CHAPTER III.

THE RED MEN.

When America was first discovered by the whites, all the country along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida was peopled by a dark-skinned people different from any known to Europeans. They were tall, with black or hazel eyes, and straight, black hair. Some of them were mild and friendly toward the whites, but others were very warlike and hated the white men for coming to live in their own woodland homes. They never lived very long in one place, but roamed about here and there, living by hunting, fishing, and sometimes planting corn, beans, pumpkins, etc. Their houses, or wigwams, as they called them, were made of bark, or skins, or matting, stretched on poles driven in the ground, and an Indian village was simply a great many tents in one spot, in the largest of which the chief always lived. These little villages were nothing like those which you would see now, scattered up and down the Atlantic coast, where all kinds of people live together; but each village was the home of one particular family or tribe of Indians, and it was very much as if you and all your brothers and sisters, your uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, grandmothers, grandfathers, great-grandmothers, great-grandfathers, and everybody else who was the least bit in the world relation to you, lived altogether in one little town by yourselves. Each tribe took some animal for its symbol, or _totem_, as they called it, such as the turtle, bear, or wolf, and they believed that the spirit of the animal chosen watched over them and protected them. Like the ancient Egyptians, they believed that the soul of man passed at his death into the body of some other man or of some animal, and they drew signs from the flight of the birds and the shapes of the clouds. They worshipped the sun, which they said was the symbol of the Great Spirit, and they believed that the moon could weave charms. They believed also that the wind and the stars, the streams and the lakes, the great trees and the beautiful flowers, all had spirits. And little Indian boys and girls never went to school as you do, to learn about history and geography, but their school was out in the shady woods at their mother's feet, where they sat and listened to the beautiful stories of Hiawatha, the son of the West Wind, who had been sent among them to clear their rivers, forests, and fishing-grounds, and to teach them the arts of peace; of his wife, Minnehaha, Laughing Water, who sat by the doorway of her wigwam, plaiting mats of flags and rushes when Hiawatha came to woo her; of Minnehaha's father, the old arrow-maker, who made arrow-heads of jasper and chalcedony, and of the brave, beautiful, and gentle Chibiabos, the best of all musicians, who sang so sweetly that all the warriors and women and children crept at his feet to listen, and who made from hollow reeds flutes so mellow and musical that at the sound the brook ceased to murmur in the woodland, the birds stopped singing, the squirrel ceased chattering, and the rabbit sat up to listen. And the bluebird and robin and whippoorwill begged Chibiabos that he would teach them to sing as sweetly, but he could not, for he sang of the things they could not understand, of peace and love and freedom and undying life in the Islands of the Blessed.