52 PHARMACAL PLANTS AND THEIR CULTURE. 



figurative and highly exaggerated, so that, after all, it is quite difficult 

 to deduce the cold facts. 



The Indian tribes of the United States differ in intelligence and 

 amenability to the civilizing influence. In such a comparison the 

 tribes of California 1 do not shine forth favorably. They do not have 

 the dignified mien and fair intelligence of the Choctaws and Chicka- 

 saws, for example, nor the savage aggressiveness of the Mohawks, 

 Apaches, and other tribes. As near as can be ascertained, they are 

 very filthy, not warlike, though vindictive, ignorant, and resourceless, 

 though capable of subsisting where no other tribe would care to live. 

 The desert tribes are the very lowest in the scale of savagery; only 

 occasionally do they engage in the hunt and in fishing. Their language 

 is very crude, and their vocabulary very limited. The women of some 

 tribes have acquired much skill in basket-making. Their clothing and 

 dwellings are of the crudest. Tribal conditions and social and family 

 relationships are very indefinite and loose. This is approximately the 

 summing up of the California Indians by the historian H. H. Bancroft 

 in his "Native Races of the Pacific Coast/' 



The most common diseases and pathologic affections of the California 

 Indians (this applies to American Indians generally) are consumption, 

 rheumatism, aches and pains, scrofulous affections, sore eyes, chronic 

 ulcer, and itch. It is generally asserted that smallpox and syphilis were 

 introduced by the whites. Contagious diseases among Indians are gen- 

 erally laid to the doors of the whites. This is affirmed by no less an 

 authority than Dr. Carlos Montezuma, of the Apache tribe. It is very 

 evident that the attempts to civilize and segregate the Indians is con- 

 ducive to consumption (pneumonitis). This is fully demonstrated in 

 the case of the tribes of Indian Territory. Several prominent members 

 of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian Council informed the writer that 

 it was only a question of time when pneumonia would cause the com- 

 plete extermination of the Indian Territory tribes. The blame is laid 

 to the removal from the more congenial climate of Florida and Alabama, 

 their former homes, to the colder, malarial climate of Indian Territory. 



Naturally, medical practice among the tribes of California aborigines 

 was not, and is not, of a high order. General ailments were treated by 

 the incantations and mummeries of the medicine men, who apparently 

 did not have a very high standing, even in their own tribe. If a med- 

 icine man failed to effect a cure, or the patient died under his treatment, 



1 There is apparently a close relationship between the various tribes along the entire 

 Pacific coast. For example, the burial customs and certain social customs of the 

 Hupas, as recorded by P. E. Goddard, are almost identical with those of the Nitinats 

 and Clallams on the west coast of Vancouver Island. These latter tribes were once 

 prosperous and independent, but in consequence of the ravages of warfare, smallpox, 

 and syphilis, they began to dwindle rapidly in number, and a more rapid total extinc- 

 tion was prevented by a union of the two tribes. There now remain, all told, about 

 forty members (men, women, and children) living in a village of frame buildings on 

 a low island in San Juan bayou, Vancouver Island, just opposite Cape Flattery. They 

 are squat in figure, semi-aquatic in habit, and are extremely filthy, being infested 

 with body lice and other parasites. Their present tribal organization is very loose. 



