THE INDIANS OF INDIANA
No part of the
United States is
richer in the tragedy,
romance and pathos of Indian history
than the region included in the old Territory Northwest of the Ohio
River. It
might be called the empire of
the Algonquian tribes within
our boundaries; for although they
extended far into British America; although there was a large detached
tribe — the Blackfeet — in the West ;
although the Lenni Lenape
reached away to the Atlantic coast,
most of the Algonquians of the United
States were here at the earliest known period, and the Eastern tribes
were thrown back here as settlement progressed.
It was here that they made
their last stand for their
country east of the Mississippi and put the white man to his best
effort to
conquer them. No part of the
country ever produced greater
Indians than Pontiac, Tecumtha, The Little Turtle,
Poch-gnt'-she-he-los,
and Black Hawk.
When the French
entered this region
their first task was to aid
the resident tribes in driving
back the Iroquois, who had acquired firearms, and had almost overrun
the
country to the Mississippi.
After this was done there was
comparative peace until individual tribes undertook war against the
French; but the French were always able to hold
the alliance of most of the
tribes, and by their aid
almost exterminated the Mascoutins at Detroit in 1712, and the Foxes in
northern
Illinois in 1730. The French
always treated the Indians
well and made notable efforts for
their spiritual welfare as well as for their temporal needs. It was
chiefly to a
missionary enterprise that
Indiana's first permanent settlement
was due. Father De Beaubois, the
priest at Kaskaskia, and in charge of the religious interests of the
Illinois
settlements, desired to
extend his work by the establishment of a post on the Wabash and an
assembling of Indians there. He gained the
approval of the Louisiana
authorities, who also desired
an additional supply of clergy and an establishment of nuns, of whom
there were none in Louisiana
at the time.
In 1725 De
Beaubois was sent to
France on this mission. The
Chevalier de Bourgmont had
collected twenty-two chiefs and representative Indians to accompany
him, but just before they were to embark the
ship in which they were going
sank at its moorings, and
this so frightened them that only half a dozen of the Indians could be
induced to make the journey.
Their visit in France was as
notable an event in the world of fashion as the visit of Pocahontas to
England, and the account of their presentation at
the court and attendant
celebrations fills thirty- three
pages of the court journal, Le Mercure de France. De Beaubois succeeded
in his undertaking and sent out to Louisiana the nuns who founded the
celebrated Ursuline Convent at New Orleans, and with them Father
D'Outreleau, who was to be the
first "Missionary to the
Ouabache." Orders were also
sent for the establishment of a post. The contemplated mission did not
succeed; but in the summer of
1731 Sieur de Vincennes
brought a small party of soldiers and a band of Piankeshaws from the
Vermillion million River and founded the post which still bears his
name.
By this time the
efforts of the
English to get control of the
fur trade had become more
serious, and they, too, had enlisted Indian allies both in the north
and in the south.
First came the disastrous
Chickasaw campaign of 1736,
in which Vincennes lost his life;
and after that intermittent warfare till the close of the French and
Indian war. In
all this the fighting was
outside of our region, and
not till the British sought to take possession of the Northwest was it
brought
back in Pontiac's war. Again
there was comparative quiet
until the war of the Revolution, which inaugurated the contest of the
American and the Indian in this section
for the occupancy of the
soil. Of the period then
beginning I have sought to present some authentic stories in the
following pages. It would require volumes to present
a full record of individual
adventure, but I have aimed
to give some illustrations of various phases of the contest, of battles
and massacres, of hardships, of white and
Indian captivity.
In doing this I
have had especially
in mind the preservation of the Indian names of Indiana in their proper
forms and with their real meanings. This will be regarded
by many as a presumptuous
undertaking, and with some
reason. Several months ago, in
a letter to me concerning Indian place names, Gen. R. H. Pratt, of
Carlisle
School fame, said: "The
subject has not specially interested
me for the reason that, in my experience, not one in twenty of the
Indian names in use could be recognized by any member of the tribe from
which the name was derived. The attempts to perpetuate such names are
therefore only sentimental abortion." This is very true, and true of
Indiana names as well as of
those elsewhere,but there is
no question of perpetuating the names. They are here to stay. In the
defiant words of Mrs.
Sigourney — "Their name is on
your waters — Ye may not wash
it out."
And nobody desires
to wash them out. That were a waste of energy much better directed to
washing something else. The practical question is merely whether we
shall continue their use
without an effort to ascertain their
origin and meaning. As to this, the extent of their corruption seems to
me an attraction rather than
an objection. Nobody cares
much for a puzzle that is readily solved, in philology or in any other
line.
But there is at least passing
interest in identifying any
battered and distorted relic; and in reality our Indian names are no
more
corrupted than some others.
Probably no Frenchman would
be reminded of his native tongue
by "Picketwire," but that is what the cowboys of Colorado and New
Mexico have made of the Purgatoire River. Probably no Frenchman would
suspect the Smackover River of Arkansas of bearing a French name, but
that is what remains of "Chemin Couvert." Our own Mary Delome has
rather a French air, but hardly enough to suggest
that this tributary of the
Maumee was named "Marais de
l'Orme" (Elm Swamp). On some
of our maps of Laporte County will be found "Lake Dishmaugh," which
does not look much like French, but it was
originally "Lac du Chemin,"
though Chamberlain made the
guess that it had been "Lac des Moines."
Surely no Hindoo
would lay claim to
"Indiana" as of his language,
but it is from the same root as "Hindoo" itself, for it comes from
"Sindhu," the native name of the
Indus —literally "the river" —
whence Sindh or Scinde, the
province covering the delta. This the Persians perverted' to "Hindu";
the Greeks made it "Indos"; the Romans
"Indus," and from them it
passed to the various European
forms. When Columbus discovered America he supposed it was India;
hence, he called the natives "Indios" ;
and the name has abided. At
the treaty of Ft. Stanwix, in
1768, the Indians ceded a tract of land in western Pennsylvania to
certain traders, whose goods they had taken or
destroyed; and for this tract
and for the company organized
to exploit it, the name "Indiana" was evolved by the English owners. It
is constructed on the same principle as
Florida, Georgia, Virginia,
etc., and means a place of
Indians, or pertaining to Indians. This name was passed on to us when
Ohio was cut off from Northwest Territory in 1800; but in the name of
"Indiana County,"
Pennsylvania, it still appears
at the place of its birth.
As a matter of
fact there is usually
no great difficulty in
ascertaining the real Indian name if it is of a living language, for
the Indians usually
perpetuate their own names, though
occasionally they have their own corruptions. Most of the Miami names I
obtained from Gabriel Godfroy, the best Miami interpreter in Indiana,
and Kilsokwa, the oldest of the Indiana Miamis, and one who speaks very
little English. For the Pota watomi I am indebted to Thomas Topash, an
intelligent Potawatomi of Michigan; Quashma, a Chilocco School boy, and
Capt. J. A.
Scott, of Nadeau Agency,
Kansas, who called to his aid
Mr. Blandin, the agency interpreter, and old Kack-kack (Kiak-kiak —
equivalent to the American term, "chicken-
hawk"; i. e., any
of the larger
hawks), recently deceased. For others I am indebted largely to various
friends who made inquiry of Indians.
It is much to
be.regretted that there
is not in print more available information concerning the Indian
languages, and especially of the Algonquian languages, from which so
many of our place names are taken. There is considerable material for
the Odjibwa and the dialects of
the Lenni Lenape, but scarcely anything for the languages of the
important Potawatomi, Shawnee and Miami nations, and what little there
is is not entirely
reliable. And this is true of
many other Indian languages.
At the last session of Congress (1907-8) the Indiana Historical Society
made an earnest effort to secure a small
additional appropriation for
the Bureau of Ethnology for
taking up systematically and specially
the preservation of these languages, but notwithstanding the
co-operation of the Bureau, the appropriation was
rejected by the House, after
it had been made by the
Senate. There should unquestionably be an united effort by the
historical
societies of the country to
have this work done. When we
consider the enormous effort that has been made to rescue the languages
of
Egypt, Babylon and other
ancient countries, it should
arouse a realization of the importance of preserving the living
Janguages of our own country while there is yet time, and
especially so because these
are not written languages,
and if once lost they are lost forever.
And they are worth
preserving, not
only for the influence they
have had on our own language,
but for their intrinsic merit.Nearly
all of our common errors as to Indian names are due to the prevalent
impression that Indian languages are very crude. In reality they have a
very perfect
grammatical system of their
own, but differing in important features from that of any other known
languages. The grammatical
inflections of Algonquian
words are more refined and
present nicer distinctions of meaning, not only than those of the
English, but
also than those of any
European language. If anyone
doubts this statement I would refer him to the conjugation of the verb
"waub"
of the Odjibwa, as given by
School craft in his "Archives,"
covering ninety quarto pages; and
this is not complete, because it does not cover what are known as the
"transitions,"
i. e., the combinations with
subject and object pronouns,
which are characteristic of these
languages. And yet, complicated as this might seem, it is on a very
simple
and rational linguistic
system, and simply expresses through
verbal inflection the same ideas
that we express through various forms of circumlocution.
I doubt that
anyone has ever
reproduced exactly the Indian
pronunciation of words.All of
the Algonquian languages have some sounds that are not found in the
English
language, and none of them
have all of the English sounds.
In addition to this they all have interchangeable sounds. For example,
the sounds of "b" or "p" may be used at the
will of the speaker in many
words. Moreover, there is an
emphasis and accent that white men
rarely acquire — in fact, I have never found an Indian who knew a white
man that could speak his language just as the
Indians speak it. However, I
have endeavored to reproduce
Indian pronunciation, as it sounds to me, as nearly as possible in
ordinary
English characters, with a
few additions. I have
represented long "a" as in "fate" by "ay"; continental "a" as in "far"
by "ah;" and broad "a" as in "fall" by "aw." I have
used "q" to represent a sound
more nearly resembling German
"ch" than any other I know
of, but having the quality of "gh," pronounced in the same way.
Nasalized sounds are indicated by a superior "n," and are
pronounced as in the French.
If the effort I
have been able to
give to the subject shall
promote the study and record of
the Indian languages, I shall feel largely repaid for it, for the
opportunity for this work is
rapidly decreasing. In our governmental Indian schools the study of
Indian languages is not encouraged, and perhaps properly so, from a
practical point of
view, for the primary object
is to fit the Indian youth to
support themselves, and for this the use of the English language is
vital. It
is already quite common to
find "educated Indians" who
do not speak their own language at all, and obviously the more rapid
the
process of "Americanizing"
the more rapid the extinction
of the American languages. It is, therefore, evident that the work
should be
undertaken as speedily as
possible.
Prior to this time
there have been
two efforts at collecting
Indian place names of Indiana. In
his Indiana Gazetteer (1849) Mr. Chamberlain has noted a number of
Delaware
names, which were presumably
obtained from white men who
had some familiarity with the
Delaware language. There were
several of such persons in the State at the time. Later Daniel Hough
made a more extended effort and collected nearly
everything then available in
print, as well as making some
investigations among the Miami Indians. The results were published in
the Geological Report of 1882
in the form of a map, with
comments by Judge Hiram Beck.
The comments are of no practical value, being chiefly attempts to
deduce
Miami and Potawatomi words
from Odjibwa stems, but the
map is of material value, although Mr. Hough's patient work has been
marred in several instances by mistakes of
the engraver.
