Bringing Indians to the Book

4. Denying the Salmon God

4 DENYING THE SALMON GOD MISSIONARIES REGARDED INDIANS OF THE LOWER COlumbia as very strange people. They were human beings, of course, and capable of achieving Christian salvation; otherwise the missions would have made no sense whatever. But they were also heathens, uncivilized, habituated to odd practices and beliefs. The first news of them, which set the mission idea ablaze, made a sensational point of their flattened heads. They found broad faces beautiful and squeezed their infants' skulls between hinged boards. What would that process do to their intelligence or even their souls? Captain Wyeth drew good audiences in Boston in I833 when he brought a flat-headed Indian boy onto the platform with him and demonstrated that he could speak and answer questions. Jason Lee followed his example and brought young William Brooks east with him in I 838. Brooks not only dressed and behaved like a conventional young Christian but also answered many questions in English and even displayed a ready wit. He helped rake in funds for the missions at meetings in city after city, until he fell ill and died in Philadelphia (Brosnan 35, IIO-II, II9-2I, I39). IS8 DENYING THE SALMON GOD Lee himself was surprised by Brooks's accomplishments. He wrote that Brooks had not known a word of English three years earlier and had not spent much time in school, yet he rose to the occasion wonderfully . "Though I have seen him at table scores of times with ladies and gentlemen, in various parts of the Union, yet I never in a single instance saw him, by accident or through ignorance, do anything that would be considered outlandish even by the polite or well-bred" (ChristianAdvocate of October 4,1839, quoted in Brosnan III). Lee thus held his readers between two poles of expectation. Left to themselves, Indians would be outlandish; but once exposed to Christianity , they could become fully civilized. He and other writers often stressed both extremes. They made glowing progress reports about conversions, medical treatments, schools, and moral reforms. But at the same time they painted very dark scenes of Indian life apart from the missions. They reported seeingmany Indians livingin squalor-poorlyclothed, dirty, and showing many signs of disease and malnutrition. They lived from season to season on fish, game, roots, and berries. This diet had looked inadequate to Lewis and Clark even when they were hungry themselves. It would go on seeming meager to the missionaries, who were often farm people and prized their dairy cattle. The missionaries also tookin many children left at the missions, and noted that the adults around them seemed driven to beg or steal. Indians seemed pitiable when viewed through such lenses of prejudice . Close at hand, their ways also seemed different and outrageous. Their offenses ranged from the annoying to the intolerable. Some seemed intractable though petty, such as the constant pestering for worldly goods. Others were ingrained and puzzling. How couldbigamy be curtailed, for example, without leaving some wives and children destitute? How could revenge killingbe abolished, when white people's laws meted out Indian floggings and hangings? Taken altogether, however , Indians' ways seemed tinged with ingrained evil. Reports of various incidents and offenses add up to a long indictment of depravity. Indians lied and stole. They gambled, drank, andbecame violent. Their shamans worked up frenzied rituals that ended in slashed flesh. Men 159 DENYING THE SALMON GOD beat their wives and children. Indians took captives, held them as slaves, and beat, abused, and even killed them, then threw their bodies out as carrion. They practiced abortion and child killing. They sometimes sacrificed slaves and others as part of their funeral rituals, and even buried people alive. No missionary could imagine a coherent explanation for such things, except the rule of Satan over the wilderness. The mission people's writings show a steady wariness about Indians' supposed wiles and duplicity, and their ingrained propensities to sin and crime. It is hard to find any passage of admiration for native arts, crafts, skills, or virtues. Very few Indians even have personal names, except for good Christian names assigned in a mission school or at baptism. Only a handful are mentioned at any length, the few who were conspicuously useful as translators, intermediary evangelists, or steady laborers. Asa Smith perhaps came as close as anyone to broad, direct acquaintance and interchange with a particular Indian's mind, for he worked...