Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New. Nye Bill
I was so restless that last night that I walked feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge, in a northerly direction.
I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.
The Ute nation is divided into two sections – viz., the Southern Utes, who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their ponies got their bellies full of grass.
My policy – one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the government – is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing" the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.
There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.
One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.
Indians are quick and impulsive in the matter of homicide. They are slow to grapple with anything of a humorous nature, and all the humorous lecturers who have been on the Ute lecture course have lost money, but in the holocaust line, or general arson, torture and massacre business, they act with astonishing rapidity. As a race, they regard this entire land as their own, just as the mosquitoes claim New Jersey, simply because they were there first.
The Indians see that the property is improving, and so they feel more and more wealthy and arrogant. They claim that they will never give up their rights unless they get hard up, and even then it will not count. They always have a mental reservation in these matters, which they prefer to the reservation provided by the government.
Indians naturally dislike to see these lands in the possession of wealthy men whose sons earn a precarious livelihood by playing lawn tennis.
Colorow once made a short speech to his troops, which was taken down at the time by a gentleman who was present and who was collecting material for a new third reader for our common schools.
Colorow claimed that it was incorrect, and the notes were found afterward on the stenographer's body. It is about as ticklish business to report an Indian speech as it is to poultice a boil on the person of the Ameer of Cabul.
In closing Colorow said: "Warriors, our sun is set. We are most of us out on third base, and we have no influence with the umpire.
"Once I could stand on the high ground and one shout would fill the forest with warriors. Now the wailing wind catches up my cry and bears it away like the echo of our former greatness, and I hear a low voice murmur, 'Rats.'
"Whisky and refinement have filled our land with sorrow. The white man crossed the dark waters in his large canoe and filled the forest with churches and railroad accidents.
"The Indian loves not to make money and own aldermen for which he has no use. He loves his wives and his children and intrusts them with the responsibility of doing all his work. The white man comes to us with honeyed words and says if we will divide our lands with him he will give us a present; and when we give him a county and a half he gives us a red collar-button and a blue book, in which he has written in his strange and silent language, 'When this you see, remember me.' Our warriors are weak and have the hearts of women. They care not for the war-path or the chase. Most of them want to go on the stage. Once my warriors went with me at a moment's warning to clean out the foe. They slept in the swamps with the rattlesnakes at night and fought like wolves in the daytime. Now my warriors will not go on the warpath without a valise, and some of them want to carry their dinner.
"Some day, like the fall of a mighty oak in the forest, Colorow will fall to the earth and he will rise no more. You will be scattered to the four winds of heaven, and you will go no more to battle. Some of you will starve to death, while others will go to New York and wear a long linen duster, with the price of cut-rate tickets down the back. Some of you will die with snakes in your moccasins, and others will go to Jerusalem to help rob the Dead wood coach.
"Warriors, I thank you for your kind attention and appreciation. The regular outbreak will begin to-morrow evening at early candle-light. The massacre will open with a song and dance."
Colorow dresses plainly in a coat of paint and a gun.
AWKWARDNESS OF CARRYING WHISKY ABOUT
Whisky is more bulky and annoying to carry about, in the coat-tail pocket than a plug of tobacco; but there have been cases where it was successfully done. I was shown yesterday a little corner that would hold six or eight bushels. It was in the wash-room of a hotel, and was about half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire place was filled with empty whisky bottles of every size, shape and smell.
THE RIGHT SORT OF BOY
I am always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes in the heat of debate, and leave the home nest. His future is a little doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture limestone for the streets of a great city, or become President of the United States; but there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave the home nest. The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day to uncoil the tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the household, to grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the ear and led away out into the great untried realm of space.
CHESTNUT-BURR IV – BILL NYE PAYS A BRIEF VISIT TO A PROFESSIONAL STAR READER
How His Past Was Raked Up and His Future Predicted – Interesting Information for One Dollar – He is Warned to Beware of Certain Bad Men – A Delicate Point of Etiquette – Are Astrologists Deteriorating?
Ring the bell and the door will open," is the remark made by a small label over a bell handle in Third avenue, near Eighteenth street, where Mme. La Foy reads the past, present and future at so much per read. Love, marriage, divorce, business, speculation and sickness are there handled with the utmost impunity by "Mme. La Foy, the famous scientific astrologist," who has monkeyed with the planets for twenty years, and if she wanted any information has "read it in the stars." I rang the bell the other day to see if the door would open. It did so after considerable delay, and a pimply boy in knee pants showed me upstairs into the waiting room. After a while I was removed to the consultation room, where Mme. La Foy, seated behind a small oilcloth-covered table, rakes up old personalities and pries into the future at cut rates.
Skirmishing about among the planets for twenty years involves a great deal of fatigue and exposure, to say nothing of the night work, and so Mme. La Foy has the air of one who has put in a very busy life. She is as familiar with planets, though, as you or I might be with our own family, and calls them by their first names. She would know Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Adonis