Knowledge Is Power. Charles Knight
Читать онлайн книгу.
Cruising Voyage round the World, 1712.
CHAPTER III.
Adventures of John Tanner—Habits of the American Indians—Their sufferings from famine, and from the absence among them of the principle of division of labour—Evils of irregular labour—Respect to property—Their present improved condition—Hudson's Bay Indians.
In the year 1828 there came to New York a white man named John Tanner, who had been thirty years a captive amongst the Indians in the interior of North America. He was carried off by a band of these people when he was a little boy, from a settlement on the Ohio river, which was occupied by his father, who was a clergyman. The boy was brought up in all the rude habits of the Indians, and became inured to the abiding miseries and uncertain pleasures of their wandering life. He grew in time to be a most skilful huntsman, and carried on large dealings with the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, in the skins of beavers and other animals which he and his associates had shot or entrapped. The history of this man was altogether so curious, that he was induced to furnish the materials for a complete narrative of his adventures; and, accordingly, a book, fully descriptive of them, was prepared for the press by Dr. Edwin James, and printed at New York, in 1830. It is of course not within the intent of our little work to furnish any regular abridgment of John Tanner's story; but it is our wish to direct attention to some few particulars, which appear to us strikingly to illustrate some of the positions which we desire to enforce, by thus exhibiting their practical operation.
The country in which this man lived so many years is that immense territory belonging to the United States, which at that period was covered by boundless forests which the progress of civilization had not then cleared away. In this region a number of scattered Indian tribes maintained a precarious existence by hunting the moose-deer and the buffalo for their supply of food, and by entrapping the foxes and martens of the woods and the beavers of the lakes, whose skins they generally exchanged with the white traders of Europe for articles of urgent necessity, such as ammunition and guns, traps, axes, and woollen blankets; but too often for ardent spirits, equally the curse of savage and of civilized life. The contact of savage man with the outskirts of civilization perhaps afflicts him with the vices of both states. But the principle of exchange, imperfectly and irregularly as it operated amongst the Indians, furnished some excitement to their ingenuity and their industry. Habits of providence were thus to a certain degree created; it became necessary to accumulate some capital of the commodities which could be rendered valuable by their own labour, to exchange for commodities which their own labour, without exchange, was utterly unable to procure. The principle of exchange, too, being recognised amongst them in their dealings with foreigners, the security of property—without which, as we have shown, that principle cannot exist at all—was one of the great rules of life amongst themselves. But still these poor Indians, from the mode which they proposed to themselves for the attainment of property, which consisted only in securing what nature had produced, without directing the course of her productions, were very far removed from the regular attainment of those blessings which civilized society alone offers. We shall exemplify these statements by a few details.
The country over which these people ranged occupies a surface that may be roughly described as five or six times as large as all England. They had the unbounded command of all the natural resources of that country; and yet their entire numbers did not equal the population of a moderately sized English county. It may be fairly said that each Indian required a thousand acres for his maintenance. The supplies of food were so scanty—a scantiness which would at once have ceased to exist had there been any cultivation—that if a large number of these Indians assembled together to co-operate in their hunting expeditions, they were very soon dispersed by the urgent desire of satisfying hunger. Tanner says, "We all went to hunt beavers in concert. In hunts of this kind the proceeds are sometimes equally divided; but in this instance every man retained what he had killed. In three days I collected as many skins as I could carry. But in these distant and hasty hunts little meat could be brought in; and the whole band was soon suffering with hunger. Many of the hunters, and I among others, for want of food became extremely weak, and unable to hunt far from home." What an approach is this to the case of the lower animals; and how forcibly it reminds us of the passage in Job (c. iv., v. 11), "The fierce lion perisheth for lack of prey."[9] In another place he says, "I began to be dissatisfied at remaining with large bands of Indians, as was usual for them, after having remained a short time in a place, to suffer from hunger." These sufferings were not, in many cases, of short duration, or of trifling intensity. Tanner describes one instance of famine in the following words:—"The Indians gathered around, one after another, until we became a considerable band, and then we began to suffer from hunger. The weather was very severe, and our suffering increased. A young woman was the first to die of hunger. Soon after this, a young man, her brother, was taken with that kind of delirium or madness which precedes death in such as die of starvation. In this condition he had left the lodge of his debilitated and desponding parents; and when, at a late hour in the evening, I returned from my hunt, they could not tell what had become of him. I left the camp about the middle of the night, and, following his track, I found him at some distance, lying dead in the snow."
This worst species of suffering equally existed at particular periods, whether food was sought for by large or by small parties, by bands or by individuals. Tanner was travelling with the family of the woman who had adopted him. He says, "We had now a short season of plenty; but soon became hungry again. It often happened that for two or three days we had nothing to eat; then a rabbit or two, or a bird, would afford us a prospect of protracting the sufferings of hunger a few days longer." Again he says, "Having subsisted for some time almost entirely on the inner bark of trees, and particularly of a climbing vine found there, our strength was much reduced."
The misery which is thus so strikingly described proceeded from the circumstance that the labour of the Indians did not take a profitable direction; and that this waste of labour (for unprofitable applications of labour are the greatest of all wastes) arose from the one fact, that in certain particulars these Indians laboured without appropriation. They depended upon the chance productions of nature, without compelling her to produce; and they did not compel her to produce, because there was no appropriation of the soil, the most efficient natural instrument of production. If the Indians had directed the productive powers of the earth to the growth of corn, instead of to the growth of foxes' skins, they would have become rich. But they could not have reached this point without appropriation of the soil. They had learnt the necessity of appropriating the products of the soil, when they had bestowed labour upon obtaining them; but the last step towards productiveness was not taken. The Indians therefore were poor; the European settlers who had taken this last step were rich.
The imperfect appropriation which existed amongst the Indians, preventing, as it did, the accumulation of capital, prevented the application of that skill and knowledge which is preserved and accumulated by the Division of employment. Tanner describes a poor fellow who was wounded in the arm by the accidental discharge of a gun. As there was little surgical skill amongst the community, because no one could devote himself to the business of surgery, the Indian, as the only chance of saving his life, resolved to cut off his own arm; "and taking two knives, the edge of one of which he had hacked into a sort of saw, he with his right hand and arm cut off his left, and threw it from him as far as he could." The labour which an individual must go through when the state of society is so rude that there is scarcely any division of employment, and consequently scarcely any exchanges, is exhibited in many passages of Tanner's narrative. We select one. "I had no pukkavi, or mats for a lodge, and therefore had to build one of poles and long grass. I dressed more skins, made my own mocassins and leggings, and those for my children; cut wood and cooked for myself and family, made my snow-shoes, &c. &c. All the attention and labour I had to bestow about home sometimes kept me from hunting, and I was occasionally distressed for want of provisions. I busied myself about my lodge in the night-time. When it was