SKETCHES OF TRAVEL XII.—THE RED MAN AND HIS WAYS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 28, 9 July 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL XII.— THE RED MAN AND HIS WAYS

By the Editor.

My last instalment of travel-talk left ire tearing nlong in the east-hoi nd express fiom Vancou\cr We were in among the clustering mountains and speeding along the \ alley of the Fraser through the rich, broad n\er-flats that form the garden of British Columbia. T«irge mers, like the Coo/uitlam and the Pitt, were heading majestically fiom the deep and winding ravines of tie ending ranees and swelling the broad and lordly \olume of the Fiaser But for its alpine background and its swarming ranks of fir and pine, the Fraser valley might almost ha\e been a slice of an English county The foinier forest-jungle was almost cleaied away. Poplar and bioom and other trees and shrubs familiar to the English landscape pieeted the eye. Well-kept homes appeared amidst the gay plum-blossoms and the nth gieeta pastures of Fruit and Milk Ranches. where the almond-eyed, pig-tailed yellow man from, the Far East is the sole ' help ' ot the white owner. Here and there >ou whirl past a fruit cannery, a creamery, or a cheese and butler factory, or you stop for a brief space at some ' depot ' wheie brown maple-sugar, in slabs lil c dates, is conspicuously exposed for sale, and the produce of some neighboring market-garden is neatIv packed away in cases and awaiting the arrival of the next freight train to transfer it o^er the mountains and far away to distant Colgary of the cattle ranches — a journey of six hundred miles through the Rockies. Flat-bottomed steamers were ostentatiously pu/i'n" away as they breasted the mighty flow of the Fraser : They were winding their tortuous track, to the farming, fruit-raising, saw-milling, shingle-making, and mining towns and villages of the riverside, up to Yale — 103 miles by rail fiom Vancouver — where further navigation is barred by the steep and narrow gorge of the

Fraser canon. Here and there upon the river we saw Indians in their Chinook canoes — most of which were dug-outs made of tree-trunks. There are at least eight different stocks of Indians in the Province of British Columbia, and their languages, customs, folk-lore, and ethnology furnish an interesting study for scholars. Six of these stocks, with many subdivisions, live around the coast. The male coast-Indian is known as a Siwash ;

the woman is called a Klootchman

The Indians one sees in British Columbia bear little resemblance to the Noble Red Man of Fenimore Cooper's novels. They are almost as undersized and as brown as the Japanese, unwarlike, gentle to a degree, good-humored, unpicturesque, flat-nosed, and with faces of most uncomely width. We had seen many of them in Victoria and Vancouver, and came across them at frequent intervals at the stopping-places among the mountains and in their villages by the Fraser's banks. Their women, like those of the Maori, affect bright colors. They wear no headgear, and their tresses — which are as black and straight and glossy as those of the Chinese — are worn with severe and comely plainness in front and fall in a thick plait down their back,s. They carry their papooses (babies) slung in quaint " moss-bags,' or miniature basketcradles across their backs. The weight of babe and cradle and all is sustained by a strap or band passing, not over the mother's sshouldeifa, but atiobs hei broad, flat forehead.

The Little Papoose

is fat, squat, and quiet. His body, arms, and legs are tightly bound and swathed after the Italian peasant fashion and then fastened down in his tiny cradle so that he cannot wriggle a muscle but those of his head and neck. Like the Chinese baby he takes life very seriously. He has all the taciturnity of his tribe, and he does not chatter and chuckle and crow and nod and wink

' As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx.'

But the Indian mother can set it on the other side of the lodger that he is not, like the paleface papoose, a pink bundle of April weather — of beaming sunshine and sudden tears and long-drawn wailing by day, and a capricious Terror that splils the mystic stillness of the midnight hour with riotous and stormy yelling

Here and thoie down tho \ alley of the Fraser you run past, or stop at, Indian \illages, and on little elevations near the banks you see the tribesmen's quaint and pathetic little cemeteries : small God's-acres that lecall those of the Maori, with strange — sometimes grotesque 11 — car\ od posts, and wooden crosses, and tall poles bearing the faded and tattered remnants of what were probably once upon a time- gaily colored flags. Mission City, on the Fraser — 43 miles from Vancouver — is so named because it was, and still remains, the seat of an important Catholic mission to the scattered Indian population round abO'iit. The ' city ' is named for the future. It is in reality a small town Its ' lions ' are the mission buildings ; the branch line of rail that goes away south through the mountains to the cities on the Puget Sound and distant San Francisco , and the 40,000 acres of rich, fat bottom-land that were won from the Fraser's o\erflow by a system of dykes that recalls to the passing traveller's mind reminiscences of Pas de Calais and the Netherlands. Close by the town, on a pleasant sunny rise, stands the Mission. It is a collection of large buildings on a great terrace with green fields and fruit patches sloping away towards the eternal snows. In the middle stands the church. It is flanked, at some distance, on the one side by a college for Indian boys, on the other side by a com en t in which the minds and hearts of the little brown maidens are trained to knowledge and virtue and their hands to uselul domestic aits. Other large buildings rest upon tho green, sunny slope behind. The Oblate Fathers are in charge of The Indian Missions

— and, in fact, of practically all the parochial work in Canada lVom and including Winnipeg to the Pacific, and from tho American boundary-line all through British Columbia and up to the borders of Alaska. ' They're the genuine article.' said a non-Catholic British Columbian to me, as he expatiated with great enthusiasm upon their work ; ' none of your feather-bed missionaries—not much. Cultivated men, too ; but they live with the Indians, on Indian fare — and precious little of it at times. Yes, sir ; and they'\e saved the redskins from rum and low whites, and gathered them into their villages and instructed them and civilised them and turned them into honest Christians.' And then, he told

how, on the death of the late Bishop Durieu (of New Westminster), a few years ago, thousands of Catholic Indians and chiefs from all over the Province assembled to do honor to his memory and to swell the historic funeral procession of all creeds and classes that did mourning around his grave. There are in the mainland of British Columbia over 15,000 Catholic Indians— about half of the total Catholic population, which, in turn, is rather more than one-thi,rd of the general population. Vancouver Island (which is a separate diocese) njumbers among its Catholic population some 10,000 souls. A

Curious Little Bit of History links the story of the Catholic Indian missions of Canada's Far West with those which the intrepid pathfinders Fathers Jogues, Marquette, Brebeuf, La Salle, Joliet, and other brave and noble men who founded missions in the seventeenth century along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. The connecting link is furnished by Oregon, one of the Pacific States of the American Union. Between it and British Columbia lies the rugged and mountainous State oi Washington. Oregon is, like its two northern neighbors, a beautiful country of snow-clad heights, dense forests, mighty water courses, and fertile fields. In the early years of the nineteenth century John Jacob Astor established the Pacific Fur Company — a rival to the Hudson Bay Company — and built a fort and factory at Astoria, in the north-western corner of Oregon, where the mighty volume of the Columbian River empties itself into the ocean. It so happened that, in 1811, some Canadian Catholic Indians took, part in the fur-hunting expeditions of the Pacific Fur Comapny. Some of these were Iroquois — descendants of the fierce and intractable tribesmen who, in 1646, gave Canada its first ma,rtyr (Father Jogues). who were fbr generations the terror of successive French administrations, but whose present-day representatives are, in their homes on the banks of the Grand River in Ontario, the most industrious 1 and progressive of all the Indian tribes of North America The Pacific Fur Company's Catholic Indians took up their abode among the Flatheads of Oregon and imparted to them some of the principles of the Christian faith. The half-con\ erted Flatheads became ong<r for moie instruction. In 1830, and again in 1332, they sent delegates to St. Louis to ask for Catholic priests. In 1834, at the instance of Dr. John I\lcLaughhn, Governor of the Hudson Bay Company's posts (who soon afterwards became himself a Catholic), the Canadians of the Wallamette Valley sent a delegation on a similar errand to Quebec. Archbishop Signay sent them Father Francis Norbert Blanchet. He celebrated the first Mass in Oiegon, at Foit Bend, on the bank/? of the Columbia, on October 14, 1838. Seven years later he was made bishop. Oregon city became his See He brought to Oregon the Sisters of Notre J»ame of Namur, and the Jesuit Fathers — one of whom was the renowned apostle of the Indians, Father de Smet. Among the early companions of Bishop Blanchet's labors was Father Modesto Perners, who was consecrated first Bishop of Vancouver in 1846, when it was separated from Oregon and erected into an episcopal See. And this was the link that bound together in a chain of continuity the labors of the Catholic missionaries for the Siwash Indians of the West in the nineteenth century with the arduous toil of the French Fathei s for the red man of the eastern provinces in the spacious and more strenuous days of the seventeenth.

The early history of British Columbia and of Canada's great North-West was, until a comparatively recent date, practically the

History of the Fur Trade. This was a vast monopoly which the Hudson Bay Company held from the days of Charles 11. till it ceded its rights to the Canadian Government in 1870. As they pushed their forts and stations farther afield among the unexplored regions of the west and north, the /Indians came from all around to barter their rich furs for the Company's excellent goods. It was for the Company, as for the Indians, a lucrative trade. The many and various languages spoken by the tribesmen, however, long proved a trial to the bartering operations of the Company's agents. The difficulty was, howe^er, overcome by the invention of a sort of Volapuk, or universal Indian language, with a limited vocabulary made up of a mixture of French and Indian words. This hybrid tongue is called Chinook. It approaches more nearly to the dignity of a separate tongue than the ' pidgin English ' of the Far East, and is, in British Columbia, the common medium of communication between the white man and the Indian and between Indians of the different stocks that inhabit the Province.

The Hudson Bay Company kept faith with the Indians in all its dealings. The Canadian Government has followed in its footsteps. And through their joint action and the labors of the Catholic missionaries Canada has been spared the continuous unrest and the Many Grim Tragedies

that have marked the relations of the United States Government with the red man. The influence of the Catholic priest, or ' black-robe,' among the Canadian and Americnn Indians exists in undiminished strength today. In the fiercest period of the great Sioux war ol 18G3 the man who spoke the French tongue or woie the black cassock of the Catholic priest was allowed to pass without molestation through the warlike and exasperated tribes who set at furious defiance the power of the United States Government. A band of those starved, ill-used, and exasperated people — the remnant of those who cut off 1500 whites in Minnesota in 1863— are now settled at Battleford, in the Saskatchewan Province, and proved themselves from the first ' good Indians ' and desirable citizens of a country that recognises their rights as wards of the State. The total number of Indians in the Dominion is estimated at over 100,000. About one-third of these inhabit the old provinces. Some 30,000 live in Manitoba and the northwest, where— as is the case with the Maoris in New Zealand — their interests are

Guarded by Treaties nnd statute law. They live on reserves, carry on farming and other industries, receive a suitable education, and are afforded every encouragement to advance in the artß of civilised life. In British Columbia the Catholic missionaries have gathered them together in their own settlements with their pretty-spired churches and modest presbytery and little God's-acre. Missionaries, chiefs, and people alike recognise and deplore — as our Maori missionaries do — the urgent need of keeping the white man and his fire-water and his vices out of those Arcadian abodes. If a white man desires to live among the tribesmen, or marry an Indian maiden, he must either declare himself an Indian nnd live as such, or incontinently rid the settlement of his presence.

All this, and much more, is the lesson of Mission City, on the Canadian Tacific Railway. A swift run brought us 'up the narrowing valley of the Fraser past Harrison of the gold-mines ; past Agassiz, with its orderly Government experimental fruit and giain farm; past Ruby Creek, where gurnets are found ; through Hope, in whose cii cling mountains silver ore abounds

and on to Yale, where navigation cruses, and the garden valley of British Columbia ends abruptly against towering walls of rock.

(To be continued.)