Crows & Cards (27 page)

Another factor that contributed mightily to the downfall of apprenticeships was the rapid spread of Europeans across North America. New towns sprang up everywhere, and these towns had many available jobs. It became relatively easy for apprentices to run away. They could break the terms of their contracts with craftsmen and still be able to find employment in a new city that was in need of workers.

The most famous example of such a runaway was one of the United States' Founding Fathers—Benjamin Franklin. Apprenticed as a printer to his own brother in Boston, Franklin broke the terms of his apprenticeship and ran off to Philadelphia, where he started his own print shop. Years later he went on to write about it in his autobiography, which was published after his death in 1790 and became a bestseller of its day, going through fifty-five reprints in the next thirty years. Certainly his story must have influenced other young apprentices to follow his lead and start their own adventures.

It is safe to say that one occupation that didn't have a formal system of apprenticeship was that of the riverboat gambler. However, such gamblers would have certainly been willing to take advantage of a naive young boy setting forth on his own. They were willing to dupe almost anyone for their own personal gain. Cheating was their way of life, and the telegraph described in this story was only one of the ways they rigged games of chance. In the years leading up to the Civil War, gamblers thrived on steamboats and in river towns, living off the huge influx of people and money along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. That was where the action was.

***

If you had been a twelve-year-old Indian girl in 1849, you might have found yourself leading as nomadic an existence as the princess in this story. The Indian tribes at the center of the continent were suffering mightily as tens of thousands of European settlers arrived each year. The pressure to force Indian people westward had been mounting since the founding of the first European colonies. The basic reason behind this colonial expansion? Land for settlers. By 1849, European settlers in the United States outnumbered Native Americans by roughly thirty to one. But fifty years earlier, in 1800, the ratio had been only five to one. Fifty years before that, the ratio had been close to one to one. Go back another fifty years to 1700, and Native Americans outnumbered Europeans by perhaps five to one.

In her own words, a young Indian girl named Zitkala-Sa of the Yankton Sioux tribe, which now lives in South Dakota, remembers the impact of Europeans on her life in the later 1800s:

Late in the morning, my friend Judéwin gave me a terrible warning. Judéwin knew a few words of English, and she, had overheard the paleface, woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!

We discussed our fate some moments, and when Judéwin said, "We have to submit, because they are strong," I rebelled.

"
No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!" I answered.

I watched my chance, and when no one noticed, I disappeared. I crept up the stairs as quietly as I could in my squeaking shoes—my moccasins had been exchanged for shoes.... I found a large room with three white beds in it.... On my hands and knees I crawled under the bed, and cuddled myself in the dark corner.... From my hiding place I peered out, shuddering with fear whenever I heard footsteps nearby.... What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know. I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.... I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.

This young girl had to change her name as well as her hairstyle and became known as Gertrude Bonnin. The quotation is taken from "The Cutting of My Long Hair," collected in
American Indian Stories
(published by Rio Grande Press in 1976) and reprinted in
A Braid of Lives: Native American Childhood
(see section on further reading).

The princess and the chief's tribe was a neighbor of the Yankton Sioux. From the time of Zeb's story onward, all Indians west of the Mississippi were slowly being confined to reservations, making it harder for them to travel about and live off the land as their ancestors had. The princess would not have been raised on a reservation, but her children might have been and her grandchildren definitely would have been. Once forced onto reservations, Native Americans everywhere suffered the same traumatic loss of culture described above as Europeans tried to convert them to Christianity and the white man's ways.

***

As for visions and dreams, they played a central part in the religion of Native Americans at the time of Zeb's story. The members of many tribes went on vision quests as young adults in hopes of finding a spirit who would protect and guide them. They prepared for this by fasting for several days. Often the vision they received was of an animal, on whom they were later able to call for the kind of help that an outsider might label as magic or a miracle. Certainly Chief Standing Tenbears benefited from the power of such a spirit.

***

By 1849 the total population of the United States was twenty-three million, of which roughly three million were slaves of African descent. What was it like to be a slave? First, all were the property of another person. Just as people today can own a house or car or big-screen TV, people back then could own other people. What if you were someone else's property? The best you could hope for would be to have a humane master—one who treated you kindly—but many weren't that lucky. To get more work out of their slaves, some owners resorted to whippings and beatings.

Slaves rebelled against such treatment in many different ways. Some resorted to armed uprisings, such as Nat Turner's slave revolt in 1831 in Virginia, which had to be put down by federal and state troops. Self-mutilation—harming oneself—was another form of rebellion, for this deprived the owner of work from the slave. A carpenter slave in Kentucky was reported to have cut off one of his hands as well as the fingers of his other hand to prevent himself from being sold down the river. Finally, running away from their masters was a common form of rebellion. Those who tried escaping slavery this way either joined groups of slaves hiding in wilderness areas or made for the Free States, where slavery was outlawed (basically, any state north of the Ohio River was a Free State). How badly did slaves want to be free? One woman in North Carolina ran away from her owner sixteen times, which of course meant that she was caught and punished just as often.

***

St. Louis was the boomtown of the era. In the century before this story, it was ruled by three different countries—Spain, France, and the United States, who acquired it as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1849 it truly was the gateway to the West, a sprawling, rambunctious meeting place for a wide range of people and cultures. Roughly half of its 1849 population of seventy thousand people had been born in other countries, and of the half that were native-born Americans, a majority of them came from other states. Also included in St. Louis's population were 2,700 slaves and 1,300 free blacks. Native American tribes, such as the Osage and Illinois, had been pushed out of the area, but they remained regular visitors to the city, often camping on the banks of Chouteau's Pond.

***

But not all movement was westward in America. There was also a tiny but newsworthy trickle of Indians who traveled eastward. Sometimes they went to the nation's capital to meet the president. Other times they traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.

In the 1820s a group of twelve Osage Indians, including a man named Big Soldier, left St. Louis for Europe. They traveled widely, seeing France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. They attended operas, were mobbed by crowds of curiosity seekers, were taken advantage of by greedy promoters, and were wined and dined by King Charles X of France. The "Noble Savage," as North American Indians were sometimes romantically thought of by Europeans, excited the imaginations of royalty and commoners alike.

Certainly the attitudes of Europeans toward Indians were contradictory. Europeans may have invaded and taken Indian lands, but sometimes they deeply admired the Indians' close ties to nature and their customs, which were viewed as exotic. It was documented that Indians traveling across Europe received gifts from their hosts and that these gifts became prized possessions upon their return home. Travelers to Missouri in the 1840s recorded that Big Soldier, one of the twelve Osage who had traveled across Europe twenty years before, proudly showed off a French bronze medal given to him on his trip. The medal bore a portrait of the French general Lafayette. Big Soldier spoke of the general with affection and treasured the medal above all his possessions.

Did an Indian ever receive a golden crown from a European monarch, as in this story? Not that was recorded. When gifting Indians, Europeans were far more stingy. They were most likely to part with what they thought to be cheap trinkets than anything they valued. Yet being of European descent myself, I like to think it possible that at least one prince or king, overcome with brotherly love (and perhaps too much wine), might have bestowed a crown on a visiting Indian chief—a gift from one blue blood to another. Such a generous gift might have been made by a kinsman of someone like Prince Maximilian of Germany, who traveled through St. Louis in the 1830s and lived for a time among the Mandan Indians of the upper Missouri River. Writing of his travels, Prince Maximilian said, "Wonders passed us as in a dream."

***

As for traveling medicine shows, they were descended from quack doctors called mountebanks who for centuries had sold elixirs and cures across Europe. In America such con artists flourished in colonial times and by the late 1800s had become wildly popular. They peddled tonics, which were mostly alcohol, and provided entertainment.

Whether or not there was ever a medicine wagon pulled by a camel is unproven, but in the later 1800s medicine shows often used animals such as elephants to help draw crowds. In this way they were a forerunner of the traveling circuses eventually made famous by P. T. Barnum and the Ringling brothers. As to whether there were camels in North America by 1849, the first camel to reach North America was believed to have come in the early 1700s to Virginia. And it is well documented that in 1856 the U.S. Army imported camels to Texas to help settle the West, an experiment that failed but spawned a host of colorful stories about the sightings of camels in the wilderness. It certainly seems possible that an enterprising showman such as Dr. Buffalo Hilly, who had traveled to Europe and possibly beyond, could have brought home a camel to pull his wagon.

Did medicine shows include Indians? Oh, yes. People of the time were eager to be treated by the potions and cures that Native Americans had learned from tribal elders or seen in visions. Patent medicine companies, such as the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, became successful because of it. Traveling medicine shows included Indians for the same reason. Although many of the traveling shows and patent medicines were later proven to be run by white men who were con artists, there were still patients who claimed remarkable cures thanks to them. Perhaps such patients had been treated by medicine men as talented as Chief Standing Tenbears.

FURTHER READING

Some of the books I consulted in preparing to write this story include the following:

B
OOKS
A
BOUT
S
T.
L
OUIS

Primm, James Neal.
Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980.
3rd ed. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998. An encyclopedic look at the great city.

Ross, Oscar Mervene.
The History of St. Louis, 1848–1853.
St. Louis: Washington University, 1949. A master's thesis written and stored at Washington University in St. Louis. It brought to life the early city of St. Louis for me. My thanks to Washington University for sharing this gem. (A master's thesis is a lengthy research paper by a college student working on an advanced degree.)

B
OOKS
A
BOUT
S
TEAMBOATING AND THE
M
ISSISSIPPI
R
IVER

Bissell, Richard.
My Life on the Mississippi, or Why I Am Not Mark Twain.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Worth reading for a perspective on Mark Twain.