Eskimo and the Iron Age

Taking the Americans stock by stock, the Eskimo or Innuit have known iron nine hundred years, and since the days of John Cabot (1497) have been growing more and more dependent on it. It is difficult to find a bit of Eskimo work in which there is no trace of iron obtained from wrecks or in trade. Of the artistic carvings and patterns the best are without exception from areas where there has been most intimate association with Ironage peoples. The shaping and decorating have been done with good steel tools, with constant borrowing from Old-world designs. The women quickly adopted the iron-blade fish-knife, awl and cutting knife, the iron needle and thimble. "Dr Rae said, on the authority of Professor Flower, that the form of head in the western Eskimo differs extremely from that to the east, the former being brachycephalic, the latter the very reverse. He had carefully studied Dr Simpson's description of the natives about Bering strait and could in no way reconcile it with his own observations of the Eskimo eastward of the Coppermine river." No less the industrial products of the east differ from those of the west. The east Greenlanders resemble eastern world hyperboreans in some of their arts more than they do Alaskan Eskimo.

Nansen calls attention to the Scandinavian settlement of Greenland from Erik Röde to the middle and close of the fourteenth century, when the Eskimo destroyed the Western settlement in 1341 and the Eastern in 1379. He thinks that this destruction was not due entirely to a war of extermination, but to a gradual absorption of the settlers into the Eskimo population. The profound modification of the dress and life of the Greenland Eskimo is in favor of this view. The arts are singularly reminiscent of Old-world specimens.

So far as my observations in the National Museum go, the Eskimo in prehistoric times made their harpoons, dart-barbs, and arrowpoints of bone and antler, but not of walrus ivory. There is not an ancient harpoon-head in the National Museum made of that material. The Eskimo did not aboriginally etch

1 Journal Anthrop. Institute, London, 1889, xIx, p. 458.

2 Across Greenland, London, 1890, II, p. 267. Also Tylor: Journal Anthrop. Institute, London, XIII, p. 349.

on bone and antler. All sorts of decorative carving are absent from their apparatus, though attempts have been made to trace their lineage to the cave-dwellers of France on that ground.

The Iron Age and the Indians

The Athapascan doubtless heard of the white man before he saw him, and saw him first not in his majesty, in the person of the commander, but in the person of the unprejudiced trapper and voyageur. He saw the French and then the English on the south and by and by the Russian and the Cossack on the west. The toboggan, the gun, the curved knife, beads and steel needles, and other appliances of daily life came in trade and tended greatly "ad effeminandos animos." The birchbark canoe and the snowshoe, being better than anything the whites had to offer, held their own and were universally adopted, but they were enormously bettered by the curved steel knife and the ax.

The Algonquian stock, commencing with John Cabot, were taught in the industrial arts by French, Dutch, Swedes and English Puritans, Quakers, and loyalists, who contributed to their outfits iron arrowheads, knives, saws, files, drills, fish-hooks, and guns, and having cajoled them out of the knack of their native arts put them into close intimacy with the blacksmith, gunsmith, and the wood-worker. The steel ax came early to the aboriginal hand and suggested to it many kinds of work. The iron fist of war struck the defenseless body of the Algonquian severe blows; but he was taught to strike back and furnished with guns, tomahawks, and scalping knives. In this connection it is instructive to look over old bills of items furnished to these Indians, lists of articles demanded by them in trade, and the kind of skilled workmen sent to them to instruct them. '

1

Alongside of these bills it is also instructive to place the requisitions made upon the Indian Office for treaty supplies in the United States and Canada to see in what directions and how far the Indian has traveled into the white man's country.

French Canadian traders were the first to penetrate the northern interior west of Hudson bay. Their most distant station was on Saskatchewan river, two thousand miles from civilization. These coureurs des bois were admirably adapted to

1 Documentary History of New York, vol. x.

.

conciliate the Indians and form settlements among them." The Hudson Bay Company was organized in 1670, and completed the reign of the 'sultan gun' in Canada. The curved or farrier's knife and the big flat file were members of the cabinet. Gookin says of the Massachusetts tribes: "They delight much in using knives, combs, scissors, hatchets, hoes, guns, needles, awls, looking-glasses, etc. They disuse their former weapons and instead thereof have guns, pistols, swords, rapier blades fastened unto a staff of the length of a half-pike, hatchets, and axes." The "rapier blade fastened unto a staff" is peculiarly interesting, as it became the ubiquitous accompaniment of all horse-riding, buffalo-stabbing Indians of the plains.

The goods sold to the Algonquian tribes of Pennsylvania were cloth, linen, ready-made shirts, blankets, cottons, callimancos, thread, worsted, powder and shot, rifle-barreled guns, wampum, knives, colors, wire, brass kettles, silver and other buttons, buckles, bracelets, thimbles, needles, tinder-boxes, hatchets and other tools, nails, combs, and looking-glasses. The Indians wore their knives, hatchets, etc, on their necks at first (1609), but soon learned better. No one, it is true, thinks of collecting such things for their own sake, but should we exorcise our museums of them, then the establishments would have to be closed.

In their southern border the Algonquian encountered negro slaves nearly two hundred years ago. What little remains to us of him is now mixed with negro blood, has lost nearly all of the aboriginal life and thought, and is in the daily practice of Iron-age industries. In 1607 the party of Captain Newport presented to King Arahatec and to Powhatan "gyftes of dyvers sortes, as penny knyves, sheeres, belles, beades, glasse toyes," all of them made of or with iron. Doubtless the Indians seized with their eyes a great many happy suggestions that lay in their imaginations for future use. John Smith says of the time when Wingfield was deposed and Ratcliffe elected in his stead (1607), "As we had no houses to couer us our Tents were rotten and our Cabbins worse than nought; our best commoditie was Yron which we made into little chisels." Again, whatever Captain

1 Cf. Bancroft, Native Races, etc., New York, 1, pp. 26-34, for résumé of first contacts.

2 Massachusetts Hist. Coll., 1st series, 1, 152.

3 Loskiel, Miss. of United Brethren, pp. 98-101; 123; also Heckewelder.

4 John Smith's Works, Arber's reprint, London, 1884, p. 9.

Smith means, he says that in 1608 word was sent to Powhatan that he, Smith, had no idea of gunning for turkeys in Powhatan's country and scaring his wives and children, "but only to goe to Powhatan to seeke stones to make hatchets.' Again, in Smith we read:

"So the President finding his intention thus frustrated

held

on his course for Iames Towne; we having in this Iornie (for 25 lbs. of copper and 50 lbs. of Iron and beads) kept 40 men 6. weeks . . and daily feasted with bread, corne, flesh, fish and fowle. Every man having for his reward . . . a month's provisions; at Iames Towne to the Cape Marchant 279 bushels of corne." 2

. . and we delivered

"Within this river" (Patawomeck), says Strachey, "Captain Samuell Argoll, in a small river, which the Indians call Oeniho, anno 1610, trading for corn, obtained near four hundred bushells of wheat [maize], pease and beans, besides many kinds of furs, for nine pounds of copper, four bunches of leads, 8 dozen hatchets, 5 doz. knives, 4 bunches of bells, 1 dozen scissors, all worth not more than 408. English." Spades, shovels, and hoes of iron, pins and needles, are elsewhere mentioned in this relation.

Of the Virginia Indians Strachey also remarks (1612): "They are generally covetous of our comodityes, as copper, white beades for their women, hatchetts, of which we make them poore ones, of iron howes, to pare their corne ground, knives and such like." 4

Again he declares that they gave up the hatchets made by thrusting a stone sharpened at both ends through a handle of wood and by trucking with us have thousands of our iron hatchets, such as they be."5

6.

The Iroquoian first saw the white invaders in 1504 and entered into relations with Jacques Cartier in 1534. Before that he was hunter, fisherman, and planter, and his masters found him extremely plastic. He threw away his rather rude bow and arrow for the gun, the tomahawk, and the butcher's knife, and he continued his former life successfully with the new appliances. Among a collection of Iroquoian objects are bullet-molds, flint

1 John Smith's Works, Arber's reprint, London, 1884, p. 37.

2 Ibid., p. 146.

3 Cf. Hist. of Travaile into Virginia Britannia. London, 1849, Hakluyt, vol. 6, p. 38.

4 The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, etc. London, 1849, Hakluyt Soc.,

vol. 6, p. 69.

5 Ibid., p. 106.

locks, scalping knives, Venetian beads, and apparatus for applying them, machine-made wampum, and not a stone implement save his pipe worked down with a steel file. The northern Iroquoian had three sets of teachers: (1) the French, not prejudiced against intermarriage; (2) the English, eager for the fur trade, and (3) the Dutch, who came to possess his land. They all brought him iron in trade, already manufactured, but never taught him to smelt or to forge it. He worked it cold, either upon grindstones, whose use he well knew as a stone-worker, or with the most obliging and useful file. The smith who went to live with him was a gunsmith. The northern Iroquoian was little if at all accultured by the negro. The southern Iroquoian, or Cherokee, learned the serviceableness of iron from Spaniards and from English. They also absorbed into themselves negro blood and traditions. Fortunately for them, in the early days. of the Republic they were taught peaceful pursuits and prepared for the forcible removal of their nation largely to their present home. They learned to master iron as well as to be mastered by it and to master with it, and are now absolutely in the Iron Age, living under a constitution framed after ours, and their daily anxiety is concerning the iron horse speeding across their land.

The natives of the Southern States of the Union are now the civilized tribes of Indian Territory, the Seminoles of Florida, some reservations of those who were not removed, and smaller tribes and stocks that disappeared. It is sufficient to say that even the Seminole now dresses like a Highlander and has abandoned his native arts. Among the civilized tribes it is difficult to trace the lineaments of the former life, and in the Carolina mountains the industrial life is thoroughly mongrelized.

On the plains of the Great West the buffalo commenced his course of extinction' when the white man gave to the Indian the iron arrowhead, the steel-blade lance, the pony and the rifle. No one will pretend that the Crow warrior, mounted on his pony, having on his head a war-bonnet with trailer reaching to the ground, on his body a coat and breeches and moccasins covered over almost solid with beads, his horse caparisoned with headstall, collar, and crupper of gorgeously beaded and fringed buckskin, is an aboriginal picture. There is much to be eliminated.