from which they emerged only after the lapse of fully for some time, though the struggle with centuries, and in consequence of a new importa- his habit was fearful, till one evening in a social tion of civilized ideas. The great plain of Meso-party, glasses of wine were handed around. potamia, once the seat of the mighty Assyrian They came to a clergyman present, who took a empire, is now almost desolate; the nomade glass, saying a few words in vindication of the Arab, and the wild ass of the desert, sharing be- practice. Well,' thought the young man, ‘if tween them the vast and lonely wastes. The old clergymen can take wine and justify it so well, Egyptian civilization has perished so utterly, why may not I?' So he took a glass. It inthat the miserable Copt, the lineal descendant of stantly rekindled his firey and slumbering apthat ancient dweller of the Nile, is ignorant of petite; and after a rapid downward course he its first rudiments. All the facts of history cor- died of delirium tremens-a raving madman!" roborate the affirmations of Holy Writ, that the The old man paused for utterance and was just earliest inhabitants of the globe enjoyed a com- able to add-" that young man was my only son, paratively high civilization, and that savage na- and the clergyman was the reverend doctor who tions are the wrecks of once civilized peoples, has just addressed the assembly."-Southern and the fallen and degraded remnants of better Churchman. and nobler types. Of the character of the primordial inhabitants of these United States, the antochtones, as sci- THE NEGROES OF HAMILTON AND CHATHAM, entific writers call such aborigines, it is impossi CANADA WEST. ble to speak certainly. The various theories At Hamilton, in a population of 24,000, which have been projected, some assigning them there are from 400 to 600 colored people, among a place among the Mongol tribes, some describing them blacksmiths, carpenters, plasterers, and them as the lost children of Israel, are all alike unsupported by sufficient proof. We know too little respecting the ancient populations of these regions, either to affirm or deny what they were. From the paucity of their remains on the Atlantic coast, as compared with those found in the valley of the Mississippi, it would seem probable, however, that their chief seat of empire was iu the west, and that they entered America, if they immigrated at all, from the direction of Asia. Time, which will bring to light more of their utensils, will enable investigators to approximate finally, perhaps, to the truth; but at present it is a waste of words to speculate as to their race, religion, political institutions, or language. One fact alone is indisputable, which is, that a race, greatly superior in the arts of life as well as in knowledge of war to the Indians, an agricultural, or at least a pastoral, and not a hunter race, once inhabited these United States. But how long ago this was, no man can tell. Nor whether this primordial race was extirpated by the red man, or declined into him through long centuries of degradation.-Ledger. THRILLING INCIDENT. At a temperance meeting in Philadelphia some years ago, a learned clergyman spoke in favor of wine as a drink, demonstrating it quite to his own satisfaction to be scriptural, gentlemanly, and healthful. When the clergyman sat down, a plain, elderly man arose, and asked the liberty of saying a few words. Permission being granted, he spoke as follows:-"A young friend of mine," said he, "who had long been intemperate, was prevailed on, to the joy of his friends, to take the pledge of entire abstinence from all that could intoxicate. He kept his pledge faith one wheelwright. There are two churches, small frame buildings, a Baptist and a Methodist, but they are not well supported, and neither of them at present has a regular resident clergyman. Many of the colored men are reputed to possess property, but I do not give the estimates, as I am not entirely confident of the correctness of my information. One hackman, a mulatto, who still drives his own hack, is worth, at the lowest valuation, from $12,000 to $15,000. He, emigrated to Hamilton seventeen years ago, acted as porter in a store for twelve years, and then bought a hack; he has now two carriagesand four horses. The town, needing the lot on which his house stands for a market, has lately paid him $8000 for it, and he is putting up a larger and better house on another lot which he owns. His parlor was covered with a brightcolored Brussels carpet; hair-seated mahogany chairs were protected by handsome crotchetworked anti-macassars, and there was a sofa, marble-covered centre table, and a piano in the room. He took three newspapers, one weekly and two dailies. This man told us that every once in a while colored men, dressed in the height of the fashion and tricked out with rings and chains, would call upon him, and announce themselves as deputations from Baltimore or Philadelphia, or some other city in the States, sent to inquire into the condition of their brethren in Canada. "They make me mad,' continued he, "to look at them, and I have often said to them, Why do you stay there? You will never be anything but Tom, or Dick, or Jim, or good boys, or clever niggers. Take off these fine clothes and gimcracks, come here and be men!" Of London, which, in a population of 12,000 or 13,000, contains from 500 to 600 colored FRIENDS' INTELLIGENCER. people, we have little to say. The condition of Inside things were more inviting; the rooms, the blacks there resembles that of their fellows were clean, neat and comfortable, and the beds, in Hamilton and Toronto. Pauperism and beg-except that they were stuffed with feathers, gary are almost unknown among them, work is irreproachable. We found the landlord, a huge, abundant, and labor is fairly rewarded. The jolly Englishman, at the head of his own tea heads of the police department thought that table, carving a round of boiled beef big enough petty crime, particularly larceny, was more fre- to have fed the Common Council of a city; and, quent among the blacks than among the inhabi- for the first time since we had been in Canada, tants at large, though in both places they in a place swarming with negroes, the waiters at thought it was less so than among the lower table were white, and females. The town conIrish. In London this, however, was merely an sists of one long street, King street, closely opinion, as in the statistical statements of the built, in which the stores are all situated, while police department the offences committed by the the dwellings, mostly surrounded by gardens, blacks were not separately recorded. At London are scattered over streets crossing and running a neat and well furnished drug store is kept by parallel to it. a black man, who twenty-three years ago escaped from slavery in Kentucky. At that time he could write a little, sufficient, as he laughingly said, to put his name to a pass. For a long time he had dealt only in herbs and simples, but foreign drugs were gradually added, and we found him hard at work at a little Latin manual, mastering the barbarous Latin in which physicians couch their prescriptions. The condition of the colored people in regard to the violation of the law, as shown by the records of the police department, is not so favorable in Hamilton as in Toronto. According to Mr. John Caruthers, Chief Constable of Hamilton, there were 1922 arrested or summoned to appear at Court in that place during the year 1856, and of these 81 were colored people. If we put down the population of Hamilton in round numbers at 24,000, the proportion of arrests would be 1 to 124; and, estimating the colored population at 550, the arrests among them would be a fraction over 1 in 7. It must be recollected in this connection that, from the fact of their being almost exclusively emigrants, the proportion of adults among the colored people is greater than in the population at large, and some deduction from their proportional criminality must obviously be made on this account. Despite its unpromising appearance, Chatham seems an active and stirring place. In the town there are three sawmills, two shingle mills, two potash factories, two sash and blind factories, four flour mills, four brickyards, several iron foundries, three or four wagon factories, three cabinet warehouses, three breweries and two distilleries. It is a port of entry, and exports a large amount of lumber, staves, shingles, bricks, drain tiles and flour. A large steamboat was, when we were there, being loaded for Buffalo, and two smaller steamers and a brig were lying Before the present depression in in the stream. business, which prevails equally in Canada as in the United States, seven steamboats and a dozen sailing vessels have been seen in port at one time, completely filling up the river. Of this busy town about one third of the population are colored people, and they appear to contribute their full quota towards its indusare one gunsmith, four Among them try. cabinetmakers working on their own account and employing others, six master carpenters, a number of plasterers, three printers, two watchmakers, two ship carpenters, two millers, four blacksmiths, one upholsterer, one saddler, six master shoemakers, six grocers and a cigarmaker. Unskilled workmen find abundant employment Chatham, Canada West, the headquarters of in the various mills, in agricultural labor, and in the colored people, is a straggling town, con- cutting, sawing and splitting the wood which is taining about 6000 inhabitants, situated at the used for fuel. Common laborers obtain from a head of navigation upon the River Thames. dollar to twelve shillings a day. The houses Unlike Toronto and Hamilton, and even London, inhabited by the better class of colored people it possesses no fine buildings, and there is little are two story frame buildings, painted white, for outward appearance of wealth. For the first the most part surrounded by well-kept gardens, time in my travels the women were without and quite equal in appearance to those belonging hoops, and some strapping lassies I met, covered to the same class of white residents. In one with huge flat Bloomer hats, their naturally which we entered the furniture was handsome broad shoulders rendered broader by a cape, and a new piano occupied one corner of the their clinging skirts, innocent of starch, brass, parlor; the master of the house, a colored man, or whalebone, presented to one fresh from the (acting, by the way, as a land agent,) and city a sight sufficiently strange. Here at least represented to me as a man of rare intelligence, was an inversion of the common order of things! was absent. The poorer blacks live commonly The principal hotel at which we put up was a in small detached cabins, sometimes built of large wooden barrack of a building, the entrance unhewn logs, consisting ordinarily of one room. on a level with the unpaved street, and sharing The furniture was commonly one or two bednecessarily somewhat its color and appearance. I steads, with bedding, a chest or two, chairs, FRIENDS' INTELLIGENCER. tables and cooking utensils, sometimes a looking In In the market place, on the day I visited it, the greater number of wagons or carts with vegetables seemed to belong to negroes. One large wagon, drawn by two good horses and tended by an active, intelligent looking, jet black man, was particularly well supplied. Two of the wagons were each drawn by a mare, with a colt running by its side. One rickety old cart, drawn by a half-starved horse and containing a scanty stock of vegetables, put me in mind of old Tiff's turnout at the camp meeting. The means of education are not liberally provided. There is but one public school for the colored people, and that is crowded, and two private schools, one attended by about fifty and the other by fifteen pupils. The wife of the teacher of the larger of these schools, a New England woman, the teacher himself being absent, complained that the pupils frequently did not pay the small stipend demanded of them. Beggary, we were informed, did not exist among them, and I could learn of but two or three persons who were assisted from the town funds. In the shop of the gunsmith, who has been mentioned as one of the colored mechanics of the town, we saw a rifle which he had just finished, which seemed an exceedingly neat and handsome piece of workmanship, as it was, we have no doubt, a good and effective weapon. The engraving upon it-an art in which he had no instruction-was both well designed and well executed. The gunsmith was a dark-colored mulatto from North Carolina; he had been redeemed from slavery when twenty-one years of age by his father, a mulatto. He at that time knew something of the business which he afterward followed, and acquired some further knowledge of it at the North. Misunderstanding something that had been said, we observed with some surprise, "You surely know how to write ?" He answered with a smile that he had somewhere a diploma constituting him an A. B.! On coming North he had entered Oberlin College, and graduated from that institution; and in a late catalogue of the same College he showed us the name of a younger brother who had just completed a course of instruction there. He was one who, by his good sense, intelligence and information, would have been a marked man anywhere. J is not a singular instance in Chatham; indeed there is to be found there a much higher degree of education and culture than among the same class at Toronto. situated, many of the colored people are agriculIn Kent, the county in which Chatham is turists, residing upon and cultivating their own farms. Many of them are represented as doing exceedingly well. One farm, owned and occustill cultivated by his family, was generally pied by a colored man recently deceased, and allowed by those not disposed to favor the the model farm of the neighborhood. Some, blacks, as well as by their well wishers, to be without capital or skill, and probably, too, without sustained industry, do not succeed; but it is generally admitted that on the whole they make better farmers than the Irish, and far better than the French Canadians, a considerable number of whom reside in the immediate neighborhood of Chatham.-N. Y. Tribune. MY FATHER. 'Tis past! that solemn scene is passed! I watched thy failing, day by day, Ir seemed o'er thee in life's last hours, And left its impress, calm and deep, Though Age upon thy lofty brow, Had pressed his signet seal; Had laid his weight of years, And now thou'rt gone-a loneliness In Heaven is a brighter world, From pain and sorrow free; memory In other hearts may set, Our sweet autumnal western-scented wind THE SWEET BRIER. As that the sweet brier yields it; and the shower One half so lovely-yet it grows along The poor girl's pathway- by the poor man's door. Such are the simple folks it dwells among; And humble as the bud, so humble be the song ; I love it, for it takes its untouch'd stand Not in the vase that sculptors decorate. Its sweetness all is of my native land, And e'en its fragrant leaf has not its mate Among the perfumes which the rich and great Buy from the odors of the spicy east. You love your flowers and plants-and will you hate The little four-leaved rose that I love best, That freshest will awake and sweetest go to rest? SCRIPTURE SONNET. BY ANNE W. MAYLIN. "Correct me; but not with anger, lest thou bring me to no thing."-JER. 10: 24. We need not ask for suffering; when its test This fainting frame, or this o'erburdened heart; We may implore Him, He would grace impart And strength to suffer still as the belove Of his own bosom. For of all below, The one affliction in this world of woe Most sad-is an affliction unimproved. From the New York Tribune. THE INDIANS OF THE GREAT BASIN. Having lived for the last five years (with the exception of a few short intervals) with the Indians of the Utah Territory, and presuming that a brief account of those interesting tribes will be acceptable to your readers, I offer the following: I crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Spring of 1852, to explore the geographical and mineral character of the country, and was one of the first to discover gold in Carson Valley. Finding so little was known, either of the country or of its people, I devoted myself wholly to explorations. For this purpose, I followed the course of four different rivers, beside the Humboldt, which, like it, terminate in sinks, but which have not yet been marked upon any map of the country. A remarkable feature of this section is, that the smallest streams flow through the largest valleys, which are always most fertile and beautiful at their head among the mountains. These valleys abound in grass and indigenous fruits, particularly in gooseberries and currants, several kinds of which are the best I ever saw. Elk, deer and antelope, with various birds and fish, are abundant. Those who have travelled the usual road, along the Humboldt, have formed no adequate conception of the capacity of this country for civilized life-its fertility increasing as we diverge each side from the river. From my researches, I have every reason to know that the mineral riches of this country are great. I found coal and lead in various locali ties. There is also an abundance of iron and some gold and silver. The climate is pure and bracing, varying, like that of California, with the altitude of the mountains. But it was in the primitive and unperverted natives of these secluded valleys and mountains that I felt the deepest interest. From much travel, and a sojourn of years among the three tribes which occupy what Fremont denominates the Great Basin, I am satisfied that their numbers cannot be less than from sixty to seventy-five thousand. The Great Basin is divided between the Piotes, Shoshonees and Utahs, by well-defined lines, designated by curves in the rivers, projections of the bluffs, and prominent mountains. The Piotes occupy the country from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Sink of the Humboldt, including the whole length of the Carson River Valley. The Shoshonces (not Shawnees) occupy from the Sink to Goose-Creek Mountain. The Utahs from the mountains to the river, where the domains of the Crow Indians commence. There is a distinguishing difference between these tribes, the Piotes being somewhat superior to the California Diggers, but yet variable both in physiological and intellectual endowments. Some of them are particularly athletic. I saw one who was seven feet high and proportionably strong, while others are only on a par with the Diggers. They differ also from the other tribes in not using any paint upon their persons, although they adorn themselves with a variety of ornaments, consisting of shells and feathers. I lived with this tribe one year, no other white person being among them, and during the whole time met with nothing but uniform kindness and hospitality. The Utahs are generally a finelooking people, but as they are in closer contact with the Mormons, they are losing much of their primitive mauners. Omahaw inquired of me what the white men wanted to go to war with white men for. I learned from him that Brigham Young had tried to engage him and his people in a prospective war. The Mormons are wise in their policy toward these Indians, not allowing their people to destroy any of their game, but purchasing all they want, for which they pay in flour-thus establishing a trade of great value and mutual advantage. They also prepare skins, of which they manufacture leggings and boots, both for sale and their own wear. They are quite industrious, and with proper encouragement would readily adopt habits of a true civilization. Notwithstanding they are noted as being thieves, they are strictly honest among themselves, and conceive that they have a right to get what they can from those who get all that can be got from them. The Chief informed me that five years ago a Spaniard in the neighboring Mexican territory, proposed to give him twenty-five choice horses, on condition that he would not steal any more. The bargain was made, but afterwards repented of by the Chief, yet, his honor being at stake, no temptation could induce him to forfeit that. So the Spaniard lost no more horses. sown together in a substantial way. These are kept neat and clean, and in Winter robes of furs are worn. They do not tattoo themselves. They comb their hair behind their ears, showing phrenological developments equally progressive with I passed through their country about 350 any other race of men. They are very ingenious miles, on three different occasions, and spent one in the manufacture of such articles as they use ; entire Winter among them, and could not but and, considering that they have nothing but stone observe that, although they have derived advan-hammers and flint knives, it is truly wonderful tage from trade with the Mormons, yet there is to see the exquisite finish and neatness of their considerable deterioration in their manners in implements of war and hunting, as well as their consequence of licentiousness and multiplied dis-ear-rings and waist-bands, made of an amalgam eases. They were strictly chaste, and still allow of silver and lead. of but one wife. Adultery insures disgrace and loss of character, and but for its introduction by those who assume to be their superiors, they would still have been a virtuous people. As yet they have not been cursed with the introduction of whiskey, nor disturbed in their hunting grounds. They are very choice in their horses, and will never ride any but those in the best condition. The horse is the only domestic currency they possess. In the Spring of 1854, I carried to them several kinds of garden seeds, particularly beans, which they highly appreciated. One of the chiefs, accompanied by his daughter, paid a visit to a neighboring tribe, near the South Pass, where a French trader induced her to become his wife, without obtaining the required permission. Early this past Summer, one hundred warriors were dispatched a distance of three hundred miles to inflict the penalty. As they passed through the land of the Crow Indians some of these joined in the campaign. On find many arrows, and took a number of cattle as their spoil. The emigrants had taken great alarm (not knowing the cause) and, supposing themselves liable to similar attacks, have reported ac The Shoshonees (the name signifies light-offoot) occupy the center and principal part of the Great Basin, and I believe that 50,000 is not an over-estimate of their number. I have visited them several times, and passed a great portion of three years among them. Thousands of them had never seen a white man until my sojourn with them. They are the most pure and uncorrupted aborigines upon this continent. They are strong and well-proportioned-particularly ing the culprits they pierced them through with the warriors, who are selected for their manly bearing and stature. Yet they are not a warlike people. Having a fine country, with plenty of game, roots, fish and fruit, they have no incentive but for peace, and only practice war for self-cordingly. protection, and to maintain the supremacy of The desire to prevent war and aggression upon their laws. They are scrupulously clean in their these tribes has induced me to cross the Plains. persons and chaste in their habits. Illegitimacy I arrived in this city on Sunday, October 11, is unknown, and while attachments are commonly and seeing in one of the daily papers a notice of formed when young, they are not permitted to the American Indian Aid Society, now being ormarry until eighteen or twenty years old; and ganized by John Beeson and others, I immediso jealous is this nation of the purity of blood ately sought their acquaintance, and am truly that it is a capital offence to marry any of another glad to find that they are preparing to carry out nation without special sanction from their coun- the very plan which I conceive is the best adopted cil and head chief. They allow of but one wife, to secure the preservation of these people from and all the females, both old and young, are Border Ruffians and Mormon pollution. From treated with consideration and respect. And my knowledge of the Indian character, I believe such is their uniform observance of law that it they have never been properly appreciated, and grows with their growth; so that their youths that, if the plan proposed by Mr. Breeson, and from the age of fourteen or fifteen seem to require to a limited extent practised by William Penn, no parental restraint, for they become a law to had been adopted from the first settlement of the themselves. They inflict no penalties for minor country, many thousand lives and one hundred offenses, except loss of character and disfellow-millions of dollars might have been saved. If ship, and though whole families live together, of all ages and both sexes, in the same tent, immorality and crime are of rare occurrence. They have no prisons, no lawyers, nor poor houses; for whatever one person needs another imparts. Neither have they any prevalent sickness. I saw but one cripple among them. The men wear leggings made of deer-skins, and all of them, even the children, wear moccasins. The women often dress in skirts made of entrails, dressed and men and means are provided, as the Association October 16, 1857. Upbraid only ingratitude.-Penn. |