THE CHEMAWA AMERICAN
3
is due mainly to their narratives of Indian life. And if we add, that dur
ing the last decade our painters, sculptors and musicians have been grad
ually attracted by Indian subjects, we shall have a complete picture of
the great debt which we owe to the Indian of North and South Ameri
ca in the field of literature and art. Furthermore our history, so re
splendent with brilliant characters, has been embellished thanks to the
Red Man by a number of heroes who could easily adorn the history of
any nation. Pocahontas, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Brant, and others, have
won for themselves a place in the annals of mankind and have contrib
uted their share to the glorious past of our nation.
But the bulk of the Indian's contribution to civilization aud culture
does not lie in our intellectual and literary attainments. It is our ma
terial life that owes him an everlasting debt and upon which he bestowed
benefaction after benefaction, gift after gift. Take our commercial life,
for instance, of which we are so justly proud. Who thinks today of the
fact, that our railways and railroads follow exactly the paths, made, trod
den and kept up at an enormous sacrifice, by the ancient, pre-Columbian
Indian? Verily, it was not an empty boast, when in 1847 an Iroquois
chief appealed to the White man for help upon the following grounds:
"The Empire State, as you love to call it, was once laced by
our trails from Albany to Buffalo; trails that we had trodden for
centuries; trails worn so deep by the Iroquois that they became
your roads of travel, as your possessions gradually ate into those
of my people. Your roads still traverse the same lines of com
merce which bound one part of the Long-House to the other.
Have we, the early possessors of this land, no share in your history?"
Our industry, stupendous as it is, has been enriched by a number of
substantial devices which we learned from our red neighbor. 'Every
grocer knows and appreciates the value of arnotto, the famous dye for
staining cheese and butter, but he is not aware of the fact that it has
been given to us by the Indian. In like manner we received from the
Red Man the cochineal, a red tinge for animal fibres and for coloring
certain foods, and also a score of other dyes. Ornamental timbres and
dye-woods we owe to the previous knowledge and experimentation
of the Indian; and the various uses to which wre apply mahogany and
log-wood today, are the results of his early, though primitive, enter
prises. Llama, wool, alpaca, hemps and fibres are other industrial ar
ticles imparted to us by the Indian with a generous hand. But above all,
by showing us the usefulness of caoutchuc (India Rubber) which we
employ nowadays so extensively in mending old things and forming new
ones, the American native has won the right to claim the everlasting
gratitude of our manufacturers. And these items by no means exhaust
the long list of contributions made by the Indian to our industrial progress.