<h2 id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br/> <span class="medium">THE INDIAN AND OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE</span></h2>
<p class="drop"><span class="upper">The</span> Indian is an absolute believer in the virtue
of the outdoor life, not as an occasional thing,
but as his regular, set, uniform habit. He <i>lives</i> out of
doors; not only does his body remain in the open, but
his mind, his soul, are ever also there. Except in the
very cold weather his house is free to every breeze that
blows. He laughs at “drafts.” “Catching cold”
is a something of which he knows absolutely nothing.
When he learns of white people shutting themselves
up in houses into which the fresh, pure, free air of
the plains and deserts, often laden with the healthful
odors of the pines, firs, balsams of the forest, cannot
come, he shakes his head at the folly, and feels as one
would if he saw a man slamming his door in the face
of his best friend. Virtually he sleeps out of doors,
eats out of doors, works out of doors. When the women
make their baskets and pottery, it is always out of doors,
and their best beadwork is always done in the open.
The men make their bows and arrows, dress their
buckskin, make their moccasins and buckskin clothes,
and perform nearly all their ceremonials out of doors.</p>
<p>Our greatest scientific fighters against tuberculosis
are emulating the Indian in the fact that even in the
winter of the East they advocate that their patients
sleep out of doors. Pure air, and abundance of it,
is their cry.</p>
<p>“Taking cold” comes, not from breathing “night
air,” but generally from inflammation of the mucous
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">50</span>
membranes caused by impure air,—the air of a heated
room from which all the pure air has been exhausted
by being breathed again and again into the lungs of its
deluded occupants, each exhalation sending with it a
fresh amount of poison to vitiate the little good that
remains.</p>
<p>Men often go to gymnasiums in the city to get
exercise. The air is vitiated by the presence of others,
and as respiration is increased by the exercise, impure
air is taken into the lungs, and the prime object of the
exercise is defeated. For it is not so much to develop
muscles as it is to stimulate the general action of the
whole body that gymnastics should be indulged in.
Vigorous exercise demands deep breathing; if the
air breathed is pure, the blood thereby becomes more
oxygenated or vivified. As this vitalized blood circulates,
it carries its life-giving new strength and energy
to every part of the body, so that the whole man feels
the increased vigor. But let the air be impure, death
instead of life is given to the blood. Hence, where
possible, all vigorous exercise should be taken out of
doors in the pure air and sunlight, and if this is not
possible, every door, window, and avenue through
which outside air can be brought inside should be
placed wide open, and <i>kept open</i> during the whole
time of the exercises. If spectators come, and on their
account windows and doors are closed, a positive
injury is being done to the exercisers. Far better
turn out the spectators than shut out God’s pure air.</p>
<p>What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can
do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor
life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise
in order to preserve our health. Think of the vigor and
strength, the robustness and power, the joy and the
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">51</span>
health, that are the possession of men and women
of outdoor life. Let any one who wishes to know
what this means read John Muir’s <i>Mountains of
California</i>. In it he tells of his years of experiences
climbing the terribly difficult peaks of the Sierras,
the exploring of glaciers, the sleeping out at night
during snow-storms in the depth of winter without
either an overcoat or a single blanket. One of the
most thrilling of experiences is told as simply as the
narrative of a child. He was out during a terrific
wind-storm. Says he: “When the storm began to
sound I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to
enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always
something rare to show us, and the danger to life and
limb is hardly greater than one would experience
crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.”</p>
<p>Think of a city-bred man, a society man, deliberately
walking out into a storm to <i>enjoy</i> it.</p>
<p>“It was still early morning when I found myself
fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over
the hills.... I heard trees falling for hours at
the rate of one every two or three minutes; some
uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked
condition of the ground; others broken straight across,
where some weakness caused by fire had determined
the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a
delightful study. Young sugar-pines, light and feathery
as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground;
while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles
had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly
above them, their long, arching branches streaming
fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and
singing and shedding off keen lances of light like a
diamond.
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">52</span></p>
<p>“I drifted on through the midst of this passionate
music and motion, across many a glen from ridge to
ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or
to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had
swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the
varying tones of individual trees,—spruce and fir and
pine and leafless oak,—and even the infinitely gentle
rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was
expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own
song and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting
a richness of variety to be found in no other
forest I have yet seen.</p>
<p>“Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble
through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the
summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood;
and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine
thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook
and get my ear close to the Æolian music of the
topmost needles. But under the circumstances the
choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose
instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being
blown down, or of being struck by others in case they
should fall; another was branchless to a considerable
height above the ground, and at the same time too
large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing;
while others were not favorably situated for clear views.
After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the
tallest of a group of Douglas spruces that were growing
close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which
seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it.
Though comparatively young, they were about 100
feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking
and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to
climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">53</span>
no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never
before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion.
The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the
passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward
and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable
combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while
I clung with muscles
firm braced,
like a bobolink on
a reed.</p>
<div class="figright"> <ANTIMG id="i_053" src="images/i_053.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">HAVASUPAI DRESSING BUCKSKIN.</p> </div>
<p>“In its wildest
sweeps my treetop
described an
arc of from twenty
to thirty degrees,
but I felt sure of
its elastic temper,
having seen others
of the same species
still more severely
tried—bent almost
to the ground,
indeed, in heavy
snows—without
breaking a fiber.
I was therefore
safe, and free to
take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited
forest from my superb outlook....</p>
<p>“I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing
my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly
on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.”</p>
<p>What an experience, and what a joy to feel one’s
self able to enjoy it! I know what it is. Years before
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">54</span>
I had read this, I had had a similar experience when
driving over the high Sierras from the borders of
Oregon, Nevada, and California down into southern
California. Imagine the ordinary business man, or
clerk, or banker, or preacher, or lawyer, or doctor,
daring to climb so high a tree, and especially during
such a storm. Yet such a day so spent is worth more
than a year of any ordinary man’s life.</p>
<p>Edward Robeson Taylor, the poet-mayor of San
Francisco, once expressed his keen appreciation of
what Nature gives to the man who loves her enough
to test her. And he has made the test many a time,
in the Sierras, in the forests, in the deserts, in the
Grand Canyon, as well as on the Bay of San Francisco.
He wrote:</p>
<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In him that on the rugged breast of mountain<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Finds his joy and his repose,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Who makes the pine his fellow, and with zest<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Treads the great glaciers and their kindred snows,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">A strength is planted that in direst test<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Dares all the devils of Danger to oppose.”<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>Then, too, there are marvelous healing powers in
God’s great out-of-doors. The <i>vis medicatrix Naturæ</i>
is no fiction of the imagination. If sick people
knew enough, were wise enough, to go out into the open
and discard all civilized modes of life, climbing mountains,
sleeping on pine boughs, swimming in the
streams, working in the soil, dabbling in the hot or
cold springs, eating the ripe fruits and nuts, and
bathing the whole body daily in bright sunshine, they
would be brought to a health and vigor they had never
before known.</p>
<p>I have often wondered why thoughtful white people
have not observed that insanity is practically unknown
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">55</span>
amongst the Indians. Why? Our own great Emerson
once wrote a clear answer.</p>
<p>“It was,” said he, “the practice of the Orientals,
especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander
at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and,
if they liked, to associate with wild animals. In their
belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around
an insane person, and live with him on a friendly
footing. The patient found something curative in that
intercourse, by which he was quieted and sometimes
restored. But there are more insane persons than are
called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The
crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theaters, card-tables,
the speculators who rush for investment at ten per cent,
twenty per cent, cent per cent, are all more or less mad—these
point the moral, and persuade us to seek
in the fields the health of the mind.”</p>
<p>But not only does healing come to the <i>mind</i> in
Nature: the diseased <i>soul</i> there finds medicine and
health.</p>
<p>The well-beloved Robert Louis Stevenson was well
aware of this out-of-door joy. Among many other fine
things on the subject he once wrote the following which
fully expresses my idea:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among
dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination
takes no share in such a cleansing.”</p>
</blockquote>
<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG id="i_056" src="images/i_056.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">AN APACHE GRANDMOTHER AND SOME BASKETS OF HER OWN DESIGN AND WEAVE. ALL MADE IN THE OPEN AIR.</p> </div>
<p>One of our great artists and writers, whose life went
out a few years ago in sad eclipse, wrote with a clarity
of vision that his awful experiences had taught him:
“I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval
things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than
the earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">56</span>
too much, and live with her too little. I discern great
sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered
about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the
grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the
sea was for the swimmer, and the land for the feet of
the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow
that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.
The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy, that
he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped
over the young shoots; and for the artist and the
athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited
with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the
wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men.
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">57</span>
... I feel sure that in elemental forces there is
purification, and I want to go back to them and live in
their presence.”</p>
<p>How literally true to fact is this assurance of purification
out in the great elemental forces and places of
Nature, and how the Indian daily demonstrates it.
Thousands can testify to it. Here one becomes soothed.
The grinning faces of hate do not pursue him here.
Nature is passionless to the hunted man. She is
willing to be wooed and won, and then opens up her
rich treasures to the guiltiest and vilest of men, until
they regain the right angle of vision, then the desire
for purification, then repentance, then assurance of
forgiveness, and finally their self-respect. Then they
are able to return (if necessity compels) to civilization
and bear any punishment that may be awarded, for in
the rugged arms of Nature they have absorbed strength
and power,—strength of will and power of soul to dare
and do that which the highest within them compels.</p>
<p>Who that has read the <i>De Profundis</i> of that erratic
and brilliant genius, Oscar Wilde, has not felt the sad
pathos and yet intense truth of his concluding words?
They are Indian-like in their direct truth and native
strength.</p>
<p>“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences
are sentences of death; and three times I have
been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested,
the second time to be led back to the house of detention,
the third time to pass into a prison for two years.
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place
for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet
rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in
the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose
silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">58</span>
night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness
without stumbling, and send the wind over my
footprints so that none may track me to my hurt.
She will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter
herbs make me whole.”</p>
<p>This is one of the great wonders of the out-of-door
life that the weary and sinful of the white race would
do well to learn.</p>
<p>But not only does health of mind and soul return
to the sinful in God’s great out-of-doors: the most
vigorous and pure, healthy and perfect, minds and
souls are expanded and strengthened with such contact.
Buddha, Mahomet, Moses, David, Elijah,
Christ, were all lovers of out-of-doors. Washington,
Lincoln, and Garfield were all out-of-door men. One
learns in the solitude and primitive frankness of the
free life of the out doors to do his own thinking, untrammeled
by convention or prejudice. He sees things
as they are. His soul is unclothed, and there can no
longer be any deception or pretense. So he becomes
an individual; not a mere rote thinker of other’s
thoughts, and not a mere parrot of other men’s ideas.
Edwin Markham could never have written <i>The Man
with the Hoe</i> had he lived only in the city. He would
never have seen deeply enough, and he would never
have dared brave the conventional prejudices of the
civilized (?) world as he did in his poem, had he been
city-bred. But because he thought nakedly before
God and his own soul he was compelled to see the
monstrousness of making a man—a son of God,
created in His image—a mere clod of clay. The
idea that this poem is a reflection upon labor is utter
nonsense. It is merely a protest, strong, vigorous,
forceful as a thunder-storm, against compelling some
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">59</span>
men to labor so hard that they have neither time nor
opportunity for mental and spiritual occupation, and
have thus even lost the desire for or hope of gaining
it. Labor is ennobling, but man is made for more
than mere physical labor. The unequal distribution
of affairs in this life causes some men to have no
physical labor, to their vast disadvantage, while others
have nothing but physical labor, equally to their
disadvantage. The finding of a just equilibrium
between these two extremes, and then aiding the men
of both extremes to see the need of each helping the
other, or of taking some of the burden of the other,
would result in the immediate benefiting of the race
to an incalculable extent, both in body, mind, and soul.
And it is this for which I plead, earnestly calling upon
my fellows to so adjust their own lives that they will
strike the happy mean, thus <i>living</i> (not merely talking
about) the dignity of labor as well as the joy of mental
and spiritual occupation.</p>
<p>Another important thing must not be overlooked.
As a result of this out-of-door life the Indian is an early
riser and an early retirer to bed. The civilized habit
of turning night into day, living in the glare of gas and
electric light, is, on the face of it, artificial, unnatural,
and unhealthful. It is indefensible from every standpoint.
There is not one word of good can be said of it.
The day is made for work, the night for rest and
sleep. The use of artificial light to the extent we
indulge it in civilization is gradually rendering normal
eyesight a rarity. Children are born with myoptic
and other eye-diseased tendencies. Sometimes it
seems as if more people, of all ages, wear glasses
than use their natural eyesight, and this is but one
of many sad consequences accruing in part from
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">60</span>
our reversal of the natural use of the day and night
times.</p>
<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG id="i_060" src="images/i_060.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">HAPPY AND HEALTHY HOPI CHILDREN, ASKING THE AUTHOR FOR CANDY.</p> </div>
<p>Many men, literary and others, wait until the quiet
of evening to do their work. They often stimulate
themselves with coffee, and even stronger beverages,
and then work until the “wee sma’ hours,” by artificial
light, <i>after they have already done a fair day’s
work</i>. We used to hear a great many words of commendation
of the youths in school and college who
“burned the midnight oil.” If I had my way I would
“use the leather strap” upon all these burners-up of
their physical and mental forces at the time God
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">61</span>
intended they should be abed and asleep. The time
for mental work is in the early morning after a hearty,
healthy, good night’s sleep. The body is strengthened,
the mind refreshed, and thought flows easily and
readily, because all weariness has disappeared under
the influence of “tired nature’s sweet restorer.”
Mental work done at such time is not only a pleasure,
but is well done, properly done, because the conditions
are right for its doing.</p>
<p>Nor is this all. There is a mental and spiritual
pleasure given to the early riser that the late sleeper
knows nothing of. One of the most beautiful baskets
in my historic collection of Indian baskets is one made
by a Coahuila woman who depicted thereon the
white light of the morning shining through the dark
silhouettes of the sharp points of the giant cactus.
Her æsthetic enjoyment was thus made the inspiration
of a real work of art.</p>
<p>How much white people lose by not seeing and
knowing the beauty of the early morning hours,—the
hours just preceding dawn, and during the first
outburst of the sun! A friend and I stood out the
other morning before sunrise, looking at the exquisite
delicate lights over the mountain peaks, and she gave
expression to the above thought, and only a few days
before I had said it to a friend as we had wended our
way from <i>El Tovar</i> Hotel at the Grand Canyon out
to O’Neill Point to see the sunrise. Elisha Safford
eloquently speaks as follows of this:</p>
<h3>BEAUTY OF THE MORNING</h3>
<div class="poetry"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Oh, the beauty of the morning! It showers its splendors down<br/></span>
<span class="i0">From the crimson robes of sunrise, the azure mountain’s crown;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">It smiles amid the waving fields, it dapples in the streams,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">It breathes its sparkling music through the rapture of our dreams.<br/></span>
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">62</span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">It floats upon the limpid air in rainbow clouds of mist,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">It ripples through the glowing skies in pearl and amethyst,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">It gleams in every burnished pool, it riots through the grass,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">It splashes waves of glory on the shadows as they pass.<br/></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">It steals among the nodding trees and to the forest croons,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">In airy note and gentle voice, ’neath waning plenilunes;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">It calls, and lo! the wooded brakes, the hills and tangled fens—<br/></span>
<span class="i0">A world of life and mystery—swarm with its denizens.<br/></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">It trembles in the perfumed breeze, and where its ardor runs,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">A thousand light-winged choristers pant forth their orisons;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">A thousand echoes clap their hands, and from their dewy beds,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">A million scarlet-throated flowers peer forth with startled heads.<br/></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Oh, the beauty of the morning! It rains upon our ears:<br/></span>
<span class="i0">The music of the universe, the chiming of the spheres;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">From cloistered wood and leafy vale, its tuneful medleys throng,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Till all the earth is drenched in light and all the world in song!<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG id="i_062" src="images/i_062.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">INDIAN BASKET, SHOWING INFLUENCE OF NATURE IN THE DESIGN.</p> </div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">63</span></p>
<p>All children, and especially city children, need out-of-door
life. Men and women need it too, sadly, but
if the elders cannot have it, owing to our perverted
social conditions, our law-givers should see to it that
the children do better. It is a well-known fact that
cities would soon die out if their vast populations were
not constantly being replenished by the sons and
daughters of the country. So instead of letting our
city children grow up to imperfect manhood, let us
find some way to get them out of doors and out into
the country more and more. Exercise in the open,
where pure air penetrates to the full depths of the
lungs, personal contact with the soil, and physical
work upon it, as well as personal contact with the
trees and flowers and all growing things, the animals
of the farm and field, the rocks and mountains, the
hills and valleys, the waterfalls and streams, the deserts
and canyons; all these are to be desired. Who does
not wish to sing with Edwin Markham:</p>
<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I ride on the mountain tops, I ride,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">I have found my life and am satisfied!”<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>Of course this out-in-the-country life for city children
can only be gained if their parents and our educators
and politicians combine to provide it. And in
some way it ought to be done. What a joy it would
be to many a city boy to be allowed to go and do some
work in the country during certain times in the year!
Those who have seen the city children who are taken
yearly into the country by Fresh Air Funds, or out
by vessel into the Bay of New York or Boston Harbor,
by philanthropic people, know what delight, joy, and
health they receive from the outing. These things all
point to the great, the dire, the awful need there is for
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">64</span>
some way of giving to our city children and men and
women more out-door life.</p>
<p>Just after the San Francisco earthquake, Dr. J. H.
Kellogg, editor of <i>Good Health</i>, wrote in his forceful
way of some lessons the people might learn from that
disaster. Here is
one of them bearing
upon this very
question:</p>
<div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG id="i_064" src="images/i_064.jpg" alt="" /> <p class="caption">MONO INDIAN COOKING CORN MUSH IN A<br/> BASKET BY A CAMP FIRE.</p> </div>
<p>“Three hundred
thousand
people have found
out that they can
live out of doors,
and that out of
doors is a safer
place than indoors.</p>
<p>“People who
have all their lives
slept on beds of
down, protected
by thick walls of
brick or stone,
barricaded against
the dangerous (?)
air of night, have
found that it is possible to spend a night upon an
unsheltered hillside without risk to life, and it is more
than likely that, as in the case of the Charleston earthquake,
not a few modern troglodytes, who scarcely
ever saw the light of day before, have been actually
benefited by being forced out into the fresh air and
the sunshine.</p>
<p>“The great tent colonies, improvised by the military
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">65</span>
authorities with such promptness under the efficient
management of the able General Funston, may become
the permanent homes for some of the thousands who
are now for the first time in their lives tasting the
sweets of an out-of-door life. Man is an out-of-door
creature, meant to live amid umbrageous freshness,
his skin bathed clean by morning dews or evening
showers, browned and disinfected by the sun, fed by
tropic fruits, and cheered by tropic birds and flowers.
It is only through long generations of living under
artificial conditions that civilized man has become
accustomed to the unhealthful and disease-producing
influences of the modern house to such a degree that
they can be even in a small measure tolerated. But
this immunity is only apparent. An atmosphere that
will kill a Hottentot or a baboon in six months will
also kill a bank president or a trust magnate—<i>sometime</i>.
And if these tent-dwellers get such a taste of the
substantial advantages of the out-of-door life that
they refuse to return to the old unwholesome conditions
of anti-earthquake days, they will profit substantially
by their experience, terrible though it has been.
It takes earthquakes and cyclones and tidal waves to
jostle us out of the unnatural and degenerative ruts
into which conventionality is always driving us.</p>
<p>“What advantages has the man in the brown-stone
front over the man in the tent? Only these: A pale
face instead of the brown skin which is natural to his
species; a coated tongue, no appetite, and no digestion,
instead of the keen zest for food and splendid digestive
vigor of the tent-dweller; an aching head and confused
mind and depressed spirits, instead of the vim and
snap and energy, mental and physical, and the freedom
from pain and pessimism of out-of-door dwellers;
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">66</span>
early consumption or apoplexy or paresis or cancer of
the stomach or arteriosclerosis,—the dry rot of the
body which stealthily weakens the props and crumbles
the foundations of the citadel of life.”</p>
<p>Why is it that in our cities in summer, and in
Florida and the South generally, and in the West,
we do not follow the French custom of eating out of
doors?</p>
<p>American visitors to Paris in the summer time have
always been impressed by the prevalent custom there
of dining out of doors. The sidewalks in front of cafés
and restaurants are always so occupied with chairs and
tables that pedestrians often have to step into the street
to get by. This has long been the summer custom in
Paris, but with the arrival of cold weather tables and
chairs disappeared every year, and the diners returned
to the close nicotine-laden air of the stuffy little dining-rooms
inside. But last year, according to the London
correspondent of the <i>Outlook</i>, an enterprising Frenchman,
finding his patrons much attached to his open-air
dining-room, and being short of room inside, undertook
to make his guests comfortable out of doors by
means of a large brazier placed upon the sidewalk.
Others followed his example, and in a short time the
streets were lined with braziers from the Madeline to
the Bastile, much to the satisfaction of the cab-drivers
and newsboys. One ingenious proprietor made his
table-legs hollow, filled with hot water, and thus
utilized them as foot-warmers. And so one may now
enjoy a fashionable Parisian café <i>au plein air</i> any day
in the year.</p>
<p>Everybody is always hungry at a picnic, not simply
because of the unusual exercise, but as the result of the
tonic appetite-stimulating influence of the out-of-doors.
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">67</span>
The same plan may be introduced into any private
home by utilizing a back porch, or, when this is lacking,
a tent-cloth awning may be provided at the
expense of a few dollars.</p>
<p>The old Spanish <i>patio</i>, or inner court, provided
the seclusion that many desire, with the possibility of a
larger out-of-door life. Mr. Gustav Stickley, the far-seeing
editor of <i>The Craftsman</i>, which so effectually
pleads for a simpler and more democratic life for the
people, has planned a number of <i>Craftsman</i> houses
in which these open porches for eating, and sleeping
as well, are introduced. This is a great step in the
right direction, and is strongly to be commended.</p>
<p>But the outdoor life is larger than houses and
porches. One must get away from all houses to really
feel and know the joy of the great out-of-doors. Every
teacher and orator should know the birds and trees,
the flowers and grasses, the rocks and stars, the clouds
and odors, <i>at first hand</i>. He should not depend upon
books at all for any of this knowledge, save as guides to
obtain it. Instead of reading books he should read
Nature. See how powerful is the simple oratory of
the Indian, whose figures and similes and illustrations
and metaphors are of those things in Nature with
which he is perfectly familiar.</p>
<p>Another effect upon the mind and soul as the result
of this outdoor life is remarkable to those who have
never given it a thought. One of our poets once said,
“The undevout astronomer is mad.” And every
Indian will tell you that the undevout Indian is either
mad or “getting civilized.” One of our California
historians once wrote something to the effect that the
California Indian had no religion, no mythology, no
reverence, no belief in anything outside of and beyond
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">68</span>
himself. Jeremiah Curtin, a careful and close student
of the California Indian for many years, in his wonderfully
interesting book, “Creation Myths of Primitive
America,” shows the utter fallacy of this idea. He
says: “Primitive man in America stood at every
step face to face with divinity as he knew or understood
it. He could never escape from the presence of those
powers which had constituted the first world, and
which composed all that there was in the present one.
... The most important question of all in Indian
life was communication with divinity, intercourse
with the spirits of divine personages.” Indeed, the
Indian sees the divine power in everything. His God
speaks in the storm, the howling wind, the tornado,
the hurricane, the roaring rapids and dashing cataracts
of the rivers, the never-ending rise and fall of the
ocean, the towering mountains and the tiny hills,
the trees, the bees, the buds and blossoms. It is God
in the flower that makes it grow and gives it its odor;
that makes the tree from the acorn; that makes the
sun to shine; that sends the rain and dew and the gentle
zephyrs. The thunder is His voice, and everything
in Nature is an expression of His thought.</p>
<p>This belief compels the Indian to a close study of
Nature. Hence the keenness of his powers of observation.
He knows every plant, and when and where
it best grows. He knows the track of every bird, insect,
reptile, and animal. He knows all the signs of the
weather. He is a past-master in woodcraft, and
knows more of the habits of plants and animal life
than all of our trained naturalists put together. He
is a poet, too, withal, and an orator, using the knowledge
he has of nature in his thought and speech. No
writer that ever lived knew the real Indian so well as
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">69</span>
Fenimore Cooper, and we all know the dignified
and poetical speech of his Indian characters. I know
scores and hundreds of dusky-skinned Henry D.
Thoreaus and John Burroughses, John Muirs and
Elizabeth Grinnells and Olive Thorne Millers. Indeed,
to get an Indian once started upon his lore of plant,
tree, insect, bird, or animal, is to open up a flood-gate
which will deluge any but the one who knows what to
expect.
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">70</span></p>
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