virgin valleys and the hill slopes, protecting and shadowing the pioneer in his prairie dugout, the freighter on his lonely path to the outposts, and the miner in his far cabin on the mountain side, the herder in the solitudes of the unmeasured plains, the citizen wheresoever his remote home or rude abode--that same law and order and civilization which has made possible the cities which have sprung up like magic creations from the soil. They tell how that vast expanse of territory, from the Missouri to the coast, has been formed into new states and become the homes of millions of American citizens. Our more recent books and publications give us the biographies of men whose boyhood days were over before the building of the first railroad and before electricity came into use--that mysterious thing that links the natural with the supernatural as it carries messages along telegraph wires or on lines of cable under the ocean, or the human voice through the telephone, or delivers its wireless messages as winged spirits unseen and unheard, a realization in our time of something more wonderful than the mythical legend of the daughters of Odin carrying through boundless space the souls of military heroes to the far off Walhalla. Why preserve the biographies and records of the days of these pioneers? Why concern ourselves with their hardships, their adventures, their impulses, their motives? Why dwell upon the influences, multitudinous and varied, which took them out into the wilderness and solitudes? I answer again, because they made history in the west as our forefathers made it in the east. Without them our cities would not be here, our railroads would not be here, our commerce would not be here, our prosperity would not be here, our state would not be here, and we ourselves would not be here. Ah, more! Out of the expanse of wild nature they extended the borders of the republic. There are some good citizens who are indifferent to |
the antiquities of the red man, who have no concern with anything relating to his past existence. They may ask the question why is it worth while to preserve the thirty thousand specimens of Indian relics, implements, utensils and apparel which the society has in its possession? I answer, they have a special value as they give us a lesson of human life. Nothing in the world's history, in so far as we know it, possesses so much interest as the beginning and the end of the existence of a race of people. We know little of when the life of the red man began, but we are the witnesses of his rapid disappearance. We little remember that these lands where the husbandmen plow the fields and gather the harvests, were once the homes and hunting grounds of another and almost extinct race of people. It is a transition from a red man's village of tepees to a white man's city of brick and stone and steel buildings. Yet we take no account of the change. We have forgotten the red man, and many who do remember him measured him by our own self arrogant standard of ideals, and so regarded him as a useless encumbrance upon the lands he possessed, with no recognized right to live upon them when his occupancy stood in the way of the white man's invasion. When we listen to the Indian's side of the story we have presented to us another viewpoint of his rights. Standing Bear, a Ponka chieftain, who had been wrongfully and forcefully removed with his people to the Indian Territory and who afterward returned to his old home on his northern reservation, and was about to be again removed by the government's agents, spoke some caustic and severe truths, when he said to them, "You can read and write and I can't, you can think that you know everything and that I know nothing. If some man should take you a thousand miles from home, as you did me, and leave you in a strange country without one cent of money, where you did not |
know the language and could not speak a word, you would never have got home in the world. You don't know enough. This is my land. The Great Father did not give it to me. My people were here and owned this land before there was any Great Father. God gave it to me". As white men we measure our success and all that we do and all that we accomplish by the environments with which we are surrounded. By our commerce we trade with all the world, and we gather the articles that supply our necessities and luxuries from all the producing countries of the earth. Take us as we are, and we could not live without them. With the Indian it was not so. He lived in the land where God created him. He had no commerce. He had no mills or factories. He had the capacity to create for himself out of the products of nature what he needed to supply his wants. The Great Spirit seemed infinite and dwelt with him, and communed with him from the majestic mountains and spoke to him from the bright and beautiful stars. If the Indian were here to-day, he might walk into the museum of our historical society and point to a rope made of the hairs of a buffalo and truthfully say that it was woven by the fingers of Indian women at a time when there was no other method of manufacture known to his race. That rope of buffalo hair hanging in the cabinet is a specimen of native ingenuity which contrasts the life of a red man, in the days when we regarded the prairies as an uninhabitable wilderness, with our days of civilized world affiliation. When the Indian looks at that rope he may say to the white man with some degree of plausibility: "What do you really know of life as it really is? You were not born under the open heavens; you have not slept on the hard, cold ground, exposed to inclement weather and nearly perishing of hunger and thirst. Could you feed and clothe yourself |
from the naked earth without the assistance of others? We have carried wood and water, cooked and fed and clothed ourselves from the materials gathered by our own hands. Where our tent was set at night or where the foot rested, that was home to us. We roamed at times, and then longed to lie down in the embrace of mother earth and breathe the smoke of the camp fire. But the wanderlust would come--a feeling of unrest--like that of the birds when the spell of spring or autumn comes upon them, and the migratory instinct seizes them, or like that of the great herds of reindeer in the north which travel each year to the sea to drink of its salty waters, and which, if prevented, die. The aborigines were a people who never willingly submitted to the rule of the white man, but tenaciously held to the ancient beliefs and customs of their forefathers. They were a proud spirited people whose chiefs had the personal dignity of born rulers and the fearless qualities of military commanders. We white men take just and honorable pride in our arts, and in our education, in our philosophies and in our scientific attainments, but the native Indian sage may ask how long these will continue to civilize us. He might call our attention to the writings of a sentimental American who has expressed the belief that unless the trend of modern materialistic tendencies becomes supplanted by something higher, the same fate that overtook the ancients must inevitably overtake us. We of to-day are apt to say: "Behold the works and glories of the white man!" But the Indian may say: "I see in your ancient past lands that are desolate and the ruins of your greatness. The same mountains that stood guard over those valleys and shadowed you in those prosperous ages now look down upon broken monoliths and remains of decaying temples. The mountains stand as permanently now as then, but overlook a desolation not much dissimilar 17 |
to the solitude of a deserted Indian habitation on our western plains". The Egyptians, once so highly civilized that they were the supreme rulers of the world, have gone, their buildings and temples have gone, and left us but a few crumbling ruins. They have left us no poetry, no works of literature, no paintings, no sculpture in marble or figures of bronze. The Carthaginians, once the rulers of Africa, with their cities and ships and commerce and conquering armies under a Hannibal, are no more; and their lands have been despoiled by the invader, like unto the Indian lands. The Indian, when told of all that we may boast of among the past glories of our race, may answer in words of comment: "The sun shines alike on the just and the unjust, the white man and the red man, and the great world still continues to laugh and goes on its way in spite of men's philosophy". He might add, too, that his philosophy has taught him that one might as well expect the mountains to slip into the sea or the stars to stop in their courses as a man in love with his own ideal of a vision of beauty to listen to ethics. Why does the grass grow? Why do the birds sing? Why do the flowers turn to the sun? Answer these to the Indian and he will tell you why he loves his ancient and proud spirited independence. The white man may say to the Indian, "You make war", but he answers, "So do you. Our bad men may steal and murder, but so do yours. We love a personal liberty as well as you. We may have been guilty of indescribable tortures, but we refrain from referring to the pages of history that are filled with descriptions of yours." The Indian might plead the excuse that he had no means of enforcing obedience to law but force, but that white men had officers to maintain the peace and courts to administer the law. Then, too, if the Indian were a visitor to our |
museum he might point his finger to the slave shackles, which hang in a cabinet close to the thousands of specimens of Indian relies, and explain: "The red man never held an abject race of people in slavery as did the Americans for near a century of their boasted freedom". Standing today on the threshold, half way between savagery and civilization, and comparing the cruelties and the barbarisms of the one with the luxuries and vices of the other, the Indian may ask himself the question, "Which is preferable--civilization with its virtues as he sees it, or the simple life of his tribe?" The one may tell the time of the day by the sun and the stars, the other by his watch. The one listens to his music--the opera, the drama--and looks upon works of created art and reads his books, but the other answers, "But what harmony compares to nature? What books contain her hidden truths and mysteries?" The mechanical devices of the one are wonderful, but spiritually both stand where they began centuries ago. So the Indian chieftain said: "The great symphony of nature, the throbs of our mother earth, the song of the forest, the voices of the wind and the waters, the mountains and the plains, and the glory of the stars are grander by far and more satisfactory and enduring to him than the fancies and artificial harmonies created in the name of civilization". We should not judge the Indian too harshly. He had his standards, his ideals, and his philosophy. He cannot fairly be measured by our standards of life. His age was not our age. His civilization was not our civilization. His memory remains a story of human life. The collections, in the Nebraska State Historical Society, of books and pamphlets and manuscripts and relics are the only preservations we have of a historic past that can never come again. The original proud, romantic, vigorous and warlike Indians of the plains have disappeared forever. Their insignificant remnants are fast fading away |
or disappearing in our civilization. Their hunting grounds have become our tilled farm lands; their battle fields remain unmarked; their chieftain warriors have died and been buried without monuments; their languages have not been transmitted to a succeeding race. Aside from what has been collected and is being preserved in museums and our historical societies, the history of the aboriginal inhabitants of the soil has passed into legends and traditions without a Homer to write them in poetry or a Wagner to put them into music. The white race has a characteristic which distinguishes it from all other races of people, that of migration and invasion. It began its course in the earliest times in the lands of the east. It kept moving westward, leaving in its wake the ruins of its greatness. When it had peopled Europe it moved westward until it discovered and invaded and peopled America. Our western pioneers were the advance guard of that movement which kept going onward in its westward course until it reached the waters of the Pacific. The white men in their march met the aboriginal red men and overwhelmed them. They found the arid lands of the prairies and conquered them with fertility. They have built towns and cities in places that were once a solitude. What was once a wilderness has become the homes of millions of men. But there are no more lands to invade; there are no more Indian tribes to conquer; there are no more opportunities for the pioneer. Beyond the Pacific waters are different races of people. The mighty Japan with her brown men, the populous China with her millions of yellow men stand as a bulwark against the white men's invasion. Our progress westward has become bounded by the waters of the ocean. These reflections cannot help but impress upon us the importance of collecting and preserving all that can be |
obtained relating to the history of a past which can never be repeated. The value of all the society now possesses will be enhanced many fold as the years more widely separate that past from the future. The white men are confronted with a conjectural problem of the future. We read in history's pages of the glories of ancient Greece, but we see her only in ruins. We read of the grandeur of Rome, but we see her in decay. If we would go back to more antecedent days we find evidences of civilization only by excavations of the remains of buried cities. Here on this continent we have seen another race, that has been the proud possessor of these lands for centuries, disappear. The red men were not able to maintain the supremacy of their race nor the lands of their birthright. When we look back over our past faded glory and departed grandeur we may well ask ourselves, "Will the white man be able to preserve his present high standard of civilization and progress and prosperity?" If he is to do so, he should preserve the history of the extinct race that dwelt on the American soil, just as he should preserve the history of his own past; for out of these he may gather the lessons of wisdom that will give him the essential promptings for his own preservation. This, in part, is the mission of the Nebraska State Historical Society. The Indian collections of the historical society will continue to become more valuable as antiquities. They will become more priceless than the mummies of Pharaohs, or the hieroglyphics from the Nile. They will become more interesting than the groves and temples of the Druids, the wonderworkers of the ancient Celts. This collection is all we have left to tell the story of the life of a human race that has been swept away by an all powerful and conquering white man. To them the heavens have been rolled away as a scroll. To them the moon and stars have gone back into utter darkness. |
Putting all other considerations aside, the people of Nebraska, in this the age of their strong manhood and unrestrained prosperity, can do a no more commendable or worthy thing than to appropriate a part of their revenues for the preservation and housing of these valuable collections of the historical society. |
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