A COMMON SIGN LANGUAGE
Intercourse by signs was universal among the Aborigines. The code of signals was much the same from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Major Lee M. House tells of being at Washington, D. C., with a party of Indians from Oregon and Washington, attending a great council of representatives from all parts of the country. Languages were different and the gathering clans were cold and morose, until somebody made an attempt at an address in the sign language, which put everybody at ease, for all understood.
Certain chants and songs are widely known also. The Omalias knew at once the "stick-bone" gambling song of the Indians of Vancouver island, upon hear- ing it sung by a student of Indian music. It was the same as their own.
While there has not been that general uplift in the character of the Indian, or of his race as an element of the population, which was hoped for and labored for by the first missionaries, yet there has been a vast improvement of his condition mentally, morally and financially. Civilization has not been advantageous to the bodily vigor and strength of the red man. In his primitive condition he had to put forth strenuous effort to take game for his subsistence, and this developed his limbs, his body, and his vital organs. The lazy life of the Indian reservation, with government annuities to piece out slight efforts at labor to produce crops for foods, has enervated rather than developed his body. But worse than all his natural and inherited shortcomings to hold the native down to barbarism has been the persistent and devilish pursuit of the Indian by the dishonest, corrupt and diseased white man. The worthless white man that hangs around the reservation, that sneaks into its confines the bad whiskey, and debauches the Indian family, that persistently fights and defeats every effort to teach the Indian decent ways of living, is a thousand times a meaner, baser and more destructive creature than any Indian could be. And this vile influence of the depraved white man is unfortunately a part of the history of the Indian for a hundred years — "a century of dishonor" it has been called ; and it is also, and severely just so, a part of the history of the educated and governing class of the American citizens. In the history of the state of Oregon it can be pointed out where an Indian agent at Grande Ronde agency, on a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year for four years, came out of office with money enough to purchase two thousand acres of the richest land in the Yamhill valley. How much of the annuities which the United States government issued to be paid by that agent to the fifteen hundred ignorant Indian wards was stolen by the trusted agent, and how little the poor Indians received, will never be known. At the Umatilla reservation, not one agent but more than half a dozen, grew rich in persistent thefts from the ignorant and impoverished wards of the government, and which robbery was continued until the Christian churches of the nation made reform of the Indian agencies the battle cry from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine.
In this battle to secure justice to the poor and despised Indian, who could do nothing for himself or family, the names of Marcus Whitman, Jason Lee, Elkanah Walker, Cushing Eells, H. H. Spalding, Bishop Blanchet, Peter John De Smet, James H. Wilbur, George H. Atkinson, Joel Palmer, T. W. Davenport,
