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UTE ELOQUENCE
(SPEECH OF OLD MAN COLOROW AT AN OLD SETTLER'S REUNION IN NORTH PARK, COLORADO.)
The following short oration, delivered by Colorow in the North Park, I send in as a sort of companion-piece to the letter written by Jack, and given in this work. Few people actually know the true spirit of Greek and Roman oratory that still lingers about the remnants of this people, now nearly driven from the face of the earth. I have never seen this speech in print, and I give it so that the youth of the nineteenth century may commit it to memory, and declaim it on the regular public school speech day.
"Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: – Warriors, we are but a little band of American citizens, encircled by a horde of pale-faced usurpers.
"Where years agone, in primeval forests, the swift foot of the young Indian followed the deer through shimmering light beneath the broad boughs of the spreading tree, the white man, in his light summer suit, with his pale-faced squaw, is playing croquet; and we stand idly by and allow it.
"Where erst the hum of the arrow, as it sped to its mark, was heard upon the summer air; and the panting hunter in bosky dell, quenched his parched lips at the bubbling spring, the white man has erected a huge wigwam, and enclosed the spring, and people from the land of the rising sun come to gain their health, and the vigor of their youth. Men come to this place and limp around in the haunts of the red man with crutches, and cork legs, and liver pads.
"Things are not precisely as they formerly were. They have changed. There seems to be a new administration. We are not apparently in the ascendancy to any great extent.
"Above the hallowed graves of our ancestors the buck-wheater hoes the cross-eyed potato, and mashes the immortal soul out of the speckled sqursh-bug. The sacred dust of our forefathers is nourishing the roots of the Siberian crab apple tree, and the early Scandinavian turnip.
"Our sun is set. Our race is run. We had better select a small hole in the earth into which we may crawl and then draw it in after us, and tuck it carefully about us.
"These mountains are ours. These plains are ours. Ours through all time to come. We need them in our business. The wail of departed spirits is on the winds that blow over this wide free land. The tears of departed heroes of our people fall in the rain drops, for their land is given away. To-day I look upon the sad wreck of a great people, and I ask you to go with me, and with our united hearts' blood win back the fair domain. Let two or three able-bodied warriors follow me and hold my coat while I mash' the white-livered snipe off the lowlands beyond recognition.
"Let us steal in upon the frontier while the regular-army has gone to his dinner and get a few Caucasians for breakfast.
"Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire." [Applause.]
THE AGED INDIAN'S LAMENT
[copyrighted: all rights reserved.]
Warriors, I am an aged hemlock. The mountain-winds sigh among my withered limbs. A few more suns and I shall fall amid the solemn hush of the forest, and my place will be vacant. I shall tread the walks of the happy hunting grounds, and sing glad hallelujahs where the worm dieth not and the fire-water is not quenched.
"Once I was the pride of my tribe and the swift-foot of the prairie. I stood with my brethren like the towering oak, and my prowess was known throughout my nation. Now I bow to the wintry blast and hump myself with a vigorous and unanimous hump. My eagle-eye is dimmed. The fleetness of my limbs is gone. The vigor of my youth is past. I do not shout now to my warriors, for the cliffs and rocks refuse to answer back my cry, and it sinks away like the sad moan of the low-grade refractory mule.
"When my brethren go forth to shoot the swift-footed ranchman as he gambols on the hill-sides, I cower above the camp-fire and rub mutton-tallow on my favorite chilblain through the still watches of the night.
"Warriors, I yearn for immortality. The White Father has said that over yonder the life is one of uninterrupted editorial excursions. No inflammatory rheumatism can ever enter there.
"I want to be a copper-colored angel and out-fly the boss angel of the entire outfit. I want to see Pocahontas and other great men who have clomb the golden stair. I want something to eat, so as to surprise my stomach. I want a long period of rest and soul-destroying inactivity.
"Warriors, my sun is set. I have lost my grip. My features are sharpened by age, and one by one my white teeth have resigned till but two are left, and they do not seem to mash by an overwhelming majority. I cannot masticate buffalo tripe or even relish my tarantula on toast as I once could.
"My twilight is fading into evening, and the day is gone. I hear the crickets chirp in the dead grass and I know that the night is at hand. Far away upon the gentle winds I hear the soft cooing of the Colorado tom-cat, and the thump of the stove lid as it misses the cat and strikes with a hollow, mournful sound against the corral. A few more moons and you will meet, but you will miss me. There will be one vacant chair.
"The veal-cutlet and the watermelon of the pale-face hold out no inducements to me. The circus and the icecream festival will miss me, for I shall be far away in the ether-blue, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. I shall be revelling in more eternal rest than I know what to do with.
"Farewell, my warriors. Make my humble grave low in the valley where the wild columbine and the Rocky Mountain flea can clamber over my last resting place, and carve upon the slab above my head the name of Minneconjo-presipitatenuxqonicatahskunkahcoquipahhahamazanpah kahconkaska. The-cross-eyed-caterpillar-who-walks-on-his-hind-legs-and howls-like-the-pale-face-pappoose-who-adver-tises-to-hold-down-the blonde-bumble-bee."
HOW A MINING STAMPEDE BREAKS OUT
Dear reader, shall I give you a few symptoms of the mining epidemic in Mountain towns? All right. I will anyhow!
Symptom 1. – A long-haired man is seen pounding up a piece of quartz about the size of a man's hand.
Symptom 2. – Two men meander up to him and ask him where he got it.
Symptom 3. – The long-haired man looks down into the mortar, and lies gently to the inquiring minds who linger near.
Symptom 4. – More men come around. The long-haired man gets a gold-pan and doubles himself up over the ditch and begins to pan.
Symptom 5. – Two hundred more men come out of saloons and other mercantile establishments and join the throng.
Symptom 6. – The long-haired man gets down to black sand, and shows several colors about the size of a blue-jay's ear.
Symptom 7 times. – Several solitary horsemen start out, with some pack-mules, and blank location notices, and valley tan. The plot deepens. The telegraph gets red-hot. Men who have been impecunious, for lo, these many years, come around to pay some old bills. Poor men buy spotted dogs and gold-headed canes. Stingy men get reckless, and buy the first box of strawberries without asking the price.
I have caught the epidemic myself.
I am getting reckless. Instead of turning my last summer lavender pants hind side before, and removing the ham sandwich lithograph on the front breadths, I have purchased a new pair.
I never experienced such a wild, glad feeling of perfect abandon.
I go to church and chip in for the heathen, perfectly regardless of expense. If Zion languishes, I come forward and throw in the small currency with a lavish hand.
Banks, offices, hotels, saloons and private residences show specimens of quartz carrying free gold and carbonates, hard, soft, and medium soft, with iron protoxide of nitrogen, rhombohedral glucose indications of valedictory and free milling oxide of anti-fat in abundance.
Nellis, who lives near the Mill Creek carbonate claims, came in to town the other day to get an injunction against the miners, so that he could injunct them from prospecting in his cellar, and staking his pie-plant bed.
When he goes out after dark to drive the cow out of his turnip patch, he falls over a stake every little while, with a notice tacked on it, which sets forth that the undersigned, viz., Johnny Comelately, Joe Newbegin, Shoo Fly Smith, and Union Forever Dandelion claim 1,500 feet in length, by 600 feet in width for mineral purposes on this claim, to be known as "The Gal with the skim-milk Eye," together with all dips, spurs, angles or variations, gold, silver, or other precious metals therein contained.
Mr. Nellis says he is glad to see a "boom," and at first he did all he could to make it pleasant for prospectors; but lately he thinks that their sociability has become too earnest and too simultaneous.
I told him that the only way I could see to avoid losing his grip, and having his string-beans dug up prematurely, was to stake the entire ranche as a placer claim, buy him a Gatling gun that would shoot the large size of buckshot, and then trust in the mysterious movements of an overruling Providence.
I do not know whether he took my advice or not; but I am looking anxiously along the Mill-Creek road every day, for a six mule team loaded with disorganized remains, and driven by a man who looks as though he had glutted his vengeance, and had two or three gluts left over on his hands.
THE GREAT ROCKY MOUNTAIN REUNION OF YALLER DOGS
Secretary Spates, the silver-tongued orator and gilt-edged mouth organ of Wyoming, acting general superintendent and governor extraordinary of Wyoming, expressed a wish the other day for a dog. He had a light yellow cane, and wanted a dog to match. He said that he wanted something to love. If he could wake up in the stillness of the night and hear his faithful dog fighting fleas, and licking his chops, and coughing, he (the secretary) would feel as though he was loved, at least? by one. Some friends thought it would be a pleasant thing to surprise Mr. Spates with a dog. So they procured a duplicate key to his room and organized themselves into a dog vigilance committee. There were several yellow dogs around Cheyenne that were not in use, and their owners consented to part with them and try to control their grief while they worried along from day to day without them. These dogs were collected and placed in the secretary's room.
Throwing a heterogeneous mass of dogs together in that way, and all of them total strangers to each other, in the natural course of things creates something of a disturbance, and that was the result in this case. When the secretary arrived, the dogs were holding a session with closed doors. The presiding officer had lost control, and a surging crowd of yellow dogs had the floor. Only one dog was excepted. He was struggling with all his strength against the most collossal attack of colic that ever convulsed a pale, yellow dog. Just as he would get to feeling kind of comfortable, a spasm would catch him on the starboard quarter and his back would hump itself like a 1,000-legged worm, and with such force as to thump the floor with the stumpy tail of the demoralized dog and jar the bric-a-brac on the brackets and what-nots of the Secretary of Wyoming Territory.
Just then the secretary arrived. He was whistling a trill or two from the "Turkish Patrol," when he got within earshot of the convention. Several people met him and asked him what was going on up in his room. The secretary blushed and said he guessed there was nothing out of character, and wondered if someone was putting up a Conkling story on him, to kill a Spates boom.
When he got to the door and went in, thirty-seven dogs ran between his legs? and went out the door with a good deal of intensity. More of them would have run between the secretary's legs, but they couldn't all make it.
Mr. Spates was mad. He felt hurt and grieved. The dogs had jumped on the bed and torn the pillow shams into minute bandages, and wiped their feet on the coverlid. They had licked the blacking off his boots, and eaten his toilet soap. One of them had tried on the secretary's dressing gown; but it was not large enough, and he had taken it off in a good deal of a hurry.
Long after it was supposed that the last dog had gone out, yellow dogs, of different degrees of yellowishness, and moving in irregular orbits, would be thrown from the secretary's room with great force. Some of them were killed, while others were painfully injured. It is said that there are fewer yellow dogs in Cheyenne now than there used to be, and those that are there are more subdued, and reserved, and taciturn, and skinned on the back, than they used to be; while the secretary has a far-away look in his eye, like a man who has trusted humanity once too often, and been everlastingly and unanimously left.
WHAT WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE HAS DONE FOR WYOMING
SOME TESTIMONIALS, AND ONE THING AND ANOTHER
The managing editor of a Boston paper, is getting material together relative to the practical workings of Woman's Suffrage, and as Wyoming is at present working a scheme of that kind, he wants an answer to the following questions:
1. – Has it been of real benefit to the Territory?
2. – If so, what has it accomplished?
3. – How does it affect education, morals, courts, &c.?
4. – What proportion of the women vote?
ANSWERS
1. – Yes, it has indeed been of real benefit to the Territory in many ways.
Until woman's suffrage came among us, life was a drag – a monotonous sameness, and simultaneous continuousness. Now it is not that way. Woman comes forward with her ballot, and puts new life into the flagging energies of the great political circles. She purifies the political atmosphere, and comes to the polls with her suffrage done up in a little wad, and rammed down into her glove, and redeems the country.
2. – It has accomplished more than the great outside world wots of. Philosophers and statesmen may think that they wot; but they don't. Not a wot.
To others outside of Wyoming, woman's suffrage is a mellow dream; but here it is a continuous, mellow, yielding reality. We know what we are talking about. We are acquainted with a lady who came here with the light of immortality shining in her eye, and the music of the spheres was singing in her ears. She was apparently on her last limbs, if we may be allowed that expression. But woman's suffrage came to her with healing on its wings, and the rose of health again bloomed on her cheek, and her appetite came back like the famine in Ireland. Now she wrestles with the cast-iron majolica ware of the kitchen during the day, and in the evening works a cross-eyed elephant on a burlaps tidy, and talks about the remonetization of the currency.
Without attempting to answer the last two questions in a short article like this, we will simply give a few certificates and testimonials of those who have tried it:
Prairie-Dog Ranche, Jan. 3, 1880.
"Dear Sir: I take great pleasure in bearing testimony to the efficacy of woman's suffrage. It is indeed a boon to thousands. I was troubled in the east beyond measure with an ingrowing nail on the most extensive toe. It caused me great pain and annoyance. I was compelled to do my work wearing an old gum overshoe of my husband's. Since using woman's suffrage only a few months, my toe is entirely well, and I now wear my husband's fine boots with perfect ease. As a remedy for ingrowing nails I can safely recommend the woman's suffrage.
"Sassafras Oleson."
Miner's Delight, Jan 23, 1880.
"Deer Sur: Two year ago mi waife fell down into a nold sellar and droav her varyloid through the Sarah bellum. I thot she was a Gonner. I woz then livin' in the sou west potion of Injeanny. I moved to where i now am leaving sevral onsettled accounts where i lived. But i wood do almost anything to recover mi waifs helth. She tried Woman's Suffrins and can now lick me with 1 hand tied behind hur. i o everything to the free yuse of the femail ballot. So good bi. at Present
"Union Forever McGilligin."
Rawhide, Feb. 2, 1880.
"Dear Sir: I came to Wyoming one year ago to-day. At that time I only weighed 153 pounds and felt all the time as though I might die. I was a walking skeleton. Coyotes followed me when I went away from the house.
"My husband told me to try Woman's Suffrage. I did so. I have now run up to my old weight of 213 pounds, and I feel that with the proper care and rest, and rich wholesome diet, I mav be spared to my husband and family till next spring.
"I am now joyful and happy. I go about my work all day singing Old Zip Coon and other plaintive melodies. After using Woman's Suffrage two days I sat up in a rocking chair and ate one and three-fourths mince pies. Then I worried down a sugar-cured ham and have been gaining ever since.
"Ah! it is a pleasant thing to come back to life and its joys again.
"Yours truly, Ethel Lillian Kersikes."
PORTUGUESE WITHOUT A MASTER
I am spending my leisure moments these days studying the Portuguese language.
It is not very generally used, it is true, but I might meet a Portuguese some day who wanted to hold a conversation with me very much, and I would feel more at ease if I could speak the language with elegance and precision.
I am working at the task silently and earnestly without a master, and I am sometimes a little mystified by the startling and original exhibitions of imported syntax and etymology as shown in the English translations given in the book which I am studying. It is a kind of Portuguese primer, designed and constructed by Jose De Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, and although the Portuguese part of it seems to be all right, I am at times a little annoyed at the novel arrangement of the English translations.
The authors in their preface seem to convey the impression that other compilers and writers who have attempted this thing have not seemed to meet the demands of the times, but Messrs. Fonseca & Carolino intimate that they have supplied a want long felt, and they seem tickled almost to death over the fact that they have the bulge on their predecessors. In their apparently modest way they say:
"The works which we are conferring for this labor found use us for nothing, but those who were publishing to Portugal or out, they were most all composed for some foreign or some national, acquainted in the spirit of both languages. It was resulting from that carelessness to rest these works fill of imperfections, and anomalies of style, and idiotisms, for this language in spite of the infinite typographical faults which sometimes invert the sense of the periods."
Parties who have become cloyed with the spicy fragrance of "Fifteen" might find pleasing diversion in the foregoing sentence. It is quaint and unique in its style, and although I consider it perfectly original, I am led to believe that there are little poetic gems from Walt Whitman in it.
Further on the authors in poetic prose say:
"We expect them, who the little book (for the care what we wrote him and for her typographical perfection) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons and especially of the youth at which we dedicate him particularly."
Ah, how well those dark-eyed dwellers in perpetual summer know how to inspire even the dull and commonplace sentences of a preface with a living, breathing soul! How the threadbare language of apology and modest braggadocio used by the hesitating but puffed up author ever since the first work published by Moses, is made to submit to the tropical influence of sunny Portugal, and comes forth breathing the seductive odors of that glad clime where the poet's song of undying love to the dark-eyed maid is ever throbbing in passionate pulsations upon the perfumed air.
But I must give a Portuguese translation rendered back into English, of the well known anecdote told on the physician who didn't take his own medicine:
"A physician eighty years of age, had enjoyed of a health unalterable. Their friends did him of it compliments every days. 'Mister Doctor,' they said to him, 'you are admirable man. What you make then for to bear as well?' 'I will tell you it, gentlemen,' he was answered them, 'and I exhort you in same time at to follow my example. I live of the product of my ordering without take any remedy who I command to my sicks.'"
One fault with American wit, in my estimation, is its coarseness and lack of polish. I have mentioned it a great many times and wept over it in extreme sorrow. Here, however, we have it down fine. The Portuguese joke is no doubt the most mirth provoking, and at the same time the most refined and delicate joke now made. We send our manufactures to all foreign countries to successfully compete with theirs; but our joke can never hold up its head and ask for the award or bronze medal where these Portuguese rib-ticklers and button-hole busters and suspender wrenchers are allowed to compete for the free for-all prizes. The Portuguese joke with facings of same held in place with bias folds of something else, is really the most recherche joke now on the market. Americans may for years to come be able to furnish a good, fair, stoga joke that will do to stub around home with, but they cannot design a joke that will do to dress up in and wear on great occasions. The low-neck, Oxford-tie, Portuguese burst of humor, hand-sewed, with sole leather counter and steel shank, and with the name of the author blown in the bottle, is bound to command the highest market price for a century or more to come.
We may command the smoking car and Congress trade, but Portugal must furnish the easy riding, gentle, picnic and croquet joke. It may be also fed to invalids with a spoon. A friend of mine who had been sick for nine years took a Portuguese joke that I gave him right out of the can without diluting it, and by that means gradually led up to fricasseed oat-meal gruel stuffed with sawdust and other rich dishes. It saved his life, but his intellect is impaired so that he don't know a calcium light from the splendor of the New Jerusalem.
