"American Indian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to designate his rank. The names of great warriors and wise men of the tribe are generally descriptive. The North American Indian adopted that course, and it was a very sensible thing to do. You have heard of Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face (that is, a pock-marked individual), Antelope, and others of like character, could be drawn, and thus convey the name without difficulty. Uraso and Muro mean ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... and the myths and stories of certain tribes of Indians in South America, as revealed by Mr. Herbert Smith's "Brazil, the Amazons, and the Coast." (New York: Scribner, 1879.) Mr. Harris, the author of a work on the folk-lore of the negroes, asks this question, "When did the negro or the North American Indian come in contact with the tribes of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... dream. Slowly, step by step, he advanced, avoiding the dense bushes, stepping lightly over the small ones, insinuating himself through holes and round stems, and conducting himself in a way that would have done credit to a North American Indian, until he gained a tree, close on the other side of which he knew the tawny object lay. With beating heart, but steady hand and frowning eye, he advanced another step and found—that the object ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... of observation in the American Indian would put many an educated white man to shame. Returning home, an Indian discovered that his venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen. After careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... is difficult to account for. The boats of some countries are so extremely unstable, and altogether without bearings, that the smallest weight on one side more than on the other upsets them. This applies to the canoes of the North American Indian, which require considerable practice, even in the smoothest water, to keep them upright; and yet the Indians cross immense lakes in them, although the surface of those vast sheets of fresh water is often as rough as that of any ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... see a herd of celestial reindeer. The Pleiades are to the Eskimos a team of dogs pursuing a solitary polar bear. Gemini they describe as two stones in the entrance of an igloo. The moon and the sun represent to the Eskimo, as to some of our North American Indian tribes, a fleeing maiden and her ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... number of dried human heads hanging from the ceiling. I shuddered as I looked at them at first; but I own that I soon got accustomed to them. They were the heads of the enemies of the tribe taken in war, and were prized as much as the North American Indian does the scalps of his foes. No objection was made to our visiting the apartments of the women. They were clothed in long loose garments, of native cloth, suspended from the waist, their shoulders being bare. They were small, but well shaped. Their hair, which ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... that despised race ran in her own veins, led her to conceive a plan for revenge which should embrace not only the party who was the grave object of her hate, but even every person of white blood in her father's household, not even excepting her father! No one, save a North American Indian, can hold and nourish a spirit of revenge like a Quadroon. It seems to be an innate trait of their nature, and ever ready to burst forth in a blaze ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... must exercise while gazing upon the toothsome infants that congregate at the circus! That they do gaze and smack their overhanging lips I know, because, after going through their cannibalistic dance, they sat behind me and howled in a subdued manner. The North American Indian who occupied an adjoining seat, favored me with a translation of their charming conversation, by which I learned many important facts concerning man as an article of diet. It appears that babies, after all, do not make the daintiest morsels. Tender they are, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... right straight to Washington to see the President of the United States, in order to hold conference with him on the subject of his people and their lands. There was a great preparation for the occasion of his ordination. A great ceremony was to be in St. Peter's Church, because a native American Indian, son of the chief of the Ottawa tribe of Indians, a prince of the forests of Michigan, was to be ordained a priest, which had never before happened since the discovery of the Aborigines in America. In ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... deliberate and incautious movements, it was manifest, had not learned that they were pursued. Perhaps they believed no white man could brave the blinding, seething storm then raging, for they neglected those precautions which seem to be second nature with the North American Indian. ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... water or any other non-alcoholic beverage. In the northern nations, where the experience of alcohol has been less prolonged, there is still a good deal of drunkenness, although not so much as formerly. But among nations to whom strong alcohol has only recently been made available—the American Indian, for instance, or the Eskimo—drunkenness is frequent wherever the protecting arm ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Alaskan, the Latin-American, the German, the Hopes of the Future (a white boy and a Negro, riding on a wagon), Enterprise, the Mother of Tomorrow, the Italian, the Anglo-American, the Squaw, the American Indian. The group is is conceived in the same large monumental style as the Nations of the East. The types of those colonizing nations that at one time or place or another have left their stamp on our country have been ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... Gypsy superstitions had I not observed that through it all the Gypsy was on the qui vive, looking for the traces of her path that Winifred had unconsciously left behind her. Had the Gypsy been following the trail with the silence of an American Indian, she could not have worked more carefully than she was now working while her tongue went rattling on. I afterwards found this to be a characteristic of her race, as I afterwards found that what is called the long sight of the Gypsies ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... some name, phrase, or anecdote, the slumbering train of association. He suffered, indeed, during the whole scene, the agonies which he so richly, deserved; yet his pride and interest, like the fortitude of a North American Indian, manned him to sustain the tortures inflicted at once by the contending stings of a guilty conscience, of hatred, of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... when returning from the front bring trophies of battle, such as German swords, bayonets, and buttons. The most prized possession of all is the German spiked helmet. Barring only the scalp of the American Indian, a more significant trophy could not be imagined. It is not only significant but gorgeously handsome. Moreover, it is everywhere on earth accepted as the symbol ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... use the designation as an anthropological descriptive is an inadmissible generalisation. Nevertheless, in the general conception the word has come to mean all the natives of Borneo except the Malays and the nomadic peoples, in the same way as American Indian stands for the multitude of tribes distributed over a continent. In this sense, for the sake of convenience, I shall myself use the word, but to apply it indiscriminately to anthropological matters is as unsatisfactory as if one should describe a certain tribe in the ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... have the example of the whites constantly before them. They are very ugly, having black skins, flat noses, wide nostrils, and deep-sunken eyes wide apart. A bark covering, much ruder than anything which would content an American Indian, forms their only shelter, and they often burrow contentedly under the lee of an overhanging ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... possibly the oldest and most general amongst men; that which casts a spell of sanctity around wells and springs, and stays the hand about to toss an impurity into a running stream; which impels the North American Indian to replace the gourd, and the Bedouin to spare the bucket for the next comer, though an enemy. In other words, the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... every country are consulted and suited. The brown cloak of the Spaniard, the poncho of the Chilean, the bright red or yellow robe of the Chinese, the green turban of the pilgrim from Mecca, the black blanket of the Caffre, and the red blanket of the American Indian may all be found in bales ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... characterize the instruction of the Ireus at Sparta. Compare with the training given among the best of the American Indian tribes (1). ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... practised by rude men, so that they can hold together in tribes, are of course important. No tribe could hold together if robbery, murder, treachery, etc., were common; in other words, there must be honor among thieves. "A North-American Indian is well pleased with himself, and is honored by others, when he scalps a man of another tribe; and a Dyak cuts off the head of an unoffending person, and dries it as a trophy. The murder of infants has prevailed on the largest scale throughout ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... a North American Indian tribe, once spread over the territory lying between Lake Winnipeg (N.) and the Arkansas River (S.), but now confined chiefly to South Dakota and Nebraska. Failure on the part of the United States Government to observe ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... native barbarism and carried among civilized nations, they soon forget what they learn and relapse into barbarism. If the inherent potency of the prognathous type of mankind had been greater than it actually is, sufficiently great to give it the independence of character that the American Indian possesses, the world would have been in a great measure deprived of cotton and sugar. The red man is unavailable as a laborer in the cane or cotton field, or any where else, owing to the unalterable ethnical laws of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of the future that this voyage was to open to him. He knew little or nothing at that time of Labrador or Newfoundland. He had never seen an Eskimo nor an American Indian, unless he had chanced to visit a "wild west" show. He had no other expectation than that he should make a single winter cruise with the mission schooner, and then return to England and settle in some promising locality to the practice of his profession, there to rise to success or ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... being separated by death from the objects of one's love has pursued humanity from the beginning. The Hindoos used to have a selfish fashion of requiring their widows to be entombed alive with their corpses. The North American Indian insists that his horse, his bow and arrows, his spear, and his other cherished trinkets shall share his ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... and chants changed abruptly, and the dancing increased in fervor, even the children throwing themselves wildly about. The witch-doctors ran around like so many maniacs, and it looked as much like an American Indian war ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... from its national significance "The Kalevala" is interesting from the fact of its having been taken as the model in rhythm and style for Longfellow's "Hiawatha," the epic of the American Indian.] ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... the basis of their theory the observations of the men of travel. Abroad this connection of travellers and philosophers was no less intimate. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau owed much to the tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies of France. Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this alliance. He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, and himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection of them current in his day. The purely literary influence of the age of discovery persisted ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... eyes, added remarkably to the weird look, the dismal thoughtful scrutiny, which it was his habit to fix on persons talking with him, no matter whether they were worthy of attention or not. His straight black hair hung as gracelessly on either side of his hollow face as the hair of an American Indian. His great dusky hands, never covered by gloves in the summer time, showed amber-coloured nails on bluntly-pointed fingers, turned up at the tips. Those tips felt like satin when they touched you. When he wished to be careful, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... the American Indian was made at Machias. In the neighborhood of this frontier town, across the Canadian border, there were still remnants of the Abenaki and Etchemin tribes. They were French in sympathy, and all converts to the Roman Catholic faith. Mr. Lesdernier, with whom Gallatin lodged, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... The American Indian has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Even when this foreign influence comes in the form of civilization, he seems to sink and pine under it. It has been so with the Mexicans. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... act up to that standard, and another to have a high standard of morality and not to act up to it, that the former is the really moral man, as he does act up to his principles such as they are. This may hold good when we examine into the virtues and vices of nations: that the American Indian who acts up to his own code and belief, both in morality and religion, may be more worthy than a Christian who neglects his duty, may be true; but the question now is upon the respective morality of two enlightened nations, both Christian and having the Bible as their guide—between ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement. In such a view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object, good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain built on. But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious merchant-prince in his counting-room, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... was clasped low on her hips with a narrow gold band, set with jewels. It was a skirt, I suppose, but it hung with a diagonal hem-line running from hip to knee, it was beaded in an intricate pattern, not Oriental, somehow reminding me of American Indian bead work. ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... 1917 the fighting in the air took on an entirely new interest abroad, because of the German policy of painting their machines most grotesque patterns. They seemed to have taken this idea from the old American Indian custom of painting their faces to frighten their opponents, or else the fancies of the German airmen were allowed to run ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... The American Indian, as a rule, does not show excessive muscular development. Arms and legs are wanting in those ridged bunches of sinew which often bulge out all over our athletes. And yet more than one red man has displayed prodigious strength. ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... of the North American Indian, it need hardly be remarked, are of the very simplest description; indeed, it is only of late years, and since Christianity has spread among them, that they have been persuaded to adopt the rites and ceremonies of Christian burial. Formerly, ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... help enjoying the strange fix in which the Indian was caught, and he meant to make the best use of it. It is not often that an American Indian loses his wits when in danger, but Red Feather, for a few minutes, was under the control of a feeling such as a soldier shows ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... drawn and decorated, and with ornaments or gear of some kind above and below. Often the mane of the horse is arranged and curled, as if specially so dressed for parade or show, and almost suggests decorations as still sometimes adopted by American Indian or other barbarian chiefs. There are reins, too, in some instances, and these are sometimes held by a rough representation of an arm and hand. The legs of the horse always indicate gallopping. The symbols underneath it are usually either (1) the wild boar, as perhaps indicative of the most important ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley
... courage and experience was already well known in this tribe. He, himself, had made a large circle of acquaintance among the braves, and many of them had become strongly attached to him. Some of these attachments have existed for years and are still maintained; for, a fact well known, the American Indian warrior, as a general rule, is true and unchangeable in his friendships. With this object in view, Carson, putting his horse to his speed, started for the Utah village. On making his errand known to such of the braves as enjoyed his confidence, he found no difficulty in engaging a well-known warrior, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... knowledge. He draws his metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world. In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is oriental in itself. His language has the richness and sententious fullness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... (our American Indian, with whom we have now to do) has all the faculties—however defaced and blurred by long centuries of bloody crimes, which they regard not as crimes, but as virtues—seeing that these red, thriftless, bloody-minded Indians have all the human faculties intact—although, it may be, not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the men from Boston saw a sight that filled them with horror. The road was strewn with corpses of men, women, and children, scorched, dismembered, and mangled with that devilish art of which the American Indian is the most finished master. The savages had sacked the village the day before, burning the houses and slaying the people. Within three days a small force of colonial troops had driven Philip from his position at Mount Hope; but while they were doing this a ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... virtues, but who straightway began to describe a scene which she saw in it, and which turned out afterwards to be a simultaneous incident at Trebizond. The mediumistic influence of the spirit of a North American Indian may not commend the story ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... inherent in the individuals and families that compose them, and like them the races themselves are for long periods marked by power and capacity or weakness and lack of distinction. There are certain races, such as the Hottentot, the Malay, the American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive. There are family units, poverty-stricken and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... regarded himself as a superior being and his women as inferiors, made for drudgery, for child-bearing, and for contributors to his comforts and pleasures. His attitude was pretty much like that of the American Indian ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... glad to get a bundle of straw for a bed, and a wooden trencher to eat from. Vegetables were scarcely known, and fresh meat was eaten only by the well to do. The cottages were built of sticks and mud, without chimneys, and were nearly as bare of furniture as the wigwam of an American Indian. ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the money-changer's show-window; a sister of charity walks beside a Jewish Rabbi; then comes a brawny negro, then a bare-legged Highlander; figures such as are met in the Levant; school-boys with their books and lunch-boxes, Cockneys fresh from Piccadilly, a student who reminds us of Berlin, an American Indian, in pantaloons; a gaunt Western, a keen Yankee, and a broad Dutch physiognomy alternate; flower-venders, dog-pedlers, diplomates, soldiers, dandies, and vagabonds, pass and disappear; a firemen's procession, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... all stout, well built Spaniards, the master of whom was over six feet, and had much the appearance of an American Indian.—My companions were soon in a "dead sleep," and when the fishermen had left the hut, I walked out to explore our new habitation. The two huts were so near that a gutter only separated them, which caught the water from the ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... shall always wonder what became of them, and that we shall never know. I hoped mightily that the American wing of the big Catholic seminary had been spared. It had a stone figure of an American Indian— looking something like Sitting Bull, we thought—over its doors; and that was the only typically American thing we saw ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... general appearance of the men of various races are most striking. No one could mistake a Chinaman for a North American Indian, or a Negro for a Malay or a Maori. Not only are these men of various races different in outward appearance, but they have also minds of different characters, and seem naturally fitted for different ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... The music of the American Indian, often strangely beautiful and impressive, would be as reasonably chosen as that of these imported Africs. E.A. MacDowell had, indeed, written a picturesque and impressive Indian suite, some time before the Dvorakian invasion. He asserts that the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... gradually, by honorable marriage among themselves, changing the alleged "race characteristics and tendencies" of the Negro people. A race element, it is safe and fair to conclude, incapable, like that of the North American Indian, of such a process of elimination and assimilation, will always be a thorn in the flesh of the Republic, in which there is, admittedly, no place for the integrality and growth of a distinct race type. The Afro-American people, for reasons that I have stated, are even now very far from being ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... They will also distinguish small pieces of money, different fabrics and qualities of cloth, &c.; and, in walking, often ascertain, by the feeling of the air, or by other sensations, when they approach a building, or any other considerable body. So the North American Indian, whose habits of life seem to require it, can hear the footsteps of an approaching enemy at distances which astonish us. So also the deaf and dumb are very keen-sighted, and generally make very accurate observations. Any reader who is sceptical ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... painful than the functionating of numerous other vital organs—stomach, heart, bladder, bowels, etc.—and, indeed, it is not in the case of certain savage tribes and other aboriginal people, such as our own North American Indian. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... "First Footsteps" (p. 68, etc.). There is an old idea in Europe that the maniacal vengeance of the Arab is increased by eating this flesh, the beast is certainly vindictive enough; but a furious and frantic vengefulness characterises the North American Indian who never saw a camel. Mercy and pardon belong to the elect, not to the miserables ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... roof, stooped down, and, gathering his combustibles with care, set fire to them. In doing this, he must have used the common lucifer match of civilization, since no other means would have answered, and the American Indian of the border is as quick to appropriate the conveniences as he is to adopt the vices of ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... attained as an incident of its cultural and practical values. We are no longer trying to discipline the mind by memorizing lists of names and dates, though they be such euphonious names as those of the native American Indian tribes, but we are striving to understand man's past and present efforts ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... ground color some special color in the room where they are to be placed, and the borders are made in harmonious tones. The range of design is wide, from Oriental to Occidental—from Japanese to North American Indian. But all suggestions, so soon as received, are modified and removed as far as possible from direct imitation of any foreign rugs. Mrs. Albee has aimed, not to reproduce Oriental effects, but to have the designs original and distinctive. Fortunately, for years previous to the establishment of ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... ethnological point of view that collection was very valuable. What a striking contrast was presented there by the rounded form of the skull of the fierce, indomitable American Indian, who is so averse to intercourse with strangers, and the rather narrow, elongated head of the indolent negro, who is devoted to social enjoyments. How wide was the difference between the head of the Sandwich Islander or of the Tahitian and that of the Australian or the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... between what is recorded of the North American Indian and the Aztec is owing less to any difference in themselves than to the character of the historians who have written of them. The northern writers were not carried away by the romance of Indian life; they ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... different Indians from those who have lived in this country since its discovery. They do not make mummies. But all over our land we find evidences that some race—now extinct—lived here before the present North American Indian. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... of liberty of conscience was at stake. "We have encountered the red men time and again," he continued, "so that I may conclude that we have become acclimated, as they say, and understand the nature of the American Indian very well." ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... Elizabeth, who had recently adopted a young American Indian as her parlor page, elicited applause among the courtiers, yet "Lizzie" did not seem ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... that Henry Horsecollar rose to a point of disorder and intervened, showing, admirable, the advantages of education as applied to the American Indian's natural intellect and native refinement. He stood up and smoothed back his hair on each side with his hands as you have seen little girls do ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... that unlucky day they had encountered quite frequently. Where the Indian obtained the liquor was a mystery, but it was an attraction that never failed to draw Teddy forth into the forest. The effect of alcoholic stimulants upon persons is as various as are their temperaments. The American Indian almost always becomes sullen, vindictive and dangerous. Now and then there is an exception, as was the case with the new-made friend of Teddy. Both were affected in precisely a ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... fatalist in one stage, a beast worshiper in another, a thaumaturgist in a third, yet ever and first of all a mystic. It is also to be borne in mind (and the more firmly because of a widespread misapprehension) that the primitive believer, up to the highest stage attained by the North American Indian, is not a psychotheist, much less a monotheist. His "Great Spirit" is simply a great mystery, perhaps vaguely anthropomorphic, oftener zoomorphic, yet not a spirit, which he is unable to conceive save by reflection of the white man's concept and inquiry; and his departed spirit ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... Jesuits' bark. According to another account, this name arose from its value having been first discovered to a Jesuit missionary who, when prostrate with fever, was cured by the administration of the bark by a South American Indian. In each of the above instances the fever was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... leaf kept downward. When it had been thus carefully folded, it was carried to the field and buried in a hole, carefully dug, so that the top of the package was close to the surface of the ground, and the face of the leaf wrapping was directed toward the rising sun. To anyone who has studied American indian religions, these two costumbres suggest ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Indians of the upper Orinoco tip their arrows. Its principal ingredient is derived from the Strychnos toxifera tree, which yields also the drug nux vomica, which you, Dr. Leslie, have mentioned. On the tip of that Inca dagger must have been a large dose of the dread curare, this fatal South American Indian ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... is a sign of virility when used by man. We have the North American Indian with his gay feathers, blankets and war paint, and the European peasant in his gala costume. In many cases colour is as much his as his woman's. Some years ago, when collecting data concerning national characteristics as expressed in the art of the Slavs, Magyars and Czechs, the ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... forehead of intellectual, mightily intellectual power; and they are re-enforced with cheek-bones and nose which suggest that this fighting power has in it something of the grim ruthlessness of the North American Indian. The eyes, however, are the crowning characteristic of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... safe—ha-ha!" laughed the old man, glancing up at his chamber window, which looked westward, where stood a wooden figure of a miniature North American Indian all in his war paint, and brandishing his knives like a very brave, as the wind caught ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... most refined and rudest eras, of Homer, Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian. In his poetry, as in Homer's, only the simplest and most enduring features of humanity are seen, such essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the circles of stone, and the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the fort, were warriors of nations long rendered familiar by personal intercourse, not only with the inhabitants of the district, but with the troops themselves; and these, from frequent association with the whites, had lost much of that fierceness which is so characteristic of the North American Indian in his ruder state. Among these, with the more intelligent Hurons, were the remnants of those very tribes of Shawanees and Delawares whom we have recorded to have borne, half a century ago, so prominent ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... in their nomadic habits. All the natives in north-eastern Siberia, except the Kamchadals, Chuances, and Yukagirs, who are partially Russianised, may be referred to one or another of three great classes. The first of these, which may be called the North American Indian class, comprises the wandering and settled Chukchis and Koraks, and covers that part of Siberia lying between the 160th meridian of east longitude and Bering Strait. It is the only class which has ever made a successful stand against Russian invasion, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Buffon and De Pauw have drawn of the American Indian, though very humiliating, is, as far as I can judge, much more correct than the flattering representations which Mr. Jefferson has given us. See the Notes on Virginia, where this gentleman endeavors to disprove in general the opinion maintained so strongly by some philosophers that ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of it I believe in the English hat as the best thing of its ugly kind. As for the Englishman's feeling with reference to it, a foreigner might be pardoned for thinking it was his fetich, a North American Indian for looking at it as taking the place of his own medicine-bag. It is a common thing for the Englishman to say his prayers into it, as he sits down in his pew. Can it be that this imparts a religious character to the article? However this may be, the true ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stories, the one taken from Icelandic saga, the other from American Indian tradition, shew clearly the oneness which the uncultivated mind believes to exist between the soul of man and the soul of beast. The same sentiments actuate both man and brute, and if their actions are unlike, it is because ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... entertain the idea of purchasing territory to which Virginia had the prior claim. Angered by Henderson's refusal, The Dragging Canoe, leaping into the circle of the seated savages, made an impassioned speech touched with the romantic imagination peculiar to the American Indian. With pathetic eloquence he dwelt upon the insatiable land-greed of the white men, and predicted the extinction of his race if they committed the insensate folly of selling their beloved hunting-grounds. Roused to a high pitch of oratorical ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... grove, and cut down as many of the leaves as we could carry. With these we returned to the beach, on the highest part of which, just under the trees, we proposed putting up a temporary hut, till we could get a more permanent building. We soon had an edifice erected, something like a North American Indian wigwam, into which we could all creep and lie conveniently at full length. By this time the tide had gone down, and by crawling along the rocks, Macco was able to capture a number of shell-fish. This he did by cutting them off the rock with the bamboo ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... large areas while in other cases it varies, we cannot certainly tell; but we may well suppose it to be due to its being more or less correlated with constitutional characters favourable to life. By far the most common colour of man is a warm brown, not very different from that of the American Indian. White and black are alike deviations from this, and are probably correlated with mental and physical peculiarities which have been favourable to the increase and maintenance of the particular race. I shall infer, therefore, that the brown or red was the original colour of man, and ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... temptation to enter upon the analysis and portraiture of the original and native character of the North-American Indian. Voluptuary and stoic; swept by gusts of fury too terrible to be witnessed, yet imperturbable beyond all men, under the ordinary excitements and accidents of life; garrulous, yet impenetrable; curious, yet himself reserved, proud and mean ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... stir men like that." In his poem, "Hiawatha," Longfellow chose the metre of the Finnish epic "Kalevala," which is peculiarly suited to the tales of primitive people. The worthiest and most picturesque traditions of the American Indian are woven into a connected story whose charm is greatly heightened by the novel melody of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... named them first as being the most indispensable portion of the necessary suite of rooms, since the bath may exist if it be merely in the form of an old Irish "sweating-house," or a somewhat similar construction of the North American Indian; but without the heated chamber and its appurtenances there can ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... world physical circumstances control the human race. They make the Australian a savage; incapacitate the negro, who can never invent an alphabet or an arithmetic, and whose theology never passes beyond the stage of sorcery. They cause the Tartars to delight in a diet of milk, and the American Indian to abominate it. They make the dwarfish races of Europe instinctive miners and metallurgists. An artificial control over temperature by dwellings, warm for the winter and cool for the summer; variations of clothing to suit the season of the year, and especially the management of fire, have enabled ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... President Wilson is one of the chief figures. I am told that the picture of General Pershing is a life-sized painting, which he was kind enough to sit for, to be used in this production. Here is also seen an American Indian, a cowboy, a merchant and an artisan. An American flag is borne aloft while four West Point cadets suggest training and leadership. Women relief workers of all kinds are seen. Then extending entirely ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... which was developed through the winter of 1915, belongs to the Canadian. His plan was as simple as that of the American Indian who rushed a white settlement and fled after he was through scalping; or the cowboys who shot up a town; or the Mexican insurgents who descend upon a village for a brief visit of killing and looting. The Canadian proposed to enter the German ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... of North American Indian tribes which gave its name to the Caddoan stock, represented in the south by the Caddos, Wichita and Kichai, and in the north by the Pawnee and Arikara tribes. The Caddos, now reduced to some 500, settled in western Oklahoma, formerly ranged over the Red River (Louisiana) country, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... poet who has spoken most sincerely and sympathetically to the hearts of the common people and to children. His style is notable for its simplicity and grace. His Hiawatha is a national poem that records the picturesque traditions of the American Indian. Its charm and melody are the delight of all children, and in years to come, when the race which it describes has utterly disappeared, we shall value at even higher state; the clinking of gold was no more heard at night ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... were left alive among the pack, including several wounded ones, withdrew to a far end of the ice floe, the adventurers crawled back under the tent for a much-needed rest. The Esquimaux, with a silence worthy of an American Indian, took up his position in ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... in their mouths, and camel's milk is never heated, for fear of bewitching the animal. [33] The Somali, however, differs in one point from his kinsman the Arab: the latter prides himself upon his temperance; the former, like the North American Indian, measures manhood by appetite. A "Son of the Somal" is taught, as soon as his teeth are cut, to devour two pounds of the toughest mutton, and ask for more: if his powers of deglutition fail, he ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... talked I had an excellent opportunity to inspect him more closely. He was a huge fellow, standing I should say six feet six or seven inches, well developed and of a coppery red not unlike that of our own North American Indian, nor were his features dissimilar to theirs. He had the aquiline nose found among many of the higher tribes, the prominent cheek bones, and black hair and eyes, but his mouth and lips were better molded. All ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... economic 'question' which, broadly stated, is that the Caucasian is willing to work beyond his immediate need voluntarily and without physical compulsion; the African in his natural state is not. The American Indian had the same prejudice against manual labor; but rather that, as a gentleman, he thought himself above it; and his character was such that he always successfully resisted any attempts at enslavement or even compulsory service. The negro, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... we find no difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of observation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... perfectly feasible. Nothing can be easier than to counterfeit the semblance of the American Indian. The colour of the skin is of no consequence. Ochre, charcoal, and vermilion made red man and white man as like as need be; and for the hair, the black tail of a horse, half-covered and confined by the great plumed bonnet, with its crest dropping backward, is a disguise not to be ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... gayety of their times was illustrated was, "Who was the shortest man in the Bible?" The answer was, "Bildad, the Shuhite;" but now, in the revised text it is Peter, because Peter said: "Silver and gold have I none," and no one could be shorter than that. The North American Indian was no better off than Peter in his gold reserve or silver supply; but he managed to get along with the quahog clam. That was the money substance out of which he made the wampum, and the shell-heaps scattered over the island are mute ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... together thoughtfully. "That might explain it. Maybe she thinks I'm only a sort of wild North American Indian because our place is named Ware's Wigwam, and that it is beneath her dignity to be intimate with her inferiors. But if that is what is the matter, she's just a snob, and can't be very sure ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... drill a band of Indians, whom he had dressed in red coats and trowsers. A more ridiculous performance was never seen anywhere, and only an officer like Captain Woodbine, who knew absolutely nothing of the habits and character of the American Indian, would ever have thought of attempting to make regularly drilled and uniformed soldiers out of men of that race. They were excellent fighters, in their own savage way, but no amount of drilling could turn them into soldiers of ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... stream resound the splash of water and the merry laughter of matrons and maidens bathing in the clear pools, and from above the more boisterous shouts of men and boys. Surely he who says the American Indian is morose, stolid, and devoid of humor never knew him in the intimacy of ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days, festival or fast, makes no difference to them. This enormous nuisance I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian's politeness of never interrupting. What, absolutely never? Is there no case in which I should? If a man's nose, or ear, as sometimes happens in high latitudes, were suddenly and visibly frost-bitten, so as instantly to require ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... western, the river was too deep to be waded. Here a short pause succeeded, it being necessary to determine the manner in which the canoe was to be carried across. One of the four who had just reached the boat was a chief; and the habitual deference which the American Indian pays to merit, experience, and station kept the others silent until ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... extends to almost every story quoted by Mr. Smith, and some are so nearly identical as to point unmistakably to a common origin; but when and where? when did the negro or the North American Indian ever come in contact with the tribes of South America? Upon this point the author of Brazil and the Amazons, who is engaged in making a critical and comparative study ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... himself—what became of him? In Ireland and Scotland he lingers still; but, except in Wales and Cornwall, England knows him no more. Like the American Indian, he was swept into the remote, inaccessible corners of his own land. It seemed cruel, but it had to be. Would we build strong and high, it must not be upon sand. We distrust the Kelt as a foundation for nations as we do sand for our temples. France ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... perhaps, that we recruit our glorious Red Army from American Indian tribes?" the MVD man said sourly. "You are literal-minded bourgeois intellectual. This is not ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... species of white stuff made from the bark of trees. Two pieces of stuff completed their costume, one was square and looked like a blanket. The head was thrust through a hole in the centre, and it recalled the "zarapo" of the Mexicans, and the "poncho" of the South American Indian. The second piece was rolled round the body, without being tightened. Almost all, men and women, tattoo their bodies with black lines close together, representing different figures. The operation was thus ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... education. From the time that I could first remember, I had been tyrannised over; cuffed, kicked, abused and ill-treated. I had never known kindness. Most truly was the question put by me, "Charity and mercy—what are they?" I never heard of them. An American Indian has kind feelings—he is hospitable and generous—yet, educated to inflict, and receive, the severest tortures to and from, his enemies, he does the first with the most savage and vindictive feelings, and submits to the latter with indifference and stoicism. He has, indeed, ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... one of peace, the first since the outbreak of the French Revolution, but for another uprising of the Wachabites in Arabia under the standard of Tourkee and the re-occurrence of North American Indian troubles. A year had passed after the destruction of Fort Negro in Florida before the whites found a pretext for another attack. King Natchez was accused of receiving fugitive negroes, and he replied: "I have no negroes.... I shall use force to stop any armed American ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... with the man, of all others among my countrymen, whom I had most wished to know. Meanwhile the table in the dining-room was spread with cakes and preserves, and before the company withdrew, they had a good opportunity of convincing themselves, that, if the American Indian had made but little progress in the other arts of civilization, he had attained to a full appreciation of the virtues ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... American Indian name, the lovely white Cherokee Rose (R. Sinica), that runs wild in the South, climbing, rambling, and rioting with a truly Oriental abandon and luxuriance, did indeed come from China. Would that our northern thickets and roadsides might be decked with its pure flowers and almost equally ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... phthisis; he will catch the cholera more quickly than a white. Human races, where they may catch the same intermittent fever at the identical moment and in the same swamp, will not the less display different types of fever. Dr. Crevaux has shown that a certain insect with the North American Indian is not the same as with the negro or the maroon, and both differ from that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... the volatile Polynesian in this, as in all other respects, is our grave and decorous North American Indian. While the former bestows a name in accordance with some humorous or ignoble trait, the latter seizes upon what is deemed the most exalted or warlike: and hence, among the red tribes, we have the truly patrician appellations of "White Eagles," "Young ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many races, types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The right-hand figure in the upper picture bears a striking resemblance to a North American Indian. The instrument in his hands is ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... that the prime minister incontinently fled, to return with the king himself. They were a magnificent pair, the king especially, who must have been all of six feet three inches in height. His features had the eagle-like quality that is so frequently found in those of the North American Indian. He had been molded and born to rule. His eyes flashed as he listened, but right meekly he obeyed McAllister's command to fetch a couple of hundred of the best dancers, male and female, in the village. And dance they did, for two mortal ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... Mercier, 1637, ap. Parkman, loc. cit. p. 80. The current notion that the American Indian burns his victims at the stake merely for pleasure is not incorrect. He frequently did so, as he does so to-day, but in the seventeenth century this act often is part of a religious ceremony. He probably ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... conjured up in the guide's brain by the unexpected sight of this ranch could not be interpreted from the expression of his countenance, for that showed no more trace of emotion than an American Indian at the torture stake, or the marble face of a Greek god. Presently he shifted his pose, threw back his head, and Big Pete's eyes were fixed on the valley in front of us, as with distended nostrils he sniffed the mountain air, his brows contracted to a frown, his eyes ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... incomplete, they still read like the fragments of a book whose subject was once broadly and coherently treated by a man of genius. They are handled in the same bold and artistic manner as the Norse. There is nothing like them in any other North American Indian records. They are, especially those which are from the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot, inspired with a genial cosmopolite humor. While Glooskap is always a gentleman, Lox ranges from Punch to Satan; passing ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... somewhat idealized in print, I find. Victor Hugo has presented him in a light not unlike that of Cooper's noble savage—with large difference of color and pose, of course. The average Frenchman knows Cooper's noble savage as well as we know Hugo's romantic ragpicker, and he knows nothing of the American Indian besides. (It is a curious fact, which I may note in passing, that the only American author whose writings appear to be really well known in Paris to-day is Fenimore Cooper. Next to him stands Edgar Poe—Poaye, as the French call him, pronouncing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... History of the Baptists; Life of Wesley; History of Methodism; Life of Whitefield; Millar's Life of Dr. Rodgers; Crantz's Ancient and Modern History of the Church of the United Brethren; Crantz's History of the Mission in Greenland; Loskiel's History of the North American Indian Missions; Oldendorp's History of the Danish Missions of the United Brethren; Choules' Origin and History of Missions. Those who have not sufficient time for so extensive a course, may find the most interesting and important ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... a schoolboy, who knows nothing of religion out of his catechism—and nothing of the world beyond his school walls. If the ability to bear calamity with fortitude shall decide the genuineness of the creed, there is your North American Indian or Hindoo nearer to truth and heaven than the Christian. So much for your 'proof sufficient' as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... and the frequency of certain abnormalities of the skull, the hyoid bone, the humerus and the tibia. Viability, by which are meant fecundity, longevity and vigour, was low in average. The death-rate was high, through lack of proper weaning foods, and hard life. The readiness with which the American Indian succumbed to disease is well known. For these reasons there was not, outside of southern Mexico, northern Central America and Peru, a dense population. In the whole hemisphere there were not over ten ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... surpassed elsewhere. That the high moral and mental status of these people is fully recognised by their European successors is proved by the fact that many Americans in high stations to-day actually boast of having in their veins the blood of the North American Indian. And yet these highly gifted people had not when Columbus discovered America attained to the knowledge of iron. Despite the advantages of a most favourable environment and a stimulating climate, the Red Indians were in point of mechanical development behind ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Negroes have, on several occasions, found themselves in very serious situations. While the fact is well known out on the frontier, I don't remember ever having seen it mentioned back here that an American Indian has a deadly fear of an American Negro. The most utterly reckless, dare-devil savage of the copper hue stands literally in awe of a Negro, and the blacker the Negro the more the Indian quails. I can't understand why this should be, ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... the Negro as an individual who finds it more or less difficult to fit into our way of living. And yet one reason for believing that the Negro has a capacity for modern civilization is that he has survived until the present time. Compare the Negro in this regard with the American Indian, who, despite his many noble traits, has fared poorly under the white man's civilization. The Indians of Cuba, for example, were so proud and unbending that they died out under the slavery which the early Spanish imposed upon them; the Negro, because of his teachableness and his passive ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... came slowly towards me, and then looked meditatively into my face. I shall never forget him. A tall, sallow, emaciated man he was, with cheek-bones high and sharp as an American Indian's, and straight black hair. He looked like a wooden image of Mephistopheles, carved ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... instance, the plastic mobility of the Pangwee and Bakwain with the rigidity of the Hindu or Chinese. Or where the case may be seen in even a more striking way, compare the African negro with the American Indian; take the one from his tropical wilds, the other from his forest home, and place them both under the same civilizing influences, and where at the end of a fixed period will you find them? In a single generation ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman |
