architecture of Greece, Egypt, and Rome. The United States, with all its brag and boast, has never had a poet equal to old blind Homer or the Italian Dante. Germany’s Goethe is worthy to stand side by side with England’s Shakspere, and the architecture of the rude and vulgar “Goths” is the supremest crown of all building in the proud and conceited English-speaking “Mother Country.”

And so have I learned to look at the Indian. He has many things that we can take to our advantage and profit, and some of these have been presented in the following pages. In the next chapter I have a few necessary reservations and observations to make which I trust the patience of the reader will permit him carefully to consider.

CHAPTER II
THE WHITE RACE AND ITS CIVILIZATION

I am by no means a blind worshiper of our so-called “higher” and “advanced” civilization. I do not think we have advanced yet as far as the Greeks in some things. Our civilization, in many respects, is sham, shoddy, gingerbread, tinsel, false, showy, meretricious, deceptive. If I were making this book an arraignment of our civilization there would be no lack of counts in the indictment, and a plethora of evidence could be found to justify each charge.

INDIAN BEADWORK
OF RATTLESNAKE DESIGN

As a nation, we do not know how to eat rationally; few people sleep as they should; our drinking habits could not be much worse; our clothing is stiff, formal, conventional, hideous, and unhealthful; our headgear the delirium tremens of silliness. Much of our architecture is weakly imitative, flimsy, without dignity, character, or stability; much of our religion a profession rather than a life; our scholastic system turns out anæmic and half-trained pupils who are forceful demonstrators of the truth that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” And as for our legal system, if a body of lunatics from the nearest asylum could not concoct for us a better hash of jurisprudence than now curses our citizenship I should be surprised. No honest person, whether of the law or out of it, denies that “law”—which Browning so forcefully satirizes as “the patent truth-extracting process,”—has become a system of formalism, of precedent, of convention, of technicality. A case may be tried, and cost the city, county, or state thousands of dollars; a decision rendered, and yet, upon a mere technicality that does not affect the real merits of the case one iota, the decision will be reversed, and either the culprit—whose guilt no one denies—is discharged, or a new trial, with its attendant expense, is ordered. The folly of such a system! The sheer idiocy of men wasting time and strength and energy upon such puerile foolishness. I verily believe the world would be bettered if the whole legal system, from supreme court of the United States down to pettiest justice court, could be abolished at one blow, and a reversion made to the decisions of the old men of each community known for their good common sense, fearlessness, and integrity.

RAMONA AND HER STAR BASKET.

It may be possible that some who read these words will deem me an incontinent and general railer against our civilization. Such a conclusion would be an egregious error. I rail against nothing in it but that which I deem bad,—bad in its effect upon the bodies, minds, or souls of its citizens. I do not rail against the wireless telegraph, the ocean cables, the railway, the telephone, the phonograph, the pianoforte, the automobile, the ice machine, refrigerating machine, gas light, gas for heating and cooking, the electric light and heater, electric railways, newspapers, magazines, books, and the thousand and one things for which this age and civilization of ours is noted. But I do rail against the abuse and perversion of these things. I do rail against the system that permits gamblers to swindle the common people by watering the stock of wireless telegraphy, cable, railway, or other companies. I enjoy some phonographs amazingly, but I rail against my neighbor’s running his phonograph all night. I think coal-oil a good thing, but I rail against the civilization that allows a few men to so control this God-given natural product that they can amass in a few short years fortunes that so far transcend the fortunes of the kings of ancient times that they make the wealth of Crœsus look like “thirty cents.” I believe thoroughly in education; but I rail earnestly, sincerely, and constantly against that so-called education (with which nearly all our present systems are more or less allied) of valuing the embalmed knowledge of books more than the personal, practical, experimental knowledge of the things themselves. I enjoy books, and would have a library as large as that of the British Museum if I could afford it; but I rail persistently against the civilization that leads its members to accept things they find in books more than the things they think out for themselves. Joaquin Miller seemed to say a rude and foolish thing when he answered Elbert Hubbard’s question, “Where are your books?” with a curt, “To hell with books. When I want a book I write one;” and yet he really expressed a deep and profound thought. He wanted to show his absolute contempt for the idea that we read books in order to help thought. The fact is, the reading too much in books, and of too many books, is a definite hindrance to thought—a positive preventive of thought. I do not believe in predigested food for either body, mind, or soul; hence I am opposed to those features of our civilization that give us food that needs only to be swallowed (not masticated and enjoyed) to supply nutriment; that give us thought all ready prepared for us that we must accept or be regarded as uneducated; those crumbs of social customs that a frivolous four hundred condescend to allow to fall from their tables to us, and that we must observe or be ostracized as “boors” and “vulgar”; and those features of our theological system that give us predigested spiritual food that we must accept and follow or be damned. I am willing to go and feed with the Scotch and the horses (vide Johnson’s foolish remark about oatmeal), and be regarded as uneducated and be ostracized both as a boor and a vulgarian, and even be damned in words, which, thank God, is quite as far as He allows any one human being to “damn” another. For I am opposed to these things one and all.

I am not a pessimist about our civilization: I am an optimist. Yet I often find my optimism strongly tinged with pessimistic color. And how can it be otherwise?

Can any thinking man have much respect—any, in fact—for that phase of his civilization which permits the building of colossal fortunes by the monopolization of the sale of necessities, when the poor who are compelled to buy these necessities are growing poorer and poorer each year?

INDIAN BEADWORK OF
GREEK FRET DESIGN.

Can I respect any civilization that for the 125 years of its existence has refused to pass laws for the preservation of the purity of the food of its poor? The rich can buy what and where they choose, but for the whole period of our existence we have been so bound, hand and foot, by the money-makers who have vitiated our food supply that they might add a few more millions to their dirty hoard of ungodly dollars that we have closed our eyes to the physical and spiritual demoralization that has come to the poor by the poisoned concoctions handed out to them—under protection of United States laws—as foods.

Can I respect an educational institution that educates the minds of its children at the expense of their bodies? That has so little common sense and good judgment as to be putting its children through fierce competitive examinations when they should be strengthening their bodies at the critical age of adolescence?

Can I bow down before the civilization whose highest educational establishments—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, New York, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, followed by hosts of others of lesser institutions—every year send out from five to thirty per cent of their students broken down in health? What is the good of all the book-learning that all the ages have amassed unless one has physical health to enjoy it? Only this last year a Harvard graduate came to me who had taken high degree in the study of law and was adjudged eminently prepared to begin to practice his profession. But his health was gone. He was a nervous and physical wreck. His physicians commanded complete rest for a year, and suggested that five years would be none too long for him to spend in recuperation. When this young man asked me to give him my candid expressions upon the matter, I asked him if he thought imbeciles could have made a worse mess of his “education” than had the present system, which had cultivated his intellect, but so disregarded the needs of his body that his intellect was powerless to act.

Let the wails of agony of the uncounted dead who have been hurried to their graves by this idolatrous worship of a senseless, godless, heartless Moloch called “education” answer for me when people ask me to respect this feature of our higher civilization, and to these wails let there be added those of awakened parents who have seen, when too late, into what acts akin to murder their blind worship of this idol had led them. Add to these the cries of pain from ten thousand beds of affliction occupied by those still living, but whose bodies have “broken down” as the result of “over-study.”

A SABOBA INDIAN WITH BASKET IN WHICH IS SYMBOLIZED THE HISTORY OF HIS TRIBE.

Then add to the vast pyramid of woe the heartaches of hopes banished, of ambitions thwarted, of desires and aims completely lost, and one can well understand why I am not a worshiper at this shrine. If I were to choose—as every parent must for his young children who are not yet capable of thought—between a happy, because physically healthy, life, though uneducated by the schools, and an educated and unhappy, because unhealthy, life for children, I would say: Give me ignorance (of books and schools) and health, rather than education (of books and schools) and a broken down, nervous, irritable body. But it is by no means necessary to have uneducated children, even though they should never see a school. While I now write (I am enjoying a few days on the “rim” of the Grand Canyon) I am meeting daily a remarkable family. The man is far above the average in scholastic and book education. He is a distinguished physician, known not only within the bounds of his own large state, but throughout the whole United States and Europe; his methods are largely approved by men at the head of the profession, and his lucrative and enormous practice demonstrates the success of his system, with the complete approval of the most conservative of his rigidly conservative profession. He was until quite recently a professor in one of the largest universities of the United States, and was therefore competent from inside knowledge to pass judgment upon the methods of the highest educational establishments. He has money enough to place his two daughters wherever he chooses, and to spend most of his time near them. Yet he has deliberately (and I think most wisely) kept them out of school, and made the strength and vigor of their bodies his first consideration. Both ride horseback (astride, of course) with the poise and confidence of skilled vaqueros; both can undertake long journeys, horseback or afoot, that would exhaust most young men students; and now at 15 and 17 years of age they are models of physical health and beauty, and at the same time the elder sister is better educated in the practical, sane, useful, living affairs of men and women than any girl of her age I have ever met. I take this object-lesson, therefore, as another demonstration of the truth of my position, and again I refuse to bow down before the great fetich of our modern civilization—“scholastic education.”

There have been wonderful civilizations in the past,—Persia, Asia Minor, Etruria, Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Moors,—and yet they are gone. A few remnants are left to us in desert temples, sand-buried propylæ, dug-up vases and carvings, glorious architecture, sublime marbles, and soul-stirring literature. Where are the peoples who created these things? Why could they not propagate their kind sufficiently well to at least keep their races intact, and hold what they had gained? We know they did not do it. Why? Call it moral or physical deterioration, or both, it is an undeniable fact that physical weakness rendered the descendants of these peoples incapable of living upon their ancestors’ high planes, or made them an easy prey to a stronger and more vigorous race. I am fully inclined to the belief that it was their moral declensions that led to their physical deterioration; yet I also firmly believe that a better and truer morality can be sustained upon a healthy and vigorous body than upon one which is diseased and enervated.

Hence I plead, with intense earnestness, for a better physical life for our growing boys and girls, our young men and women, and especially for our prospective parents. Healthy progeny cannot be expected from diseased stock. The fathers and mothers of the race must be strengthened physically. Every child should be healthily, happily, and cheerfully born, as well as borne. The sunshine of love should smile down from the faces of both parents into the child’s eyes the first moment of its life. Thus the elixir of joy enters its heart, and joy is as essential to the proper development of a child as sunshine is to that of a flower. This is a physical world, even though it be only passing phenomena, and upon its recognition much of our happiness depends. Our Christian Science friends see in physical inharmony only an error of mortal mind, to be demonstrated over by divine mind. That demonstration, however, produces the effect we call physical health. This is what I long for, seek after, strive for, both for myself, my family, my children, my race. Any and all means that can successfully be used to promote that end I believe in and heartily commend. Let us call it what we will, and attain it as how we may, the desirable thing in our national and individual life to-day is health,—health of the whole man, body, mind, soul. Because I firmly believe the Indians have ideas that, if carried out, will aid us to attain this glorious object, I have dared to suggest that this proud and haughty white race may sit at their feet and learn of them.

DAT-SO-LA-LE, THE WASHOE BASKET WEAVER, SOME OF WHOSE BASKETS HAVE SOLD FOR FABULOUS PRICES.

I myself began life handicapped with serious ill health, and for twenty-two years was seldom free from pain. Nervous irritability required constant battling. But when I began to realize the benefit of life spent in God’s great out-of-doors, and devoted much of my time to climbing up and down steep canyon walls, riding over the plains and mountains of Nevada and California, wandering through the aseptic wastes of the deserts of the Southwest, rowing and swimming in the waters of the great Colorado River, sleeping nightly in the open air, and in addition, coming in intimate contact with many tribes of Indians, and learning from them how to live a simple, natural, and therefore healthy life,—these things not only gave to me almost perfect health, but have suggested the material of which this book is made.

CHAPTER III
THE INDIAN AND NASAL AND DEEP BREATHING

The Indian believes absolutely in nasal breathing. Again and again I have seen the Indian mother, as soon as her child was born, watch it to see if it breathed properly. If not, she would at once pinch the child’s lips together and keep them pinched until the breath was taken in and exhaled easily and naturally through the nostrils. If this did not answer, I have watched her as she took a strip of buckskin and tied it as a bandage below the chin and over the crown of the head, forcing the jaws together, and then with another bandage of buckskin she covered the lips of the little one. Thus the habit of nasal breathing was formed immediately the child saw the light, and it knew no other method.

As one walks through the streets of every large city, he sees the dull and vacant eye, the inert face, of the mouth-breather; for, as every physician well knows, the mouth-breather suffers from lack of memory and a general dullness of the intellect. Not only that, but he habitually submits himself to unnecessary risks of disease. In breathing through the nose, the disease germs, which abound in our city streets and are sent floating through the air by every passing wind, are caught by the gluey mucus or the capillaries of the mucous membranes. The wavy air passages of the nose lead one to assume that they are so constructed expressly for this purpose, as the germs, if they escape being caught at one angle, are pretty sure to be trapped in turning another. When this mucus is expelled in the act of “blowing the nose,” the germs go with it, and disease is prevented. But when these germs are taken in through the mouth, they go directly into the throat, the bronchial tubes, and the lungs, and if they are lively and strong, they lodge there and take root and propagate with such fearful rapidity that in a very short time a new patient with tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, or some other disease, is created. Hence, emulate the Indian. Breathe through your nose; do not use it as an organ of speech. At the same time that you care for yourself, watch your children, and even if you have to bandage them up while they are asleep, as the Indians do, compel them to form early this useful and healthful habit of nasal breathing.

INDIAN SHOWING EFFECT OF DEEP BREATHING IN WONDERFUL LUNG DEVELOPMENT.

But not only do the Indians breathe through the nose: they are also experts in the art of deep breathing. The exercises that are given in open-air deep breathing at the Battle Creek sanitarium each morning show that we are learning this useful and beneficial habit from them. When I first began to visit the Hopis, in northern Arizona, I was awakened every morning in the wee sma’ hours, as I slept in my blankets in the open at the foot of the mesa upon which the towns are located, by cow-bells, as if a number of cows were being driven out to pasture. But in the daytime I could see no cows nor any evidence of their existence. When I asked where they were, my questions brought forth nothing but a wondering stare. Cows? They had no cows. What did I mean? Then I explained about the bells, and as I explained, a merry laugh burst upon my ears. “Cows? Those are not cows. To-morrow morning when you hear them, you jump up and watch.” I did so, and to my amazement I saw fleeing through the early morning dusk a score (more or less) of naked youths, on each one of whom a cow-bell was dangling from a rope or strap around his waist. Later I learned this running was done as a matter of religion. Every young man was required to run ten, fifteen, twenty miles, and even double this distance, upon certain allotted mornings, as a matter of religion. This develops a lung capacity that is nothing short of marvelous.

This great lung capacity is in itself a great source of health, vim, energy, and power. It means the power to take in a larger supply of oxygen to purify and vivify the blood. Half the people of our cities do not know what real true life is, because their blood is not well enough oxygenated. The people who are full of life and exuberance and power—the men and women who accomplish things—generally have large lung capacity, or else have the faculty of using all they have to the best advantage.

To a public speaker, a singer, a lawyer, a preacher, or a teacher, this large lung capacity is invaluable; for, all things else being equal, the voice itself will possess a clearer, more resonant quality if the lungs, the abdomen, and the diaphragm are full of, or stretched out by, plenty of air. These act as a resonant sounding-chamber which increases the carrying quality of the voice to a wonderful extent.

For years I have watched with keenest observation all our greatest operatic singers, actors, orators, and public speakers, and those who possess the sweet and resonant voices are the ones who breathe deep and own and control these capacious lungs. Only a few weeks ago I went to hear Sarah Bernhardt, the world’s most wonderful actress, who at sixty-three years of age still entrances thousands, not only by the wonder of her art, but by the marvelous quality of her voice. What did I find? A woman who has learned this lesson of deep breathing as the Indians breathe. She breathes well down, filling the lungs so that they thrust out the ribs. She has no waist-line, her body descending (as does that of the Venus) in an almost straight line from armpit to hips. The result is, that, with such a resonant air cavity, she scarcely raises her voice above the conversational pitch, and yet it is easily heard by two or three thousand people.

It is needless to add that every Indian woman is intelligent enough to value health, lung capacity, and the power to speak with force, vigor, and energy more than she values “fashionable appearance”; hence none of them can be found in their native condition foolish enough to wear corsets.

I never knew an Indian woman who “needed a corset, don’t you know, to brace her up, to sustain her weak back.” Of course, if a white woman is large and fleshy, and values appearance more than health, I suppose she will have her own way anyhow, but this other reason that women give for the use of the corset I never heard fall from the lips of an Indian woman. She is strong and well, and needs no artificial support. I regret very much to see that while sensible women are giving up the corset, or at least materially loosening its strings, men are beginning to wear belts in place of suspenders. It is just as injurious to a man to encircle his waist and squeeze together the vital organs as it is to a woman. It is bad, absolutely, completely, thoroughly bad, at all times, in all circumstances, for all people. The wasp-like waist, whether in men or women, is a sign either of recklessness, gross ignorance, or deliberate preference for a false figure over a normal one and health. The hips are a most important part of a human being’s anatomy. As Dr. Kellogg has well said:

“No physical endowment is of more importance for a long and a vigorous life than capacious lungs. The intensity and efficiency of an individual’s life depend very largely upon the amount of air he habitually passes in and out of his lungs, just as the intensity of a fire, granting plenty of fuel, depends upon the rate at which the air is brought in contact with the fuel. It has been found that lung capacity depends very largely upon the height; thus, the taller a person the greater his lung capacity, other things being equal. The following table shows the lung capacity, or rather the amount of air which can be forced out of the lungs, the so-called vital capacity, for men of different heights:

“The proper time for the development of the chest is in childhood and in youth. The best of all means for increasing the chest capacity is running and active sports of all sorts. Mountain climbing, going up and down stairs, and all kinds of exercises which produce strong breathing movements are effective means of chest development. Exercises of this nature are far superior to breathing exercises, so-called, of whatever sort. Breathing exercises in which the lungs are forcibly compelled to take in more than the ordinary amount of air very soon become tiresome. The effort is wholly voluntary, and the muscles soon weary. When, however, a thirst for air is created by some active exercise which fills the blood with carbonic-acid gas, so that deeper and more rapid breathing is necessary to rid the body of this poisonous gas and to take in a supply of oxygen in its place, the act of breathing is no longer difficult, embarrassing, or tiresome, but is, on the other hand, a pleasure and a gratification. The impulse which comes from within, from the so-called respiratory centers, so excites the respiratory muscles that they cause the chest to execute the strongest breathing movements with the greatest ease, ventilating every portion of the lungs, filling every air-cell to its utmost capacity.

ONE OF THE
TRAILS UP WHICH THE HOPIS CLIMB AT FULL SPEED.

“Runners always have large and active chests, whereas sedentary persons have chests of limited capacity and rigid walls. When a chest is not stretched to its utmost capacity many times daily, it rapidly loses its flexibility. This is especially true after the age of thirty. In persons who have passed middle life, the rigidity of the chest is so great that there can be no very considerable increase in size. By development of the respiratory muscles the chest capacity may be to some degree increased, but the proper time for chest development is in childhood and youth. At this period, also, the integrity of the heart renders possible without injury those vigorous exercises which are essential to secure the highest degree of chest development.

“Probably the best of all exercises for the development of the chest and breathing powers is swimming. The position of the body, the head held well back and the chest well forward, and the active movements of the arms and limbs render swimming a most efficient breathing exercise. The contact of cold water with the skin also actively stimulates the movement of the chest, while at the same time it renders possible prolonged and vigorous muscular movements by increasing the energy and activity of the muscles.

“Special breathing exercises, as well as those active muscular movements which induce a thirst for air, are beneficial to the lungs by maintaining the flexibility of the chest, strengthening the respiratory muscles, and ventilating the lungs. These movements also exercise a most extraordinary beneficial effect upon the stomach, liver, and other organs which lie below the diaphragm. Each time the diaphragm contracts, it gives the liver, stomach, and adjacent organs a hearty squeeze, so to speak, emptying out the blood contained in these parts as one may by compression empty a moist sponge. All movements which increase the strength of the abdominal muscles are an important means of aiding and improving the breathing function.”

From this it will be seen, therefore, that everything that prevents the full and free exercise of the lungs, especially in the lower portions, is of direct injury to the body. Men need all the lung capacity and power they can gain in order to sustain their energy in the battle of life; and women, especially young women, who are to become the future mothers of the race, should be taught that the art of healthy, deep breathing is one of the fine arts, and the most important one that they can learn.

NAVAHO BLANKET WEAVER IN HER OPEN AIR WORK-SHOP.

CHAPTER IV
THE INDIAN AND OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE

The Indian is an absolute believer in the virtue of the outdoor life, not as an occasional thing, but as his regular, set, uniform habit. He lives out of doors; not only does his body remain in the open, but his mind, his soul, are ever also there. Except in the very cold weather his house is free to every breeze that blows. He laughs at “drafts.” “Catching cold” is a something of which he knows absolutely nothing. When he learns of white people shutting themselves up in houses into which the fresh, pure, free air of the plains and deserts, often laden with the healthful odors of the pines, firs, balsams of the forest, cannot come, he shakes his head at the folly, and feels as one would if he saw a man slamming his door in the face of his best friend. Virtually he sleeps out of doors, eats out of doors, works out of doors. When the women make their baskets and pottery, it is always out of doors, and their best beadwork is always done in the open. The men make their bows and arrows, dress their buckskin, make their moccasins and buckskin clothes, and perform nearly all their ceremonials out of doors.

Our greatest scientific fighters against tuberculosis are emulating the Indian in the fact that even in the winter of the East they advocate that their patients sleep out of doors. Pure air, and abundance of it, is their cry.

“Taking cold” comes, not from breathing “night air,” but generally from inflammation of the mucous membranes caused by impure air,—the air of a heated room from which all the pure air has been exhausted by being breathed again and again into the lungs of its deluded occupants, each exhalation sending with it a fresh amount of poison to vitiate the little good that remains.

Men often go to gymnasiums in the city to get exercise. The air is vitiated by the presence of others, and as respiration is increased by the exercise, impure air is taken into the lungs, and the prime object of the exercise is defeated. For it is not so much to develop muscles as it is to stimulate the general action of the whole body that gymnastics should be indulged in. Vigorous exercise demands deep breathing; if the air breathed is pure, the blood thereby becomes more oxygenated or vivified. As this vitalized blood circulates, it carries its life-giving new strength and energy to every part of the body, so that the whole man feels the increased vigor. But let the air be impure, death instead of life is given to the blood. Hence, where possible, all vigorous exercise should be taken out of doors in the pure air and sunlight, and if this is not possible, every door, window, and avenue through which outside air can be brought inside should be placed wide open, and kept open during the whole time of the exercises. If spectators come, and on their account windows and doors are closed, a positive injury is being done to the exercisers. Far better turn out the spectators than shut out God’s pure air.

What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health. Think of the vigor and strength, the robustness and power, the joy and the health, that are the possession of men and women of outdoor life. Let any one who wishes to know what this means read John Muir’s Mountains of California. In it he tells of his years of experiences climbing the terribly difficult peaks of the Sierras, the exploring of glaciers, the sleeping out at night during snow-storms in the depth of winter without either an overcoat or a single blanket. One of the most thrilling of experiences is told as simply as the narrative of a child. He was out during a terrific wind-storm. Says he: “When the storm began to sound I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.”

Think of a city-bred man, a society man, deliberately walking out into a storm to enjoy it.

“It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills.... I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young sugar-pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and singing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond.

“I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,—spruce and fir and pine and leafless oak,—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own song and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen.

“Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of the topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.

HAVASUPAI DRESSING BUCKSKIN.

“In its wildest sweeps my treetop described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried—bent almost to the ground, indeed, in heavy snows—without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook....

“I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.”

What an experience, and what a joy to feel one’s self able to enjoy it! I know what it is. Years before I had read this, I had had a similar experience when driving over the high Sierras from the borders of Oregon, Nevada, and California down into southern California. Imagine the ordinary business man, or clerk, or banker, or preacher, or lawyer, or doctor, daring to climb so high a tree, and especially during such a storm. Yet such a day so spent is worth more than a year of any ordinary man’s life.

Edward Robeson Taylor, the poet-mayor of San Francisco, once expressed his keen appreciation of what Nature gives to the man who loves her enough to test her. And he has made the test many a time, in the Sierras, in the forests, in the deserts, in the Grand Canyon, as well as on the Bay of San Francisco. He wrote:

“In him that on the rugged breast of mountain
Finds his joy and his repose,
Who makes the pine his fellow, and with zest
Treads the great glaciers and their kindred snows,
A strength is planted that in direst test
Dares all the devils of Danger to oppose.”

Then, too, there are marvelous healing powers in God’s great out-of-doors. The vis medicatrix Naturæ is no fiction of the imagination. If sick people knew enough, were wise enough, to go out into the open and discard all civilized modes of life, climbing mountains, sleeping on pine boughs, swimming in the streams, working in the soil, dabbling in the hot or cold springs, eating the ripe fruits and nuts, and bathing the whole body daily in bright sunshine, they would be brought to a health and vigor they had never before known.

I have often wondered why thoughtful white people have not observed that insanity is practically unknown amongst the Indians. Why? Our own great Emerson once wrote a clear answer.

“It was,” said he, “the practice of the Orientals, especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild animals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was quieted and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theaters, card-tables, the speculators who rush for investment at ten per cent, twenty per cent, cent per cent, are all more or less mad—these point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the fields the health of the mind.”

But not only does healing come to the mind in Nature: the diseased soul there finds medicine and health.

The well-beloved Robert Louis Stevenson was well aware of this out-of-door joy. Among many other fine things on the subject he once wrote the following which fully expresses my idea:

“To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.”

AN APACHE GRANDMOTHER AND SOME BASKETS OF HER OWN DESIGN AND WEAVE. ALL MADE IN THE OPEN AIR.

One of our great artists and writers, whose life went out a few years ago in sad eclipse, wrote with a clarity of vision that his awful experiences had taught him: “I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the land for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy, that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots; and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men. ... I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.”

How literally true to fact is this assurance of purification out in the great elemental forces and places of Nature, and how the Indian daily demonstrates it. Thousands can testify to it. Here one becomes soothed. The grinning faces of hate do not pursue him here. Nature is passionless to the hunted man. She is willing to be wooed and won, and then opens up her rich treasures to the guiltiest and vilest of men, until they regain the right angle of vision, then the desire for purification, then repentance, then assurance of forgiveness, and finally their self-respect. Then they are able to return (if necessity compels) to civilization and bear any punishment that may be awarded, for in the rugged arms of Nature they have absorbed strength and power,—strength of will and power of soul to dare and do that which the highest within them compels.

Who that has read the De Profundis of that erratic and brilliant genius, Oscar Wilde, has not felt the sad pathos and yet intense truth of his concluding words? They are Indian-like in their direct truth and native strength.

“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times I have been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt. She will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

This is one of the great wonders of the out-of-door life that the weary and sinful of the white race would do well to learn.

But not only does health of mind and soul return to the sinful in God’s great out-of-doors: the most vigorous and pure, healthy and perfect, minds and souls are expanded and strengthened with such contact. Buddha, Mahomet, Moses, David, Elijah, Christ, were all lovers of out-of-doors. Washington, Lincoln, and Garfield were all out-of-door men. One learns in the solitude and primitive frankness of the free life of the out doors to do his own thinking, untrammeled by convention or prejudice. He sees things as they are. His soul is unclothed, and there can no longer be any deception or pretense. So he becomes an individual; not a mere rote thinker of other’s thoughts, and not a mere parrot of other men’s ideas. Edwin Markham could never have written The Man with the Hoe had he lived only in the city. He would never have seen deeply enough, and he would never have dared brave the conventional prejudices of the civilized (?) world as he did in his poem, had he been city-bred. But because he thought nakedly before God and his own soul he was compelled to see the monstrousness of making a man—a son of God, created in His image—a mere clod of clay. The idea that this poem is a reflection upon labor is utter nonsense. It is merely a protest, strong, vigorous, forceful as a thunder-storm, against compelling some men to labor so hard that they have neither time nor opportunity for mental and spiritual occupation, and have thus even lost the desire for or hope of gaining it. Labor is ennobling, but man is made for more than mere physical labor. The unequal distribution of affairs in this life causes some men to have no physical labor, to their vast disadvantage, while others have nothing but physical labor, equally to their disadvantage. The finding of a just equilibrium between these two extremes, and then aiding the men of both extremes to see the need of each helping the other, or of taking some of the burden of the other, would result in the immediate benefiting of the race to an incalculable extent, both in body, mind, and soul. And it is this for which I plead, earnestly calling upon my fellows to so adjust their own lives that they will strike the happy mean, thus living (not merely talking about) the dignity of labor as well as the joy of mental and spiritual occupation.

Another important thing must not be overlooked. As a result of this out-of-door life the Indian is an early riser and an early retirer to bed. The civilized habit of turning night into day, living in the glare of gas and electric light, is, on the face of it, artificial, unnatural, and unhealthful. It is indefensible from every standpoint. There is not one word of good can be said of it. The day is made for work, the night for rest and sleep. The use of artificial light to the extent we indulge it in civilization is gradually rendering normal eyesight a rarity. Children are born with myoptic and other eye-diseased tendencies. Sometimes it seems as if more people, of all ages, wear glasses than use their natural eyesight, and this is but one of many sad consequences accruing in part from our reversal of the natural use of the day and night times.

HAPPY AND HEALTHY HOPI CHILDREN, ASKING THE AUTHOR FOR CANDY.

Many men, literary and others, wait until the quiet of evening to do their work. They often stimulate themselves with coffee, and even stronger beverages, and then work until the “wee sma’ hours,” by artificial light, after they have already done a fair day’s work. We used to hear a great many words of commendation of the youths in school and college who “burned the midnight oil.” If I had my way I would “use the leather strap” upon all these burners-up of their physical and mental forces at the time God intended they should be abed and asleep. The time for mental work is in the early morning after a hearty, healthy, good night’s sleep. The body is strengthened, the mind refreshed, and thought flows easily and readily, because all weariness has disappeared under the influence of “tired nature’s sweet restorer.” Mental work done at such time is not only a pleasure, but is well done, properly done, because the conditions are right for its doing.

Nor is this all. There is a mental and spiritual pleasure given to the early riser that the late sleeper knows nothing of. One of the most beautiful baskets in my historic collection of Indian baskets is one made by a Coahuila woman who depicted thereon the white light of the morning shining through the dark silhouettes of the sharp points of the giant cactus. Her æsthetic enjoyment was thus made the inspiration of a real work of art.

How much white people lose by not seeing and knowing the beauty of the early morning hours,—the hours just preceding dawn, and during the first outburst of the sun! A friend and I stood out the other morning before sunrise, looking at the exquisite delicate lights over the mountain peaks, and she gave expression to the above thought, and only a few days before I had said it to a friend as we had wended our way from El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon out to O’Neill Point to see the sunrise. Elisha Safford eloquently speaks as follows of this:

BEAUTY OF THE MORNING

Oh, the beauty of the morning! It showers its splendors down
From the crimson robes of sunrise, the azure mountain’s crown;
It smiles amid the waving fields, it dapples in the streams,
It breathes its sparkling music through the rapture of our dreams.

It floats upon the limpid air in rainbow clouds of mist,
It ripples through the glowing skies in pearl and amethyst,
It gleams in every burnished pool, it riots through the grass,
It splashes waves of glory on the shadows as they pass.

It steals among the nodding trees and to the forest croons,
In airy note and gentle voice, ’neath waning plenilunes;
It calls, and lo! the wooded brakes, the hills and tangled fens—
A world of life and mystery—swarm with its denizens.

It trembles in the perfumed breeze, and where its ardor runs,
A thousand light-winged choristers pant forth their orisons;
A thousand echoes clap their hands, and from their dewy beds,
A million scarlet-throated flowers peer forth with startled heads.

Oh, the beauty of the morning! It rains upon our ears:
The music of the universe, the chiming of the spheres;
From cloistered wood and leafy vale, its tuneful medleys throng,
Till all the earth is drenched in light and all the world in song!

INDIAN BASKET, SHOWING INFLUENCE OF NATURE IN THE DESIGN.

All children, and especially city children, need out-of-door life. Men and women need it too, sadly, but if the elders cannot have it, owing to our perverted social conditions, our law-givers should see to it that the children do better. It is a well-known fact that cities would soon die out if their vast populations were not constantly being replenished by the sons and daughters of the country. So instead of letting our city children grow up to imperfect manhood, let us find some way to get them out of doors and out into the country more and more. Exercise in the open, where pure air penetrates to the full depths of the lungs, personal contact with the soil, and physical work upon it, as well as personal contact with the trees and flowers and all growing things, the animals of the farm and field, the rocks and mountains, the hills and valleys, the waterfalls and streams, the deserts and canyons; all these are to be desired. Who does not wish to sing with Edwin Markham:

“I ride on the mountain tops, I ride,
I have found my life and am satisfied!”

Of course this out-in-the-country life for city children can only be gained if their parents and our educators and politicians combine to provide it. And in some way it ought to be done. What a joy it would be to many a city boy to be allowed to go and do some work in the country during certain times in the year! Those who have seen the city children who are taken yearly into the country by Fresh Air Funds, or out by vessel into the Bay of New York or Boston Harbor, by philanthropic people, know what delight, joy, and health they receive from the outing. These things all point to the great, the dire, the awful need there is for some way of giving to our city children and men and women more out-door life.

Just after the San Francisco earthquake, Dr. J. H. Kellogg, editor of Good Health, wrote in his forceful way of some lessons the people might learn from that disaster. Here is one of them bearing upon this very question:

MONO INDIAN COOKING CORN MUSH IN A
BASKET BY A CAMP FIRE.

“Three hundred thousand people have found out that they can live out of doors, and that out of doors is a safer place than indoors.

“People who have all their lives slept on beds of down, protected by thick walls of brick or stone, barricaded against the dangerous (?) air of night, have found that it is possible to spend a night upon an unsheltered hillside without risk to life, and it is more than likely that, as in the case of the Charleston earthquake, not a few modern troglodytes, who scarcely ever saw the light of day before, have been actually benefited by being forced out into the fresh air and the sunshine.

“The great tent colonies, improvised by the military authorities with such promptness under the efficient management of the able General Funston, may become the permanent homes for some of the thousands who are now for the first time in their lives tasting the sweets of an out-of-door life. Man is an out-of-door creature, meant to live amid umbrageous freshness, his skin bathed clean by morning dews or evening showers, browned and disinfected by the sun, fed by tropic fruits, and cheered by tropic birds and flowers. It is only through long generations of living under artificial conditions that civilized man has become accustomed to the unhealthful and disease-producing influences of the modern house to such a degree that they can be even in a small measure tolerated. But this immunity is only apparent. An atmosphere that will kill a Hottentot or a baboon in six months will also kill a bank president or a trust magnate—sometime. And if these tent-dwellers get such a taste of the substantial advantages of the out-of-door life that they refuse to return to the old unwholesome conditions of anti-earthquake days, they will profit substantially by their experience, terrible though it has been. It takes earthquakes and cyclones and tidal waves to jostle us out of the unnatural and degenerative ruts into which conventionality is always driving us.

“What advantages has the man in the brown-stone front over the man in the tent? Only these: A pale face instead of the brown skin which is natural to his species; a coated tongue, no appetite, and no digestion, instead of the keen zest for food and splendid digestive vigor of the tent-dweller; an aching head and confused mind and depressed spirits, instead of the vim and snap and energy, mental and physical, and the freedom from pain and pessimism of out-of-door dwellers; early consumption or apoplexy or paresis or cancer of the stomach or arteriosclerosis,—the dry rot of the body which stealthily weakens the props and crumbles the foundations of the citadel of life.”

Why is it that in our cities in summer, and in Florida and the South generally, and in the West, we do not follow the French custom of eating out of doors?

American visitors to Paris in the summer time have always been impressed by the prevalent custom there of dining out of doors. The sidewalks in front of cafés and restaurants are always so occupied with chairs and tables that pedestrians often have to step into the street to get by. This has long been the summer custom in Paris, but with the arrival of cold weather tables and chairs disappeared every year, and the diners returned to the close nicotine-laden air of the stuffy little dining-rooms inside. But last year, according to the London correspondent of the Outlook, an enterprising Frenchman, finding his patrons much attached to his open-air dining-room, and being short of room inside, undertook to make his guests comfortable out of doors by means of a large brazier placed upon the sidewalk. Others followed his example, and in a short time the streets were lined with braziers from the Madeline to the Bastile, much to the satisfaction of the cab-drivers and newsboys. One ingenious proprietor made his table-legs hollow, filled with hot water, and thus utilized them as foot-warmers. And so one may now enjoy a fashionable Parisian café au plein air any day in the year.

Everybody is always hungry at a picnic, not simply because of the unusual exercise, but as the result of the tonic appetite-stimulating influence of the out-of-doors. The same plan may be introduced into any private home by utilizing a back porch, or, when this is lacking, a tent-cloth awning may be provided at the expense of a few dollars.

The old Spanish patio, or inner court, provided the seclusion that many desire, with the possibility of a larger out-of-door life. Mr. Gustav Stickley, the far-seeing editor of The Craftsman, which so effectually pleads for a simpler and more democratic life for the people, has planned a number of Craftsman houses in which these open porches for eating, and sleeping as well, are introduced. This is a great step in the right direction, and is strongly to be commended.

But the outdoor life is larger than houses and porches. One must get away from all houses to really feel and know the joy of the great out-of-doors. Every teacher and orator should know the birds and trees, the flowers and grasses, the rocks and stars, the clouds and odors, at first hand. He should not depend upon books at all for any of this knowledge, save as guides to obtain it. Instead of reading books he should read Nature. See how powerful is the simple oratory of the Indian, whose figures and similes and illustrations and metaphors are of those things in Nature with which he is perfectly familiar.

Another effect upon the mind and soul as the result of this outdoor life is remarkable to those who have never given it a thought. One of our poets once said, “The undevout astronomer is mad.” And every Indian will tell you that the undevout Indian is either mad or “getting civilized.” One of our California historians once wrote something to the effect that the California Indian had no religion, no mythology, no reverence, no belief in anything outside of and beyond himself. Jeremiah Curtin, a careful and close student of the California Indian for many years, in his wonderfully interesting book, “Creation Myths of Primitive America,” shows the utter fallacy of this idea. He says: “Primitive man in America stood at every step face to face with divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape from the presence of those powers which had constituted the first world, and which composed all that there was in the present one. ... The most important question of all in Indian life was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits of divine personages.” Indeed, the Indian sees the divine power in everything. His God speaks in the storm, the howling wind, the tornado, the hurricane, the roaring rapids and dashing cataracts of the rivers, the never-ending rise and fall of the ocean, the towering mountains and the tiny hills, the trees, the bees, the buds and blossoms. It is God in the flower that makes it grow and gives it its odor; that makes the tree from the acorn; that makes the sun to shine; that sends the rain and dew and the gentle zephyrs. The thunder is His voice, and everything in Nature is an expression of His thought.

This belief compels the Indian to a close study of Nature. Hence the keenness of his powers of observation. He knows every plant, and when and where it best grows. He knows the track of every bird, insect, reptile, and animal. He knows all the signs of the weather. He is a past-master in woodcraft, and knows more of the habits of plants and animal life than all of our trained naturalists put together. He is a poet, too, withal, and an orator, using the knowledge he has of nature in his thought and speech. No writer that ever lived knew the real Indian so well as Fenimore Cooper, and we all know the dignified and poetical speech of his Indian characters. I know scores and hundreds of dusky-skinned Henry D. Thoreaus and John Burroughses, John Muirs and Elizabeth Grinnells and Olive Thorne Millers. Indeed, to get an Indian once started upon his lore of plant, tree, insect, bird, or animal, is to open up a flood-gate which will deluge any but the one who knows what to expect.

CHAPTER V
THE INDIAN AND SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS

TERRACED HOUSES OF THE HOPIS, ALLOWING SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS.

As I have already intimated, the Indian is practically an out-of-door sleeper. I say “practically,” for there are exceptions to the general rule. The Hopis of northern Arizona have houses. In the cold winter months they sleep indoors whenever they can. The Navahos, Apaches, Havasupais, and other tribes have their “hogans” and “hawas” in which they sleep in the very cold weather. But in the summer the invariable rule is for all to sleep out of doors. And even in the winter, if duty calls them away from home and they have to camp out, they sleep in the cold, on the snow, in the rain, as unconcerned for their health as if they were well protected indoors. It is this latter feature that so much commends itself to me. It is just as natural to them to have to sleep out of doors as it is to sleep indoors. They think no more of it, do not regard it as an unusual and dangerous experience, or one to be dreaded. They accept it without a murmur or complaint, and without fear. This is an attitude of mind that I would the white race would learn from the Indian. I once had a friend, a city-bred man, born and brought up in New York, sent west to me by his physician because he had had two or three hemorrhages, whom I took out into Arizona. The first night we had to sleep out was very cold, for it was early in the year, and at that high altitude the thermometer sank very rapidly after the sun went down. Yet I deliberately called camp by the side of a great snowbank. The fearful invalid wanted to know what I was stopping there for. I told him it was to afford him a good sleeping place on the snow. He expressed his dread, and assured me that such an experience would kill him at once. I told him that if it did I would see that he was decently buried, but that did not seem to dissipate his fears. After a good camp-fire was built, and he had had a warm and comforting supper, and his blankets were stretched out on the snow, and he was undressed and well wrapped up, with a hot rock at his feet and the cheery blaze lighting up the scene, he felt less alarmed. I talked him to sleep, and when he awoke in the morning it was to confess that his throat and lungs felt more comfortable than they had done for many long months. A month of this open-air sleeping gave him new ideas on the subject, and sent him back east to fit up a camp in the Adirondacks, where he could get a great deal of outdoor life, and sleeping with doors and windows wide open.

BOSTON MILLIONAIRES SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS ON THE SANDS OF THE COLORADO RIVER.

The outdoor treatment for tuberculosis is now almost universal. Here is what one eminent authority says on the subject:

“Tuberculosis is a direct result of over-work, either mental or physical, and rest is largely its cure. This life in the open air is best carried out in a sitting or semi-reclining posture. Every hour of the day in all seasons of the year and in all kinds of weather should thus be spent, together with sleeping in a tent, protected veranda, or in a house with windows wide open. It will be found that the colder the weather, the more marked and permanent the results. One does not need to be uncomfortable; one can be well wrapped with heavy blankets. It is the inhalation of cold air that is so effectual in stimulating appetite, as a general tonic and fever reducer. A consumptive should have for his motto: ‘Every hour in the closed house is an hour lost.’ There is no excuse for losing time.”

But it is not for those who are in ill health alone that I would commend out-of-door sleeping. Those who are healthy need to be kept in health, and there is a vim, a vigor, a physical joy, comes from this habit that I would that every child, young man and woman, and adult in the land might enjoy. Here is what one intelligent writer, Mary Heath, has recently said upon this subject, and her words I most heartily indorse:

“The success of any scheme for human betterment, morally, mentally, or physically, depends upon securing human co-operation by convincing the intellect of the truth or falsity of any widespread belief. The almost universal notion that night air is dangerous has predisposed, more than any other one cause, to the shutting of every door and window at sunset to keep out malaria. Notwithstanding the fact that all air analyses show that outdoor night air is much purer than day air, the old fear of night air still remains, and is responsible for much infection from foul air, because outdoor and indoor workers in summer and winter—all alike—spend their sleeping hours in ill-ventilated bedrooms. After false ideas about the harmfulness of fresh air are eradicated, plans should be devised and utilized for arranging outdoor sleeping apartments; plans should also be devised for keeping the body warm in cold weather without an over-amount of bedclothing; and for the health and convenience of the millions of middle class and more or less humble domestic home workers, provisions should be made for doing the housework as much as possible out of doors, away from the kitchen heat and odors of cooking food. Out-of-door recreation for the family should also be provided for. Could all sedentary workers spend the seven to nine hours of sleep in a clean, outdoor atmosphere, many of the evil effects of indoor sedentary work would be neutralized. The shop, office, or factory employe, after sleeping in the pure night air, would awake invigorated for the day’s demands and duties. Beginning the day aright, with a keen normal appetite for healthful food, he would be able to utilize his working energies without either structural damage to the tissues, or intellectual or moral degradation.”

Elbert Hubbard, of Roycroft fame, has converted all the sleeping-rooms of his phalanstery into outdoor rooms, where fresh, pure air is breathed. Dr. Kellogg, editor of Good Health, sleeps out of doors all the time, and all his large family of adopted children have rooms which practically contain no doors or windows, so that they sleep as near the open air as civilization will allow.

For years, as far as was possible, I have slept out of doors. When at home my bed is on an open porch, my face turned to the stars, the waving of plum, peach, and fig trees making music while I sleep, the beautiful lights of earliest dawn cheering my eyes before I arise, and the twittering and singing of the birds putting melodies into my soul as I dress. When I am in the wilds exploring, I sleep out of doors always, when and where I can. Those who have read my various books know of my experiences of sleeping in storms, during heavy rains, without bedding in rocky washes, in leaky boats and the rain pouring upon us, in the heat of the desert, and the cold of the snowy plateaus of Arizona. Yet I do not remember that I ever once “took cold,” though I have been wet through many a night. On the other hand, I never visit civilization, especially the proud, haughty, conceited civilization of the East, where houses are steam-heated, and street and railway cars are superheated, without taking severe colds and suffering much misery.

Those who have heard Nansen and Peary and other arctic explorers will remember that they had the same experience. Is it not apparent, therefore, that the outdoor life is the normal, the healthful, the rational, the natural life, while that of the steam-heated house is abnormal, unhealthful, irrational, and unnatural?

People often say: But I see that my house is well ventilated, and therefore the air is as pure and good as it is out of doors. In reply, permit me to say that no house can ever be well ventilated. Air to be pure and wholesome must be alive. It can only live when free and uncontained, and in contact with the direct rays of the sun during the day. Every thoughtful person has noticed the great difference there is between outdoor air and indoor air, on stepping from outside inside, even through all the doors and windows of the room were wide open. There is a vast difference between indoor and outdoor air, even under the best of conditions; so get into the open all you can, day or night, winter or summer, wet or dry.

One of the finest and strongest poems in the language is the following, by Richard Burton:

GOD’S GIFT, THE AIR

Now, is there anything that freer seems
Than air, the fresh, the vital, that a man
Draws in with breathings bountiful, nor dreams
Of any better bliss, because he can
Make over all his blood thereby, and feel
Once more his youth return, his muscles steel,
And life grow buoyant, part of God’s good plan!

Oh, how on plain and mountain, and by streams
That shine along their path; o’er many a field
Proud with pied flowers, or where sunrise gleams
In spangled splendors, does the rich air yield
Its balsam; yea, how hunter, pioneer,
Lover, and bard have felt that heaven was near
Because the air their spirit touched and healed!

And yet—God of the open!—look and see
The millions of thy creatures pent within
Close places that are foul for one clean breath,
Thrilling with health, and hope, and purity;
Nature’s vast antidote for stain and sin,
Life’s sweetest medicine this side of death!
How comes it that this largess of the sky
Thy children lack of, till they droop and die?

Many white people go out tenting in the summer and think they are sleeping out of doors. What a foolish error. Here is what a scientific authority says upon the subject:

“Are you tenting? If so, you should know:

“That a well-closed tent is nearly air-tight, and consequently,—

“That in an ordinary-sized tent, one occupant will so pollute the air as to render it unfit to breathe in less than twenty minutes; two occupants, in less than ten minutes.

A CHEMEHUEVI INDIAN AND HIS OUT-OF-DOOR SHELTER FROM THE SUN.

“That if you are tenting for your health, an opening at each end of the tent must be provided for ventilation at night. The openings should be at least a foot square for each occupant.

“Breathing impure air lowers the vitality, and consequently renders one susceptible to colds and other diseased conditions.”

CLIMBING ONE OF THE TRAILS IN HAVASU CANYON, ARIZONA.

CHAPTER VI
THE INDIAN AS A WALKER, RIDER, AND CLIMBER

As a part of his out-of-door life the Indian is a great walker and runner, having horses he is a great rider, and living in a mountainous or canyon region he is a great climber. The Indian walks through necessity, and also through delight and joy. He knows to the full “the joy of mere living.” A few miles’ walk, more or less, is nothing to him, and he does it so easily that one can see he enjoys it. In one of my books[1] I tell the story of the running powers of the Hopi Indians of northern Arizona. It is worth quoting here:

[1] The Indians of the Painted Desert Region. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, illustrated, $2.00 net, 20c postage.

“It is no uncommon thing for an Oraibi or Mashonganavi to run from his home to Moenkopi, a distance of forty miles, over the hot blazing sands of a real American Sahara, there hoe his corn-field, and return to his home, within twenty-four hours. I once photographed, the morning after his return, an old man who had made this eighty-mile run, and he showed not the slightest trace of fatigue.

“For a dollar I have several times engaged a young man to take a message from Oraibi to Keam’s Canyon, a distance of seventy-two miles, and he has run on foot the whole distance, delivered his message, and brought me an answer within thirty-six hours.

“One Oraibi, Ku-wa-wen-ti-wa, ran from Oraibi to Moenkopi, thence to Walpi, and back to Oraibi, a distance of over ninety miles, in one day.”

I doubt not that most of my readers suppose that these experiences are rare and unusual, and come after special training. Not at all! They are regular occurrences, made without any thought that the white man was either watching or recording. When asked for the facts, the Indians gave them as simply and as unconcernedly as we might tell of a friend met or a dinner eaten. And it is not with one tribe alone. I have found the same endurance with Yumas, Pimas, Apaches, Navahos, Havasupais, Wallapais, Chemehuevis, Utes, Paiutis, and Mohaves. Indeed, on the trackless wastes of the Colorado desert the Mohaves and Yumas perhaps show a greater endurance than any people I have ever seen.

As a horseback-rider the Indian can teach many things to the white race. Among the Navahos and Hopis, the Havasupais and Wallapais, the Pimas and Apaches, most of the children are taught to ride at an early age. They can catch, bridle, and saddle their own horses while they are still “little tots,” and the way they ride is almost a marvel. There need be no wonder at this, for their mothers are as used to horseback-riding as they are. Many an Indian child has come near to being born on horseback. They ride up and down trails, over the plains and up the mountains. They go with their parents gathering the seeds and pinion nuts, and are also taught to handle their horses in the chase. They study “horse-nature,” and early become expert horse-breakers. While their animals are broncos and wild, and therefore are never as well “broken” as are ours, they compel them to every duty, and ride them fearlessly and constantly.

The girls and women, too, ride almost as much as the boys and men, and always astride. If anything were needed to demonstrate to an Indian woman the inferiority of a white woman it would be that she sits on a side-saddle. The utter unnaturalness and folly of such a posture is so incomprehensible to the Indian mind that she “throws up her hands,” figuratively speaking, and gives up the problem of solving the peculiar mentality of her white sister. And I don’t wonder! Thank God the day is passing when women are ashamed of having legs, or of placing one of them on one side and the other on the other side of a horse. Common sense and comfort will ultimately prevail, and place the most modest, refined, cultured, and womenly women upon the backs of their horses cavalier fashion, dressed in trousers. The idea that men should dictate to women what they should do to be womanly is so absurd as to make even fools laugh. What does a man know as to what is womanly? Women alone can determine that question, just as men alone must determine what is manly. So I am satisfied that I shall live to see womenly women—the best the world has—reasonably natural in their dress on horseback, and riding as the Creator evidently intended them to do.

If girls as well as boys of the white race were to ride horseback more, much disease would flee away. Liver and stomach troubles are shaken out of existence on horseback; the blue devils and constipation are almost an impossibility, and the exhilaration of the swift motion and the vivifying influence of the deeper breathing, the shaking up of the muscles and nerves, the quickening effect of the accelerated heart action, and the readier circulation of well-oxygenated blood make the whole body a-tingle with a newness of life that is glorious. If I were well to do and had a score of children their chief education should be out of doors, and rain or shine, storm or calm, snow or sleet, winter or summer, boys and girls alike should ride horseback ten to twenty miles or more each day.

A ZUNI INDIAN WITH A JAR OF WATER
UPON HER HEAD.

Nor should this do away with daily walking. Walking is a fine offset to riding. One needs to walk a good deal to enjoy riding a good deal. One is a necessary complement to the other. One exercise uses muscles that are little called upon by the other. So I would make good walkers, in all weathers, of all boys, girls, men, and women of the white race, even as are those of the Indian race. In order to be good walkers the Indians have naturally found the most perfect and natural attitude for walking. Every Indian walks upright, his abdomen in, chest up, chin down, and spinal column easily carrying his body and arms. The white race may well learn from the Indian how to keep the spinal column upright, how to have a graceful carriage in walking, and how to cure stooped shoulders. With all younger women and men of all ages among the Indians a curved spine, ungraceful walk, and stooped shoulders are practically unknown. The women produce this result by carrying burdens upon their heads.

Yes, and the boys and men as well carry burdens also upon the head, though not as much as the women. Burden carrying upon the head is a good thing. As one writer has well said:

“Most of us are accustomed to regard the head as a mere thinking machine, unconscious of the fact that this bony superstructure seems to have been specially adapted by Nature to the carrying of heavy weights.

“The arms are usually considered as the means intended for the bearing of burdens, but the effect of carrying heavy articles in the hands or on the arms is very injurious, and altogether destructive of an erect or graceful carriage. The shoulders are dragged forward, the back loses its natural curve, the lungs are compressed, and internal organs displaced.

“When the head bears the weight of the burden, as it is made to do among the peasant women of Italy, Mexico, and Spain, and the people of the Far East, there is great gain in both health and beauty. The muscles of the neck are strengthened, the spine held erect, the chest raised and expanded, so that breathing is full and deep, and the shoulders are held back in their natural position.

A YOKUT INDIAN WITH A WHEELBARROW LOAD OF PEACHES AND
FIGS. THE CARRYING BASKET IS SUSPENDED BY A BROAD
BAND OVER THE FOREHEAD.

“It is a good thing for children to be early accustomed to the carrying of various articles, gradually increasing in weight, balanced upon the head. In this way they may acquire an erect carriage, and free and graceful walk.”

The Indian man and woman will pick up an olla of water, containing a gallon or more, and swinging it easily to the top of the head will walk along with hands by their sides, as unconcernedly as if they carried no fragile bowl balanced and ready to fall at the slightest provocation. And they will climb up steep and difficult trails, still balancing the jar upon the head. The effect of this is to compel a natural and dignified carriage. I know Navaho, Hopi, and Havasupai women who walk with a simple dignity that is not surpassed in drawing-room of president or king.

Then, too, another reason for this dignified, healthfully erect carriage is found in the fact that neither men nor women wear high-heeled shoes. The moccasin is always flat, and therefore the foot of the Indian rests firmly and securely upon the floor. No doubt if the Indian woman wished to imitate the forward motion of the kangaroo, or any other frivolous creature, she could tilt herself in an unnatural and absurd position by high-heeled shoes, but in all my twenty-five years of association with them I never found one foolish enough to do so.

The men, as well as the women, gain this upright attitude as the result of “holding up their vital organs” when they go for their long hunting and other tramps. It seems to me that fully one-half the white men (and women) we meet on the streets are suffering from prolapsus of the transverse colon. This is evidenced by the projection of the abdomen, which generally grows larger as they grow older; so that we have “tailors for fat men,” and special implements of torture for compressing into what we call a decent shape the embonpoint of women. But, I ask, as I see the Indians, why do white people have this paunch?

APACHE MAIDEN CARRYING A BASKET
WATER OLLA UPON HER HEAD. FULL
OF WATER THIS WEIGHS MANY POUNDS.

An Indian with a “bay-window” stomach, a paunch, is seldom, if ever seen. Why? He has long ago learned the art, the necessity, of keeping his abdominal muscles stretched tight. His belly is always held in. The muscles across his abdomen are like steel. The result is the transverse colon is held securely in position. It has no prolapse, hence there is no paunch. If we taught ourselves, as the Indian does, to draw in the abdomen and at the same time breathe long and deep, this prolapsus would be practically impossible. Half the medicine that is sold to so-called “kidney sufferers” is sold to people whose kidneys are no more diseased than are those of the man in the moon. It is the pulling and tugging of the falling colon that causes the wearisome backache; and the lying and scoundrelous wretches who prey upon the ignorant write out their catch-penny advertisements describing these feelings, so that when the sufferer picks up their literature he is as good as entrapped for “a dozen or more bottles,” or until his money gives out.

O men and women of America, learn to walk upright, as God intended you should. Do not become “chesty” by throwing out your chest, and throwing your shoulders back at the expense of your spine, but pull in the muscles of your abdomen, fill your lungs with air, then pull your chin down and in, and you will soon have three great, grand, and glorious blessings; viz., a dignified, upright carriage; freedom from and reasonable assurance that you will never have prolapsus of the transverse colon and its attendant miseries and backache; and a lung capacity that will help you withstand the approaches of disease should you ever, in some other way, come under its malign influence.

When I see white boys slouching and shambling along the streets I wish with a great wish that I could have them put under the training of some of my wild Indian friends. They would soon brace up; heads would be held erect, chins down, abdomen in, chest up, and with lips closed, and the pure air of the mountain, canyon, plain, desert, or forest entering their lungs through the nostrils; the whole aspect of life would begin to change. For “nothing lifts up the spirits so much as just to lift the chest up. It takes a load off the head, off the mind, off the heart. Raise your chest so high that the abdominal organs perform their functions in a proper way. When one is all doubled over, the head and spine are deprived of blood that they are entitled to. When the chest is lifted up, the abdominal organs are compressed, and the blood that has been retired from the circulation and accumulated in the liver and the stomach is forced back into the current where it belongs. The head and spinal cord get their proper supply of blood, and one feels refreshed and energized immediately.”

HAVASUPAI CHILD WITH WATER BOTTLE SUSPENDED FROM THE FOREHEAD.

But in addition to their walking and riding the Indians are great climbers of steep canyon and mountain trails. Men, women, and children alike pass up and down these trails with almost the ease and agility of the goat. I have seen a woman with a kathak (carrying basket) suspended from her forehead containing a load of fruit, of pine nuts, of grass seeds, weighing not less than from 50 to 100 lbs., her baby perched on top of the load, steadily and easily climb a trail that made me puff and blow like a grampus. Few exercises, properly taken, are of greater benefit to the lungs and heart, and indeed, all the vital organs, than is trail or mountain climbing. See that your clothing is easy, especially around the waist, for there must be room for every effort of lung expansion. This applies to men as well as to women, for the wretched and injurious habit is growing among men of wearing a belt instead of suspenders. If the prospective climber is a woman, let her wear a loose, light dress, and with as short a skirt as her common sense, judgment, and conscience will allow her to wear. If she is out “in the wilds,” let her wear trousers and discard skirts entirely as a senseless and barbarous slavery to custom and convention. Shoes should be easy and comfortable, with thick soles and broad, low heels.

CLIMBING THE TRAILS IN THE CANYON OF THE HAVASU, ARIZONA.

Begin to climb as early in the morning as possible. Don’t try to do too much at first. Try a small hill. Conquer that by degrees. Get so that you can finally go up and down without any great effort. Then tackle the higher hills, and finally try real mountains, eight, ten, fourteen thousand feet high. If you are delicate to begin with be more careful still, and ask the advice of your physician, but don’t be afraid so long as you do not get fatigued to exhaustion. For climbing develops the thighs and calves of the leg, the muscles of the back, enlarges the lungs, makes the heart pump more and purer (because better oxygenated) blood throughout the whole body, brings about more rapid changes in the material of the body, and thus exchanges old and useless tissue for new and healthy, dissolves and dissipates fat, induces perspiration and exhalations through the kidneys that are peculiarly beneficial.

In breathing be sure to keep the mouth closed. Insist upon nasal breathing, and the exercise will perforce make it deep breathing. The deeper you breathe the more good you will get from it. Let the posture be correct or you will lose much good. This is in brief: pull the abdomen in, raise the chest, keep the chin down, and let the arms hang easily and naturally by the side.

For years I have compelled myself to seize every possible opportunity for trail climbing or descending. Hundreds of miles of trails have I gone up and down in the Grand Canyon of Arizona, often with a thirty, forty, fifty pound camera and food supplies on my back. I have ascended scores of mountains throughout the Southwest, and the rich experiences of glowing health and vigor, vim, snap, tingle, that come from such exercises no one can know but those who have enjoyed them.

A few weeks ago I came to the Grand Canyon (September, 1907), after nearly a year of rest from physical labor on an extended scale (my civilized occupations had pre-empted all my time). I started out on the trail, up and down Havasu Canyon, Bass Trail of the Grand Canyon, and the Grand View and Red Canyon trails. Again and again I walked up the steepest portions for a mile at a time, setting the pace for the horses and mules, and it was a source of mental as well as physical delight that my lungs, heart, and body generally were in such good condition that I could do this day after day for two weeks, not only without exhaustion, but with positive exhilaration and physical delight.

CHAPTER VII
THE INDIAN IN THE RAIN AND THE DIRT

How these “things we may learn from the Indian” grow upon us, as we study the “noble red man” in his own haunts. Again and again I have noticed that “he doesn’t know enough to go in when it rains.” The white man who first coined that expression deemed it an evidence of smartness, and reared his head more proudly than his fellows because he was the author of so bright an idea. Yet when you come to consider it, what a foolish proposition it is! Go in when it rains? Why should you go in? Do the birds go in? I have just been watching them from my study window,—larks, linnets, song-sparrows, and mocking-birds. Not one of them seems to care a particle about the rain, and their songs are as sweet and as cheery and as full of melody as they are on the days of brightest sunshine. How well I recall seeing a mocking-bird on a stand on my lawn one day when the rain was pouring down fiercely. He stood with bill up and tail down so that he had a very “Gothic-roof-like” appearance, his mouth wide open, and as the rain poured from the end of his tail he sent out a flood of melody more rich and sweet than any bird-song I ever heard.

And the horses! How they enjoy the rain! I have seen them loose in a stable having double doors, the upper of which was open, and when it rained they would thrust their noses out into the rain and let the drippings of the eaves fall upon them with evident pleasure and longing that they might get out into it all over.

HEALTHY NAVAHO CHILDREN USED TO THE RAIN AND THE OUT OF DOORS.

Nothing alive in Nature save “civilized” man dreads the rain. The Indian fairly revels in it. I was once at the Havasupai village for a couple of weeks, the guest of my friend Wa-lu-tha-ma. His little girl, seven years old, was a perfect little witch. She was quick, nervy, lively, and healthy. When it rained and her clothes got wet I tried to prevail upon her to come into shelter. But no! She wanted to be out in the rain, and off she sprang through the door, playing with the pools as they collected, and running with others of her playmates to where the extemporized waterfalls dashed themselves into semi-spray as they fell from the heights above upon the shelving rocks. Here they stood, in the water and rain, like dusky fairies, laughing and shouting, romping and sporting, in perfect glee.

The older women, too, mind it but little, unless it is very cold or the wind is blowing. They no more mind being wet than they do that the wind should blow or the sun shine, and as for any ill effect that either children or grown-ups suffer from the wet, I have yet to see it. Why? The reasons are clear. In the first place, they have no fear of the rain. It is not constantly instilled into their minds from childhood that “they mustn’t get wet, or they’ll take cold,” and girls are not taught to expect functional disarrangement if they “get their feet wet.” This has something to do with it, for the effect of the mind upon the body is far more potent than we yet know.

In the second place, they move about with natural activity in the rain as at other times. This keeps the blood circulating and prevents any lowering of the temperature of the body.

In the third place, their general out-of-door life gives them such a robustness that if there is any tax upon the system it is fully ready to meet it.

But I am asked, “Would you advocate white people, especially girls and women, getting wet? Think of their skirts bedraggled in the rain, and how these wet skirts cling to the ankles and make their wearers uncomfortable.”

INDIAN KISH IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

I have thought a great deal about this, and am not prepared to say that with our present costume I would advocate women’s going out much in the rain. But I do say that once in a while they can put on short skirts and stout shoes and such old clothes as cannot be injured by getting wet, and then resolutely and boldly sally forth into the rain, and the harder it comes down the better, if it be warm weather. Then let them learn to enjoy the pattering of the rain upon cheeks and ears. Let them hold out their hands and feel the soft and gentle caresses of the “high-born, noble rain.” Let them watch the drops as they spatter on the leaves and trickle down the stems, gathering volume and speed as they reach the bole and fall to the ground, there to give life and nourishment to the whole plant. Everything in Nature loves to be out in the rain. How fresh and bright the trees look after a shower! How the rocks are cleansed and made bright and shining! How their color comes vividly out in the rain! And upon human beings the effect is the same, provided they value health and vigor more than they mind a little discomfort in the bedragglement of their clothes. Years ago I learned this lesson. I was riding from the line of the railway, over the Painted Desert, with several Havasupai Indians. It was the rainy season. Showers fell half a dozen times a day. At first I wished I had an umbrella. I got wet through, and so did the Indians. I thought I ought to feel wretched and miserable, but somehow the Indians were as bright and cheerful as ever, so I plucked up heart and courage, and in half an hour my clothes were dry again. Four or five times that day and an equal number the next day, I got wet through and dry again. Riding horseback kept me warm, and the quick and healthful circulation of the blood, the active deep breathing caused by the exercise, the absence of fear in the soul, all combined to make the wetting a benefit instead of an injury.

My friend W. W. Bass, of the Grand Canyon of Arizona, with whom I have made many trips in that Wonderland region, tells with great gusto a true story of my riding over the desert on one occasion, clothed in one of the old-fashioned linen dusters that reached below my knees. It was warm weather, and dusty on the railway, hence the duster, I suppose. But when we got fairly out on the desert it began to rain, and how it did pour! It came down so rapidly that by and by my pockets were full of water, and Bass says that when he overtook me, I was jogging along, singing at the top of my voice (just as the mocking-bird did), the water splashing out of my pockets as I bounced up and down in the saddle. The linen duster clung to the sides and back of the horse, and wrapped itself around my legs so that the picture was comical in the extreme. But I was happy, and refused to feel any discomfort, and so got joy out of the experience, as well as health and vigor. For let it be remembered that when I came from England, twenty-five years ago, I came as an invalid, broken down in health completely; so much so that I was even forbidden to read a book for a whole year. Now few men are as healthy as I. Years of association with the Indian, learning simplicity and naturalness of him, have aided materially in making the change. I have learned the value of putting the primary things first. I used to be so “nice” and “finnicky” that the idea of having my clothes wet would give me a small panic. “They would get out of shape and look badly, and have to be pressed before I could wear them again.” But when I came to the conclusion that I was worth more than clothes, that my health was of more importance than a crease in my trousers, I found I was taking hold of a principle which, while it might at times seem to be rough on my clothing, would have a decidedly beneficial influence on myself.

And this leads to another important lesson we may learn from the Indian. He is not as “nice” sometimes as I wish he were, but we are far too nice, often, for health and comfort. Many a woman ruins her health by wrecking her nerves, drives her husband distracted, worries and annoys her children, by being too nice in her house. I have found, in New England and elsewhere,—aye, even in Old England,—women who valued a clean house more than they valued their own lives, the happiness of their children, and the comfort of their husbands. Indeed, in one case I well remember a woman drove her husband into temporary insanity, and finally into ignominious flight away from her, by her eternal washing of floors, shaking of carpets, polishing of furniture, and dusting down. Every time the poor fellow went in from the workshop he must change his clothes. If he came in from the outside he must take off his shoes before he entered the door. If he put his warm hand down on the polished table he was rebuked, for his wife at once got up, fetched her chamois leather and rubbed off the offending marks. Poor, wretched woman, and equally poor, wretched man! No wonder he went crazy, and finally lost his manhood and ran away.

I know this is an extreme case. But I vouch for its strict truth. And there are thousands of women (and men too, for that matter) who are afflicted in a serious measure with the same disease. In that home where niceness is valued more than health and comfort and work in life, there lurks serious danger. Go to the Indian, and while I do not suggest that you lose all niceness by any means, seek to learn some of his philosophy and place primary things first. First, health, happiness, comfort, peace, contentment, love; then these other things.

HOPI CHILDREN ENJOYING THEIR DAILY SPORT ON THE BACK OF A BURRO.

I’m going to make a confession that I am afraid will bring me into sad repute with some of my readers. When my first boy was born, we were naturally very proud of him. As he grew out of his baby clothes we liked to see him look nice and neat and clean. He must be a pretty little cherub, dressed in white and have the manners of a Little Lord Fauntleroy. Then I came to the conclusion that we were valuing “niceness” more than the healthy development of the child. I remonstrated and urged a change but to no effect, so I resolved on a coup d’état. One morning after the youngster was dressed up in his white bib and tucker, and as uncomfortable and unhappy as any and all healthy children feel at such treatment, I took him by the hand and led him out of doors and out of sight of all watchful eyes, where there was plenty of mud and plenty of water. In half an hour his changed appearance was a marvel. We started a little stream of water, which we then dammed. We made mud pies, and I helped him mix the “dough” in his apron. We reveled in mud from top to toe. I rolled him in it, so that back was as vividly marked as front. Not a remnant of niceness was left in him. We went home happy and contented, laughing and merry, but bedaubed and beplastered everywhere. We had had such a good time. And it was such fun going out with father. We were going again to-morrow and the next day and the next. And so we did. It needed no words, no argument. It did not take long to get two or three suits of brown canvas or blue denim, and the youngster grew up healthy, happy, vigorous, strong, tough, and often dirty, rather than anæmic, miserable, dyspeptic, weak and ailing, and nice. There would be far less demand for children’s tombstones, surmounted with marble angels and inscribed with wretched doggerel, if mothers valued health rather than niceness, vigor before primness, and strength immaculate rather than bibs and aprons. So I say, let us not be over-nice. And especially let us not train our children to value clean hands and clothes more than the rugged health that comes from contact with the soil in out-of-door employments. I find one can enjoy Homer, and Browning, Dante, and Shakspere, all the better because his body is vigorous and strong, his brain clear, and his mind active as the result of rough-and-tumble mountain climbing, desert tramping or riding, and walking on canyon trails.

Another result of this frank and fearless acceptance of out-of-door conditions is manifested in a readiness to meet difficulties that over-niceness is disinclined to touch. Let me illustrate. Two or three months ago I made a journey with two Yuma Indians and four white men down the overflow of the Colorado River to the Salton Sea. We were warned beforehand that it would be “an awfully hard trip.” We were told that it was “hell boiled down” to try to go through certain places. The river for ten or twelve miles left its bed and ran wild over a vast tract of land covered with a mesquite forest. Mesquite is a fairly dense tree growth covered with strong and piercing thorns. When we came to this place we had to cut our way through the thorny thicket, and our faces, hands, and bodies all suffered with fierce scratchings and thorn-pricks. Several times we stuck fast, and there was nothing for it but to jump out into the water with ax in hand and cut away the obstructions or lift over the boat. My Indian, Jim, though dignified and serene, as I shall fully explain elsewhere, had the promptness that over-niceness destroys. He was out over the side of the boat as quickly as I was, ready for the hard and disagreeable work. Had I been “nicely” dressed, and “nice” about the feeling of water up to my middle, too “nice” to wade for hours, sinking into quicksands, in order to find the best passage for the boats, we should have been there yet. We cut down three mesquite trees, under water, in order to get our boats over the stumps. We forced our way through tall and dense arrow weeds, one in front and the other behind the boat, lifting and forcing, pulling and pushing. It was not “nice” work, but it was invigorating, stimulating, and soul-developing.

IN THE MESQUITE FOREST ON OUR WAY TO THE SALTON SEA.

The other day I went photographing on the Salton Sea. When the launch stopped twenty feet from the island covered with pelicans, where I wished to make photographs, I shouldered my camera, stepped out into the water, which came up to my thighs, and walked ashore. The engineer wondered. Why should he? Had I waited, the pelicans would have flown away. Speed was necessary. “Niceness” would have prevented my getting what I went for. When I stand on the lecture platform, or in the pulpit, or in the drawing-room; when I meet ladies in the parlor and go with them for an automobile ride, I dress as neatly as I can afford, and endeavor to look “nice;” but when I go into my garden to work, I put on blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and a pair of heavy shoes, and I try not to be nice. I roll around in the dirt, I feel it with my hands, I revel in it, for thus, I find, do I gain healthful enjoyment for body, mind, and soul. I owe many things to the Indian, but few things I am more grateful for than that he taught me how to value important things more than “looking neat” and being “nice.”

CHAPTER VIII
THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR

Ministers and orators, teachers and statesmen, members of the W. C. T. U., as well as the Y. M. C. A., of the white race, all profess to believe that the white race believes in the dignity of physical labor.

That profession is often a lie.

We no more believe in the dignity of physical labor than we do in the refinement of a hog. Our actions give the direct lie to our words. I am writing with the utmost calmness, and say these strong words with deliberate intent. As a nation we are humbugs when we pretend to believe in the dignity of labor. Perhaps, after all, we do believe in it, but in most cases it is not for ourselves, but for “the other fellow.”

On the other hand, the Indian really and truly believes in the dignity of physical labor. A chief would just as soon be “caught” dressing buckskin, or sewing a pair of moccasins, or irrigating his corn-field as lolling on a Navaho blanket “smoking the pipe of peace.” With the white race this is not so. Men believe in the dignity of labor as much as they do in the brotherhood of man. They would no more be seen doing physical labor—wheeling a wheelbarrow, for instance, digging a ditch, building a wall, plowing a potato patch, or doing any other physical work, save the few things men are allowed to do without being thought peculiar, as, for instance, taking care of a small home garden, taking the ashes out of the furnace, and things of that kind—than they would be seen picking their neighbors’ pockets or burglarizing their houses. When they want to gain exercise they go to some indoor gymnasium, where the air is the breathed-over, dead air of a hundred people, and they swing dumb-bells, pull on weights, struggle frantically on bars, and do other similar and fool-like things, because, forsooth, these things are gentlemanly; or they go out and swing golf-clubs and pursue a poor innocent little ball over the “links,” while gaping caddies look on at their wild strokes, and listen to the insane profanity with which they try to compel themselves to believe that they are “gentlemen, bah Jove!”

A HAVASUPAI GIRL, WEAVER OF BASKETS.

Of all the contemptible, shuffling, and mean subterfuges the white race is capable of, this seems to me to be about the meanest and most contemptible. To pretend to believe in the dignity of labor, and then at any and all opportunities afforded to labor to dodge away and do these useless and selfish things that do not take off one ounce of the burden of physical labor we have imposed upon our fellows.

Let me not be thought for a moment to be opposed to any healthful recreation or sport. If golf be pursued as a recreation, for fun, I am heartily in accord with it and its promoters. It is when it is taken as an “exercise,” as a substitute for honest and useful labor, that I protest against it, as a fraud, a delusion, a snare, and a contemptible subterfuge. If you want real exercise, real work, go and relieve some poor fellow-man of his excess of hard work. Tell him you have come to give him an hour’s rest, that he may go and study nature, go and look at the flowers of your garden, wander into the woods and hear the birds sing, or visit the public library and read some entertaining and instructive book. If you are too ashamed to openly try to give an hour or two of rest and change to your “brother” man, go and chop the wood for the house, dig up the potato patch, wheel out the manure from the stable, or do some other useful and beneficial thing. Pleasure is pleasure, sport is sport, fun is fun, but to engage in these sports seriously, as a physical exercise to counteract the effects of your evil dietetic habits or other grossnesses, is to add hypocrisy and subterfuge to evil living.

HOPI INDIAN WEAVING A DRESS FOR HIS WIFE.

What labor the Indian has to do he does gladly, cheerfully, openly. He is not ashamed to have soiled hands or to be caught in the act. In this I am heartily in accord with him. If I ever wrote a creed one of the first articles of my religion would be: “I believe in the benefit and joy of physical labor.” If I had my way I would compel every member of the so-called “learned” professions (!), from preacher to lawyer, teacher and doctor, statesman, politician, and bartender, to spend not less than three hours at hard physical labor every day, and as for my brother preachers, I would put them to road-making every Monday, for half the day at least, so that by practical knowledge of road-making on earth they might be better able to preach to their congregations the following Sunday about the road to heaven. There is nothing that more reveals that we are a people of caste and class than the attitude of the rich and the “learned” toward physical labor. I am not in sympathy with that attitude in any respect; I despise, hate, loathe it, and would see it changed. To the Indian, for his honest respect for and indulgence in physical labor, I give my adherence and honor.

VARIOUS ARTICLES OF USE AND ORNAMENT MADE AND DECORATED BY INDIANS.

CHAPTER IX
THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN

In the preceding chapter I have given the Indian’s life, habit, thought, towards physical labor for himself and his sons. He holds the same attitude toward it for his daughter and his wife. And not only does he so hold it, but the wife and daughter regard it in exactly the same way. The out-door life of the Indian girl and woman makes her healthy, vigorous, muscular, and strong. She glories in her physical vigor and strength, and wonders why her white sister is not equal to her in physical capacity. When I tell her that the white women pity her because, forsooth, “she has to do so much hard work, while the lazy men sit by, smoking, and doing nothing,” she looks at me in vacant amazement. Once when I was talking in this way one of them said: “Are your white women all fools? Tell them we not only don’t need their pity, but we despise them for their habits of life that lead them to pity us. The Creator made us with the capacity and power for work. He knows that all beings must work if they would be healthy. We would be healthy, and therefore we do His will in working at our appointed tasks. We are glad and proud to do them. And as for the men: let them dare to interfere in our work and they will soon see what they will see. We brook no interference or help from them.”

HOPI WOMEN BUILDING A HOUSE AT ORAIBI, ARIZONA.

So their children (girls as well as boys) are all brought up from the earliest years to work, and to work hard. Boys are sent out to herd sheep, horses, and cattle; to watch the corn and see that nothing disturbs it. And the girls, as soon as they can toddle, become “little mothers” to their younger brothers and sisters. As they grow older they grind all the corn, gather all the wild grass and other seeds, make all the basketry and pottery, and prepare all the food for the household. To grind corn in the Indian fashion, with flat rock and metate, is no easy task for a strong man of the white race, yet I have known a girl of fifteen to keep at work at the metate for ten hours a day for several days in succession, in order that there might be plenty of flour when guests came to the Snake Dance.

On one of my visits to the Hopi village of Oraibi I found the women at work building a house. This is their occupation. All labor among Hopis is divided between the sexes in accordance with long-established custom, and I think it is so divided in all aboriginal peoples. The men undertook the protection of the home (were the warriors) and the hunting of animals for food. They also make the robes and moccasins. Those tribes that lost their nomad character and became sedentary added care of the fields and the stock to the work of their men. The women practically undertook all the rest. The building of the home, its care, the general gathering of seeds, and the preparation of all foods belong to them.

And as a rule, they do their chosen or appointed or hereditary work cheerfully. They know nothing of the aches and pains of their weaker white sisters; they are as strong as men, so they have no fear of physical labor. Not only this, but they enjoy it; they go to it with pleasure, as all healthy bodies do. How often have I stood and watched a healthy, vigorous man swing a hammer at the forge, or in a mine or a trench. How easily it was done, how gladly, how unconscious of effort! To the healthy woman, with reasonable strength, labor is also a pleasure. To feel one’s self accomplishing something, and able to do it without undue fatigue or exhaustion, what a delight it is!

The woman who honors us by coming to our house weekly to do the heavy work, often reminds me of a panther. She fairly “leaps” upon her work with an exuberance of strength and spirit that is a perfect delight, in this age of woman’s physical disability and disinclination to do physical labor.

NAVAHO MAIDENS CARRYING WATER OVER THE DESERT.

So it is with Indian women. They sing in unison when a dozen of them get together at the grinding-trough; though the work is hard enough, when long continued, to exhaust any strong man. I have seen women kneel and pound acorns all day, lifting a heavy pestle as high as their heads at every stroke. In the case of these women builders at Oraibi: they carried all the heavy rocks and put them in position, mixed their own mortar, and were their own paddies, and in everything, save the placing of the heavy crossbeams for the roof, to handle which they called upon some of the men for aid, they did all the work from beginning to end.

INDIAN MAIDENS TAUGHT BY THEIR MOTHER TO BE BASKET WEAVERS.

Now, while I do not especially want to see white women building a house, I do wish, with all my heart, that they had the physical strength to do it or similar arduous labor. I do long for the whole of my race that the women and girls shall have such vigorous health and strength that no ordinary labor could tire them.

“But,” say my white friends,—women and girls,—“we don’t want to work physically; there is no need for it; we are not strong enough to do it; we exhaust ourselves, and then do not have energy enough for the other duties of life; we engage servants to do our menial labor for us.”

COAHUILA BASKET WEAVER WORKING IN THE OPEN AIR.

Indeed! In the first place I want to protest with all the power I have against the word and idea “menial.” There is no menial service. All service, rendered in willing helpfulness and love, is dignified, noble, and ennobling. He or she who accepts service from another with the idea that the service is “menial,” thereby degrades himself, herself, far more than the person is “degraded” by the performance of the service. I would rather have my son a good scavenger, working daily to keep the city pure and clean, than be an “honored” lawyer, engaged in dishonest cases; a “successful” politician, tangled up with graft; a “popular” physician, selfishly deceiving his patients; or an “eloquent” and “dear” minister, self-righteously lauding himself and pouring forth inane platitudes in high-sounding phrases from the pulpit. “Menial service” is divine compared with these occupations when they are demoralized.

And the principle of all I have said applies to girls as well as boys. I would rather that daughters of mine should be able to scrub the floor, bake bread, do the family washing and mending, repair the boys’ clothes, knit, sew, and take care of the kitchen garden and the flowers, than strum “The Battle of Prague” or “The Maiden’s Prayer,” without feeling or expression, on a half-tuned piano. The former occupations are holy and dignified as compared with the sham exhibition of the latter. I like to see a girl with an apron on, strong, healthy, willing, useful, capable, engaged in useful household work, and if our young men had one-tenth part of the sense they ought to have, they would hunt for such girls to become their wives and the mothers of their children, rather than for the dainty, white-faced, wasp-waisted, finger-manicured dolls who are useful for no other purpose than to be looked at.

I have no desire to make pack-horses or slaves of intelligent women or girls, but I cannot help asking the question of them: “Which would you rather be, strong enough to do any and all so-called menial and laborious service, and endowed with perfect health, or be weakly and puny and live the life of ease and luxury that most women and girls seem to covet?” And upon the answer to that question should I base my judgment as to the wisdom, intelligence, and fitness for the duties of life of the answerer. There is no dignity in woman superior to the dignity of being able personally (if necessary) to care for all the physical needs of her household; there is no charm greater than the charm of strength combined with gracious, womanly sweetness exercised for the joy of others; there is no refinement greater than the refinement of a gloriously healthy woman radiating physical, mental, spiritual life upon all those who come within the sphere of her influence.

CHAPTER X
THE INDIAN AND DIET

A man is largely the result of what he eats. Indeed, many scientific specialists now tell us that sex determination is largely the result of the food eaten by the expectant mother, so that according to what the mother eats the unborn child becomes—male or female. Ploss in his well-known “Ueber die das Geschlechtsverhältniss der Kinder bedingenden Ursachen,” Düsing in his painstaking “Die Regulirung des Geschlechtsverhältnisses bei der Vernehrung der Menschen, Miere und Pflanzen,” and Westermarck in the “History of Human Marriage,” prove conclusively, from close study of actual experimentation, that the sex of the child is largely fixed by the quantity and quality of nutrition absorbed by the mother. Hence it is not too strong a statement that a man is largely the result of his (or his mother’s) food.

At first sight it will appear foolish to many of my readers to go to the Indian for ideas on diet, yet I think I can prove, more conclusively than the learned scientists whose books I have named above can prove their theories, that the Indian has many ideas on diet which the white race can learn to its great advantage.

HAVASUPAI WOMAN MAKING BREAD IN THE OPEN AIR.

In the first place, the normal aborigine, before he began to use the white man’s foods, was perforce compelled to live on a comparatively simple diet. His choice was limited, his cookery simple. Yet he lived in perfect health and strength. With few articles of diet, and these of the simplest character, prepared in the readiest and easiest ways, he attained a vigor, a robustness, that puts to shame the strength and power of civilized men. Why? The reasons are not far to seek. In simplicity of food there is safety. We eat not only too much, but too great variety, and every student of dietetics knows that the greater the variety the greater the possibility that too much will be eaten. The Indian, living his simple life, was compelled to be content with the maize, beans, pumpkins, and melons of his fields, the peaches of his orchards, the wild grass seeds, nuts, fruits, and roots he or his squaw could gather, and the products of his traps or the chase. Here, then, was a restricted dietary. He had not much choice, nor a large menu for each meal. The smaller the menu the less, as a rule, any person will eat, be he Indian or white man. The extended menu is a series of temptations to overeat. The simple menu of the Indian was a preventive to gluttony. It will doubtless be recalled that when the great Bismarck was broken down in health, his physicians gave him no other prescription as to food than that he should eat but one kind of food to a meal. This is a dietetic axiom: The less variety the less one eats. In a diseased condition health can often be restored by giving the stomach and assimilative organs less work to do.

Among the Indian race dyspepsia is almost unknown. To this fact that they have a small variety of foods, this healthful condition is largely attributable. On the other hand, one has but to pick up any daily newspaper to see the positive proofs of the dyspeptic condition of the “greatest nation of the world” among the white race. There are nostrums for dyspepsia without end. Syrups, pills, doses that work while you sleep, and dopes that work inside and out. Millions of dollars are annually spent merely in advertising these damnable proofs of our idiocy or gluttony, or both. A thousand nostrums flout their damned and damning lies in the faces of the “superior race”! And a drug store on every corner of our large cities demonstrates the great demand there is for these absolute proofs of our vile dietetic habits. Every pill taken, every nostrum swallowed, is a proof positive of our ignorance, or our gluttony, or our gullibility, and probably a good deal of each. Seventy-five millions of dollars were spent in 1905 in the purchase of patent medicines, every cent of which was worse than wasted.

Before the white race came and perverted—pardon me, civilized—him, what did the “uncivilized Indian” know of patent medicines? What did he know of the diseases which these nostrums are supposed to cure? Nothing! He was as ignorant of one as the other. In his native wildness he was healthy and strong; only since he has been led into evil ways by a false civilization has he so degenerated as to need such compounds.

Let us, then, forget our civilization,—this portion of it,—and forego our physical ills and our patent nostrums, and go back to a simple, natural, restricted diet. In that one course of procedure will be found more restored health than all the physicians of the world can give otherwise in a score of years. Let us learn to eat few things to a meal, and those of such a nature that they will properly mix, and thus not overtax the stomach in its work of digestion.

When I sit down to the laden tables of my rich friends, or at the tables of the first-class hotels of the country, I sometimes find my judgment stronger than my perverted appetite. At such times I look over the bill of fare. I see ten or a dozen courses, varying from cocktails, oysters, and fish to ice-cream, fruit, and wines. There are meats and vegetables, nuts and fruits, cooked and uncooked, pastries and jellies, soups and coffee, wines and spices, sauces, relishes, and seasonings galore, and I am more or less disgusted with the whole business, and eat sparingly of but two or three dishes. At other times, alas! my appetite asserts itself, and I “go the pace” with the rest. Now, when all these things, so elaborately prepared, so daintily served, so “nicely” eaten, are disposed of and in the stomach, let me ask (without any desire to offend): Is there the slightest difference in the contents of the stomach of such a person and the stomach of a hog filled with swill? In the first case there is cocktail and caviar, olives and celery, oysters and soup, fish and entremes, entree and roast, game and punch, ice-cream and cheese, pastry and fruit, nuts and crackers, with water, coffee, tea, or wine to liquefy it all, all taken separately, but now mixed in one horrible mess within, and in the case of the hog they were mixed first and swallowed mixed instead of in “courses.”

HOPI WOMAN, WITH BODY PARTIALLY EXPOSED, GRINDING CORN AT THE MEAL TROUGH.

O men and women of the white race, of the superior civilization, quit such gluttony and disease-breeding courses! Get back to the Indian’s simplicity in diet. Learn the meaning of “low living and high thinking.” Stop pampering your sensual appetites and feeding your stomachs at the expense of your minds, aye, and at the expense of your souls, for men and women who thus live continuously, generally become selfish, indifferent to the sufferings of others, “proud stomached”—which means much more than it seems to mean—and incapable of the finer feelings.

Nor is this all that the Indian may teach us as to diet. While at times he eats everything he can lay his hands upon and also eats ravenously, in his normal condition he eats slowly and masticates thoroughly. Since Horace Fletcher wrote his most interesting and useful books on diet and life, the term “fletcherizing” has become almost universal amongst thoughtful people to express mastication to the point of liquifaction. But I was familiar with “fletcherizing” before I had ever heard of Mr. Fletcher. The Indians, with their parched corn, had taught me years before the benefit of thorough and complete mastication. I had gone off with a band of Indians on a hard week’s ride with no other food than parched corn and a few raisins. This was chewed and chewed and chewed by the hour, a handful of the grain making an excellent meal, and thoroughly nourishing the perfect bodies of these stalwart athletes, who never knew an ache or a pain, and who could withstand fatigue and hardship without a thought.

MY HAVASUPAI HOSTESS PARCHING CORN IN
A BASKET.

A marked and wonderful effect of thorough mastication is that it decreases the appetite from 10 to 15 per cent, and reduces the desire for flesh meat from 30 to 50 per cent. The more we masticate the less we desire to eat, and the more normal our appetites become. This in itself is a thing to be desired, for it is far easier not to have an abnormal appetite than it is to control it when it has fastened itself upon us.

Then, too, while Indians will often eat to repletion, and at their feasts indulge in disgusting gorging, they do know how to fast with calmness and equanimity. I am not prepared to say that they will fast voluntarily—except in the cases of those neophytes who are seeking some unusual powers or gifts from Those Above—yet I do know that several times I have been with them when fasting was obligatory because of the scarcity of food, and they accepted the condition without a murmur. I know a very prominent physician in San Francisco, who has an extensive practice, who pumps the food out of the stomachs of several of his gluttonous patients after their hearty French dinners. He defends his course of procedure by saying that his patients would not listen to him if he counseled fasting for even one meal, yet they are willing to allow him to remove the food after it is eaten, and to swallow some harmless “dope” that he gives them, because that is easy and requires no self-control.

I know the power of appetite; I know how hard it is to eat only that which the reason tells us is best. I know how hard it is to eat slowly and thoroughly masticate the food, but I also know that these things are imperative if one would have perfect health. Therefore, in spite of my many lapses into the old habits, I persist in asserting the good over the evil, and in teaching the good to others, in the hope that, in my own case, the good course will become the easiest to follow, and in the case of the young who listen to me they may learn the best way before they have fallen into the evil way.

There is one other thing the white race might learn from the Indian, and that is that the habitual use of flesh is not essential to health. When Captain Cook visited the Maoris of New Zealand, he found them a perfectly healthy people, and he states that he never observed a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint. Nor, among the number that were seen naked, was once perceived the slightest eruption of the skin, nor the least mark which indicated that such eruptions had formerly existed. As Dr. Kress says:

“Another proof of the health of these people was the readiness with which wounds they at any time received healed up. In a man who had been shot with a musket-ball through the fleshy part of the arm, ‘his wound seemed well digested, and in so fair a way to be healed,’ says the Captain, ‘that if I had not known that no application had been made to it, I should have inquired with very interesting curiosity after the vulnerary herbs and surgical art of the country.’

“‘An additional evidence of the healthiness of the New Zealanders,’ he says, ‘is in the great number of old men found among them. Many of them appeared to be very ancient, and yet none of them were decrepit. Although they were not equal to the young in muscular strength, they did not come in the least behind them in regard to cheerfulness and vivacity.’”

At the advent of Captain Cook, the Maoris were practically vegetarians; they had no domestic or wild animals on the islands, hence could not have been flesh eaters.

While our Indians of the Southwest will eat some forms of flesh at times, they are, generally speaking, vegetarians. The Navahos scarcely ever eat meat while in their primitive condition, and they are proud, independent, high-spirited, vigorous, healthy, and strong. So with the Havasupais and Wallapais, and most of the aborigines of this region. The Apaches also are largely vegetarians, and yet are known as a fierce and warlike people. They are fierce when aroused, but when friendly are kindly disposed, honest, reliable and good workers, strong, athletic, vigorous, and healthy. These facts demonstrate that flesh meat is not necessary. Meat is another fetich of the civilization of the white race, before which we bow down in ignorant worship. The world would be far better off, in my judgment, and as the result of my observation and experience, if we ate no flesh at all. Personally I am never so well physically and my brain so active as when I live the vegetarian life, though when I am at the tables of meat eaters I eat whatever comes and make the best of it.