ON the morning of the sixteenth day out from St.
Joseph we arrived at the entrance of Rocky Canyon, two
hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake. It was along in this
wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white
men, except the stage stations, that we came across the
wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this
writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could
see and all we could learn, they are very considerably
inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California;
inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior
to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots,
and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of
Africa. Indeed, I have been obliged to look the bulky volumes
of Wood's "Uncivilized Races of Men" clear through in order
to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the
Goshoots. I find but one people fairly open to that shameful
verdict. It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa. Such
of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about
the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in
complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro;
their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been
hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even
generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a
silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of
everything, covertly, like all the other "Noble Red Men" that
we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their
countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless,
like all other Indians; prideless beggars--for if the beggar
instinct were left out of an Indian he would not "go," any
more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry,
and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though
often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no
higher ambition than to kill and eat jack-ass rabbits,
crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the
buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have
the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something
which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is referred
to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children,
these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no
villages, and no gatherings together into strictly defined
trival communities--a people whose only shelter is a rag cast
on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who
inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that
our country or any other can exhibit.The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, which-ever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to.
One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots, and yet they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out.
. . . The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man--even of the scholarly savages in the "Last of the Mohicans" who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's works and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks--I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive--and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings--but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine--at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody's.
