"American Indian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who had a rooted aversion to the letter "h," except where a smooth breathing is usual, began by saying that Christianity differed from other religions in the fact of its having an eternal 'Ell. The Mahometans had their beautiful ladies; the North American Indian looked for his 'Appy 'Unting Grounds; but 'Ell was a speciality of the Christian system. On the other side was the fact that you continually had salvation inundated upon you. Tracts were put into your hand, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... its national significance "The Kalevala" is interesting from the fact of its having been taken as the model in rhythm and style for Longfellow's "Hiawatha," the epic of the American Indian.] ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... man can say. If they were Indians, they were very different Indians from those who have lived in this country since its discovery. They do not make mummies. But all over our land we find evidences that some race—now extinct—lived here before the present North American Indian. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... five fishermen, all stout, well built Spaniards, the master of whom was over six feet, and had much the appearance of an American Indian.—My companions were soon in a "dead sleep," and when the fishermen had left the hut, I walked out to explore our new habitation. The two huts were so near that a gutter only separated them, which caught the water from the roofs of each and conducted it into a hogshead bedded in the ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... of the shouts and chants changed abruptly, and the dancing increased in fervor, even the children throwing themselves wildly about. The witch-doctors ran around like so many maniacs, and it looked as much like an American Indian war dance as ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... the 11th of November came and the bells from Regret and Verdun rang out the glorious news of the armistice, how the hearts of all the boys in the wards were stirred! It was a beautiful day resembling our American Indian Summer, when we threw open the doors and windows to admit the glorious message. It seemed that the prayers of not only France, but of the world, were being said and the theme that ran through them all was: "How beautiful are ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... his rank. The names of great warriors and wise men of the tribe are generally descriptive. The North American Indian adopted that course, and it was a very sensible thing to do. You have heard of Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face (that is, a pock-marked individual), Antelope, and others of like character, could be drawn, and thus convey the name without difficulty. Uraso and Muro mean some particular things or objects ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... money-changer's show-window; a sister of charity walks beside a Jewish Rabbi; then comes a brawny negro, then a bare-legged Highlander; figures such as are met in the Levant; school-boys with their books and lunch-boxes, Cockneys fresh from Piccadilly, a student who reminds us of Berlin, an American Indian, in pantaloons; a gaunt Western, a keen Yankee, and a broad Dutch physiognomy alternate; flower-venders, dog-pedlers, diplomates, soldiers, dandies, and vagabonds, pass and disappear; a firemen's procession, fallen horse, dead-lock ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the rights and wrongs, privileges and grievances, and worthiness and worthlessness of the North American Indian. Some people think that the red man has been shamefully treated and betrayed by the white man, and that the catalogue of his grievances is as long as the tale of woe the former is apt to tell, whenever he can make himself understood by a ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... grimaces. They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time. Yet we Europeans all know how difficult it is to distinguish apart the sounds in a foreign language. Which of us, for instance, could follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry. I was told, almost in the same words, of the same ludicrous habit among the Caffres; the Australians, likewise, have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and the uncertainty greater. Another class was restrained by a sentiment possibly the oldest and most general amongst men; that which casts a spell of sanctity around wells and springs, and stays the hand about to toss an impurity into a running stream; which impels the North American Indian to replace the gourd, and the Bedouin to spare the bucket for the next comer, though an enemy. In other words, the cistern was in ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... the material for the present volume I have been obliged to examine thousands of books referring to the relations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I have seen only the Hindoo K[a]masutr[a]m, the literal version of the Arabian Nights, and the American Indian stories collected by Dr. Boas, can compare with this "sweet and beautiful" romance of Longus in downright obscenity or deliberate laciviousness. I have been able, without going beyond the latitude permissible to anthropologists, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of seal-skins, with warm dog-skin for an inside lining, and his stockings were of the same. So you see no part of him was exposed but his face, which was quite dark, or, rather, copper-colored (something darker than a North American Indian), and it was very broad and very round. The nose was very small and very flat, and the eyes were small and narrow. His hair was jet black, long and tangled, and was cut straight across the forehead. He had but little beard,—only a few black, ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... North-American Indian Life, Customs, and Products, on the Theory of the Ethnic Unity of the Race. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... control within forty miles of the city of Glasgow, an important and commercial city. "Thus," as Sir Walter Scott observes, "a character like his, blending the wild virtues, the subtle policy, and unconstrained licence of an American Indian, was flourishing in Scotland during the Augustan age of Queen Anne and George the First. Addison, it is probable, and Pope, would have been considerably surprised if they had known that there existed, in the same island with them, a personage of Rob ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... we shall always wonder what became of them, and that we shall never know. I hoped mightily that the American wing of the big Catholic seminary had been spared. It had a stone figure of an American Indian— looking something like Sitting Bull, we thought—over its doors; and that was the only typically American thing we saw in ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Neolithic stage the use of the metals had not yet been learned, but tools of stone were carefully shaped and polished. To this stage the North American Indian belonged at the time of the discovery of the continent. In the Paleolithic stage, stone implements were chipped to rude shapes and left unpolished. This, the lowest state of human culture, has been outgrown by nearly every savage tribe now on earth. A still earlier stage may once have existed, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... upper Orinoco tip their arrows. Its principal ingredient is derived from the Strychnos toxifera tree, which yields also the drug nux vomica, which you, Dr. Leslie, have mentioned. On the tip of that Inca dagger must have been a large dose of the dread curare, this fatal South American Indian arrow poison." ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... Polynesian in this, as in all other respects, is our grave and decorous North American Indian. While the former bestows a name in accordance with some humorous or ignoble trait, the latter seizes upon what is deemed the most exalted or warlike: and hence, among the red tribes, we have the truly patrician appellations of "White Eagles," "Young Oaks," ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... The condition of the American Indian has much improved in recent years. Full citizenship was bestowed upon them on June 2, 1924, and appropriations for their care and advancement have been increased. Still there ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... what he had done, and realizing it, he set up a yell that would have made a North American Indian envy its force ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... in the sixth century A.D. They are more like modern English gentlemen, and when we read the German Neibelungen we recognize this difference. Virgil's Aeneid does not belong to the period of the Trojan war, but this does not prevent the Aeneid from being very fine poetry. The American Indian is not without his poetic side, as is proved by the squaw who knelt down on a flowery Brussels carpet, and smoothing it with her hands, said: "Hahnsome! hahnsome! heaven no hahnsomer!" There is true poetry in this; and so there is in the ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... savage cannot be called deficient on the side of inhibition. It is doubtful if modern society affords anything more striking in the way of inhibition than is found in connection with taboo, fetish, totemism, and ceremonial among the lower races. In the great majority of the American Indian and Australian tribes a man is strictly forbidden to kill or eat the animals whose name his clan bears as a totem. The central Australian may not, in addition, eat the flesh of any animal killed or even touched by persons standing in certain relations of kinship to him. At certain times also ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas |
