THE DYING INDIAN FRANK EDGAR FARLEY The American Indian was, as every reader knows, an object of lively curiosity to Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the literature of the time every effort was made to satisfy that curiosity. Any book treating of the history, topography, manners, morals, or arts of America or its inhabitants, from Captain Smith's True Relation down through the period of the Revolution and beyond, was almost sure to make some mention of the Indians, and not a few such books were chiefly devoted to their affairs. This eager interest may be accounted for in two ways. Of course, whatever could be learned of the red man's origin, language, religion, ethics, mode of government, habits, and manners had scientific value.1 But further than that, the Indian was to a greater or less degree on the white man's conscience. The white man had cheated him out of his lands, debauched him with rum, and dealt treacherously with him in various ways, and yet the Indian was a brother man, and at bottom he retained many of the virtues of the unspoiled child of nature. He was on the whole, in spite of his fiendish cruelty, a pathetic figure, not without nobility, and indubitably possessed of an immortal soul for whose welfare the less hardened of the whites felt some measure of embarrassed responsibility. As the eighteenth century wore on, with its ever increasing talk of "sensibility" and "the return to nature," the white, although he continued to ply the Indian with fire water and to defraud him of his hunting grounds,3 interested himself more and more deeply in the sentimental aspects of the Indian's character and fate. No trait of the red man was oftener dwelt upon than his stoical endurance of hardship, especially when subjected by his enemies to torture. Hundreds of anecdotes of such fortitude may be found in the literature of the 1 For a recently published example of such scientific inquiry (a physician's), see "Letters of Samuel Lee and Samuel Sewall relating to New England and the Indians," edited by G. L. Kittredge, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol. XIV, 1912. 2 Much was written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the subject of Indian missions. Samson Occom, the celebrated Indian preacher, who visited England in 1766-1768 on behalf of Wheelock's Indian Charity School, collected there over £12,000 as a result of some four hundred sermons and other addresses. Occom was presented to George III and met many other distinguished people. See Love's Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England, Boston, 1900, chap. viii. 3 See The Indian Dispossessed, by S. K. Humphrey, Boston, 1905. eighteenth century alone.1 It was natural that these recitals, always shocking but often thrilling, should fire the imagination of some of the poets, for the victim was usually represented as chanting a death song in which he derided his enemies. We have in consequence a number of poems in which the central figure is an Indian singing his death song at the stake. The notes comprising the present article had their origin in the curiosity aroused in the writer's mind by some songs of this character which were composed in the eighteenth century. Investigation revealed several other poems belonging to the same epoch which exhibit the Indian in various sentimental situations. A few of these songs and other poems are here briefly described and annotated. They cannot be held to portray the Indian accurately. None of them has high poetic merit. That degree of praise can hardly be bestowed upon even the best of Freneau's compositions. But they afford one more illustration of the interest in the emotions and the virtues of barbaric races which the English literature of the second half of the eighteenth century frequently reveals, and which may be regarded as one of the manifestations of that vague impulse commonly known as the Romantic movement. It remains to be said that the poems reviewed in these notes are confined to the eighteenth century and to the English language, and that the writer has not by any means exhausted all available sources of information. 1. Of the songs supposed to be sung by Indians who are dying under torture, the following is on the whole about the best that has survived: THE DEATH SONG OF A CHEROKEE INDIAN 3 The sun sets in night, and the stars shun the day, 1 For typical examples see the London Magazine, XXXII, 459(1763), and the American Museum, II, 594 (1787). The periodicals of the time abound in such instances. So do the many narratives of individual captivity, and such books (their number is legion) as Major Robert Rogers's A Concise Account of North America, London, 1765; James Adair's The History of the American Indians, London, 1775; Jonathan Carver's Travels through the Interior Parts of North America, London, 1778; and John Long's interesting Toyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, London, 1791. See also the Jesuit Relations. 2 The songs of the dying Indian were often compared with the numerous translations and imitations of the Dying Ode of Regnar Lodbrok, a poem of Norse origin which Percy made popular in 1763. See the Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, IX, 66, n. 2, Boston, 1903. The dying negro slave was also the subject of much sentimental verse in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 3 As printed in The American Museum, second edition (1787). Remember the arrows he shot from his bow: I go to the land where my father is gone: His ghost shall exult in the fame of his son. Death comes like a friend. He relieves me from pain: ་་ This composition has been ascribed to three different authors. Its earliest appearance in print seems to have been in the first number of Mathew Carey's American Museum, January, 1787 (I, 77). I have not seen a copy of the first edition. In the second (1787) no author is given; but in the third (the preface of which is dated July 20, 1790) the poem is attributed to " P. Freneau." Royall Tyler introduced the song into the opening act of The Contrast, which was performed for the first time in New York, April 16, 1787, and printed in Philadelphia in 1790. A character called Maria, who is disclosed at the beginning of the second scene "sitting disconsolate at a Table, with Books, &c.," sings the Cherokee song and then observes, somewhat stiffly, "There is something in this song which ever calls forth my affections. The manly virtue of courage, that fortitude which steels the heart against keenest misfortunes, which interweaves the laurel of glory amidst the instruments of torture and death, displays something so noble, so exalted, that in despite of the prejudices of education I cannot but admire it, even in a savage." Thomas J. McKee, who edited the play for the Dunlap Society in 1887, prints (facing p. II) a reduced facsimile of a contemporary broadside containing the words and music and bearing the title Alknomook, the Death Song of the Cherokee Indians. He remarks in his Introduction (p. x), "This song had long the popularity of a national air and was familiar in every drawing-room in the early part of the century.' Oddly enough, the song was printed among the Poems of Mrs. Anne Hunter, London, 1806, as her own composition, with the title The Death Song, written for and adapted to an original Indian air. Maria Edgeworth quotes the poem in her Rosamond (Philadelphia, 1821, II, p. 52 of The Print Gallery), where she calls it The Son of Alknomook. She adds a note by Mrs. Hunter (to whom she ascribes the authorship), explaining that "the idea of the ballad was suggested several years ago, by hearing a gentleman, who had resided many years in America, among the tribe called the Cherokees, sing a wild air, which he assured me it was customary for these people to chaunt with a barbarous jargon, implying contempt for their enemies in the moments of torture and death." The version in Mrs. Hunter's Poems, which I have not seen, evidently differs somewhat from that printed in Carey's Museum (and reproduced above), but it is said by McKee to be "an exact copy" of that in Tyler's play. The version printed by Miss Edgeworth, however, not only omits one of Tyler's stanzas ("Remember the woods"), but varies a little in other respects. Compare Mrs. Hunter's version as printed in Duyckinck's Cyclopædia, I, 341. The broadside varies slightly from Tyler's version and considerably from Freneau's. Professor Pattee, the editor of The Poems of Philip Freneau (Princeton, 1902-1907), agrees with most authorities in accepting the song as Freneau's in spite of the fact that Freneau never included it among his own works, although he "hoarded his poetic product, especially in his earlier period, with miserly care." McKee, on the contrary, is convinced "after considerable research... that Alknomook is the offspring of Tyler's genius." The evidence does not seem conclusive in the case of any one of the three candidates.1 2. In the American Museum for September, 1789 (VI, 193), appeared an anonymous prose tale bearing the title Azakia: A Canadian Story. An officer in the French army, St. Castins, becomes enamored of a young Indian woman, Azakia, whom he has saved from death. Although Azakia returns. his affection, she remains faithful to her husband, the chief Ouabi, with whom St. Castins takes refuge. Presently Ouabi is made prisoner by hostile Indians and bound to a stake, where he is to be tortured to death. He has already begun his death song when St. Castins, at the head of the chief's followers, disperses the enemy and releases the captive. In gratitude Ouabi surrenders Azakia to the Frenchman and takes a new wife. This tale was versified, with some changes in names and incidents, by Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton, the Della Cruscan, and published in Boston in 1790 with the title Ouâbi, or the Virtues of Nature. An Indian Tale. In 1 For discussions of the authorship of this song see Pattee, Poems of Freneau, II, 313 n.; McKee's edition, p. x.; Duyckinck, Cyclopædia of American Literature, New York, 1856, I, 341 n.; Onderdonk, History of American Verse, Chicago, 1901, pp. 80 ff.; Marble, Heralds of American Literature, Chicago, 1907 (to which I owe the reference to The Contrast), pp. 95 ff. McKee notes that the song was introduced into another play, New Spain, or Love in Mexico, Dublin, 1740. The date is an error. The opera called New Spain, sometimes attributed to John Scawen, was published in London in 1790, and according to the title-page received its first performance July 16 of that year, at the Theatre Royal. One of the characters is Alkmonoak, a Chickasaw chief, who is captured by the Spaniards and who sings the death song in the third act. One stanza (" Remember the arrows") is omitted. The three remaining stanzas vary somewhat from all the other versions, but most resemble the version of Tyler. In the American Museum for October, 1789 (VI, 338), is printed A Favorite Song. Tune, The Son of Alknomack. This has nothing to do with Indians. The Philadelphia Minerva for December 23, 1797, reprints from the Weekly Museum a poem of sixty lines, in rhymed couplets, with the heading Alknomack, the great Indian chief, when preparing for the war in which he was made prisoner and tormented, is said to have made the following bloody reflections and observations to the virgins and attendants of his wigwam, in the night preceding the first battle. The beginning indicates that Gray's The Fatal Sisters served as a model: Now the storm begins to come! Every yell foretokens doom. Tells us to prepare for war. |