The following is my translation of an article called: Das Schicksal der Indianer von T. Kellen. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1924, Heft 4, Seiten 93-98. The accompanying illustrations are so wonderful, that I'll let you draw your own.
Terminology
Some of the spellings in the text are liable to be left in German, as I'm not necessarily sure of the English term in all cases. Furthermore, some of the names of the peoples are outmoded. For example, many 'Indians' aren't particularly happy with that word, and Inuit people can get fed up of being called 'Eskimos'. Should anybody spot any further such cases, then please let me know. I've no intention of bringing the text 'up to date', but would willingly add an appropriate note here. I'm not aware of any previous translation.
Trevor Dykes.

The fate of the Indians by T. Kellen
When Cooper began to publish his Lederstrumpf-Romane ('leather trousers novels') over a hundred years ago, he did not know that he would provide most for our knowledge about the Indians. While natural science books about the original population of America find a relatively limited distribution, Cooper's novels, in both their original editions and in translations into all cultured languages, have been read by countless millions, and they still today belong among the best loved writings for the youth and general public. The ethnological knowledge in strictly scientific works would never have encroached into such wide circles.

There are certainly many idealized representations and fanciful decorations and, therefore, anybody who once relished Cooper and his Indian heroes should now attempt to correct his impressions of the 'Red Skins' to some extent.

Until the day of its discovery America, with the exceptions of the extreme northwest and northeast that were inhabited by Eskimo tribes, was populated by peoples with a common pedigree, the Indian races, who were distributed across 120° of latitude. The names Indians is actually wrong, as it is derived from the misapprehension of the first discoverers, who believed they had landed on the east coast of Asia, in India. It remained with the peoples, and nothing can now naturally change that.

From the Indian race developed, over many millennia, a might host of peoples, tribes and hordes, and under very different living conditions of all the numerous natural environments of the double continent, they filled it with many cultures.

An almost purely hunting culture arose in the north, east and prairie areas. A somewhat higher culture developed between the lower Mississippi region and the Ohio, and in the and in the Wyandotte. The steppe lands of the west between Rio Grande and Colorado found themselves, since early days, with an oasis culture and close knit village living.

As an example of the housing for the northwest forest tribes, the wigwams of the Winnegbago are pictured (Illustration 1). These are tents with a ground area of an elongated oval and in the shape of domes, covered with skins of cattle or rough matting. The structure consists of thin poles, anchored in the earth, which are then woven together. The fire is in the middle as with the round shaped tipis, the fur tents of the prairie Indians.

There is almost nowhere else on Earth where, within a few centuries, the fate of an entire people has changed so dramatically as here. The Indians melted away through wars, diseases (especially chicken pox), and the destruction of the natural herds, their economic foundation.

Apart from the Eskimos in the north, the rest have declined starkly in numbers, and the original inhabitants of North America have been forced back into a few areas of land, namely in northwestern Canada and the south. However, even in these areas, the Indians no longer have their previous independence, as they have long been under the influence of modern civilisation.

As a sub-race of the 'yellow race', Indians have a Mongolian appearance, with mostly red to yellow skin colours, straight black hair, weak beard growth and are strong nosed.

They divide into many lingual and cultural groups. The North American Indians, who have been wiped out in most parts of the United States, can be differentiated into nomadic tribes of Canadian hunters and fishers (Athabaska etc.), the fishing peoples of the northwest coast (Iliknit, Haida, Ischimkian, Nutka etc) with settled winter homes, highly developed wood sculpture art and clan constitutions, and the United States' Indians partly into settled hacking farmers (Iroquois, Huron etc), partly into hunters (Prairie Indians, Sioux etc), and partly gatherers (Californian and Oregon Indians: Klamath, Shoshone, etc). On the high plains of the southern United States and North America live the Pueblo in village houses.

The Middle American Indians (Rahua peoples etc) developed a semi-culture led by the Maya in the east and Aztecs in the west, with military states, picture scripts and the construction of huge temples.

The South American Indians divide into culturally low and very isolated Indians of the tropical forests (with four main language groups: Tupi-Guarani, Ges, Karaiben and Arawak), the similarly hunting and fishing Chaco Indians, the Indians of the southern pampas (Arauca, Patagonian and Pueltsche), those of extreme southern Patagonia and the Highland Indians (Tschibischa, Quechua), who developed semi-cultures and empires like those of Middle America.

Iron was unknown to all Americans before the arrival of the Europeans but, otherwise, extreme differences of cultural development had emerged.

The broad similarities between individual tribes make it much more difficult to divide them into groups. Therefore, language and levels of culture are the best means of analysis.

What above all else fascinates us about the Indians is the primitiveness of their way of life, and also the originality of the customs that have resulted from this. For example, Prince von Wied reported: "The Dakota are brave and proudly bear the symbols of their heroic deeds in view. They drape their arms and legs with the scalps of defeated enemies. A feather stuck flat into the hair counts as a reminder of a killed combatant from the enemy. Should the opponent have been despatched with the fist, then a feather is worn vertically in the hair. If killed with a musket, then a piece of wood is stuck into the hair, so as to represent a loading rod. The highest honour worn is a feather head dress with ox horns. Whoever first spies the enemy may take a small feather from the end of a feather beard. For taking a prisoner an arm band may be worn."

If the Indians find our behaviour loathsome and unnatural, they certainly do not stand below in terms of vanity. They are also superstitious, and other faults appear much more frequently than with civilised people. On the other hand, they also have their qualities which can put others to shame.

That the Indians already played sport can be seen from the accompanying illustration, which depicts them at a ball game (Illustration 2). This ball game, which researchers usually refer to with the French-Canadian expression 'la crosse', was one of the favourite amusements of the Indians. A goal was erected from posts on a large expanse; the players, often many hundreds of people, divided into two parties, and each was equipped with a kind of racquet. First came the ball game dance in which women, separately from the men, took part. Then the women withdrew, the referee threw the ball high into the air, and both parties stormed after it, attempting to catch it with the racquet and force it through the goal. The ball could not be touched with the hands. Often, one village challenged another and huge bets were laid. With this game, which demanded the highest levels of energy and skill, serious injuries frequently occurred, especially when played on ice during the winter. This did not, however, interfere with strong self-control.

Another of the drawings (Illustration 3) leads us to the dance of a police society, that is a secret group. The roles of secret societies were important among Indians. Even young boys banded together and had special signs, implements and dances. With advancing age, the people entered into associations with higher status. This mostly happened by purchase. Various of these societies served policing functions. The 'pigeons', a group of 13 year old boys, acted as hunting police for the Paikanni-Blackfeet, and even the old men had to follow their instructions and accept their punishments without question. One of the foremost of these associations was the 'dogs'.

The treatment of Indians is a black mark in the history of American culture. The methods and manner in which Americans sought to justify their suppression of native tribes, and also their eradication, can only be referred to as the right of the strongest.

Long after the settlement of Canada and the lower Mississippi by the French and the Atlantic Seaboard States by the English, the actual middle of the North America continent, the region of the great rivers of the Mississippi and Missouri, remained in the uncontested possession of its original inhabitants. The Indians led a nomadic life with constant bloody and cruel feuding between the tribes, and lived from the profits of hunting, fishing and low-level production of Indian corn, and they clothed themselves from the furs of prey animals. Elk, deer, roe deer, antelope, bear, wolf and a large number of valuable fur animals. As well as these, it was the buffalo or bison which took the prime position. It was essential for the Indian: its meat served as food, its skin provided coverings and blankets, the horns were used as drinking vessels and jewellery for warriors, the bones were made into all kinds of implements and weapons, and the gut gave bow strings. The hunt took the population levels into account, and they were killed with bow and arrow, spear and lance and, later, also with fire arms, but not more than the yearly requirement. And this explains why these grass devils, before any white foot had trod upon the virgin prairie, could pass by in herds of hundreds, and even thousands, in a slow single file led by the mighty bull, who had won this right by combat with his shaggy rivals, and they ranged across the wide plains.

A remarkable form of bison hunt from older times is pictured here, the bison hunt with a wolf disguise (Illustration 4). The bison, which then still numbered in the millions, were constantly prowled around by wolves that fed themselves from the sick or fallen animals. The Indian made use of this, in that they covered themselves with a wolf skin and, armed with bow and arrow, crept up to the unsuspecting cattle. They fired the deadly shots from close range until they had killed enough, or until the bison had somehow noticed them and run off in panic.

Later, when whites pressed into the presumed American desert from the south and east, and began to force the red skins further west, the final hours of this buffalo kingdom had already been sounded, as ploughed fields could not support the trampling foot and hungry stomach of this mighty ruminant.

The trading companies employed half-Indian hunters, who often hunted over twenty miles into the prairie to return, days later, with their bison-ladened mules.

"The bison cows", wrote Prince Max von Wied, "are to the Indians as the reindeer are for the Laplanders; food, clothing and homes are provided by the bison cows, and they sell their smoked tongues. The colossal mark of the bones is also a titbit for both Indian and hunter. These valuable animals were shot down with an extreme disregard, and often only for the tongue. Even the Missouri became their killer, and helped speed their extinction. Whole herds of wild oxen sank in its floods, and their bodies built dams, and one I saw was composed of nearly 2,000 such animals. The ceaseless hunt forced them back to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, but there they were also pursued by the greed of people."

And how they were pursued! It was reported in a letter from the North American prairie: "There is a war of extermination underway, the dimensions of which are unplanned, frivolously formed and increasing, and it has only to do with the enjoyment of keen sportsmen among the hordes accompanying the railways extending into the West. These open fire (sometimes from the railway wagons) so thoughtlessly for their dumb pleasure at the unsuspecting animals, that the bleached bones of countless victims lying on the prairie indicated this for a long time after. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the annual tally can confidently be numbered as a million."

It is no wonder that the buffalo herds more and more fled from a culture that was an enemy to them, and sought new homes in the remote corners of mountains and the unpeopled pasture lands of the West. But their days were soon numbered there as well, and indeed, this genus would have fallen entirely into legend in a not very distant time, had one not begun, in a few areas, to raise these useful animals in enclosed tracts of land, and even to cross them with, mostly, Scottish Galloway animals.

And similarly lamentable, but yet more terrible and cruel, was the war of extermination between whites and Indians, and every page of this blood soaked story is evoked by the familiar words of the poet:
"Das ist der Fluch der bösen Tat,
Daß sie fortzeugend Böses muß gebären."

(That is the curse of the evil deed, that it must continually beget evil.)

While the opinion may have a measure of justification, that the natives were completely unwilling and incapable of doing anything beyond warring, hunting can catching fish, that can never be said of the measures employed against them. There was no process of false promise and treason, of screaming injustice and bloody iniquity, of setting tribe against tribe or the exploitation of their alliances in the conflicts and wars between Spanish, French, English and Yankees, that the Christina whites were not prepared to use against the heathen redskins. This is as well as the destructions wrought by fire water (liquor) and sexual diseases deliberately spread among the Indians, bloodhounds raised in Europe so as to trace the poorest to their hiding places and tear them to pieces, covering the unsuspecting with blankets in which pox patients had been laid, to bring, as happened in Canada, the Huron slowly to their deaths, terribly cruel acts of vengeance so as to provide an example for others, deeds that their tribal compatriots had carried out on French prisoners. If cruelties flared wildly from the lower nature of Indians through more than two centuries, often resulting in butchery of unbeatable horror in border areas and thousands of murders occurred, then this could be seen as the avenging hand of retribution.

But even where the tribes were not directly persecuted, they were frequently driven to destruction by being torn from their natural conditions. When no longer able to try their hunting luck, then whole families starved from hunger. During such times, they would even eat dead dogs and all animals with the exception of snakes.

After the areas east of the Mississippi had been made serviceable for the white man, the flood of immigrants swept over the wide plains between this river and its mighty neighbour, the Missouri, and then beyond this, and the native inhabitants were suppressed or driven off further west. The most populous and violent of tribes had to give up after exhausting struggles against these powerful incursions, and accept life in so called reservations (areas under military guard), to accept the mercy bread from the government, while others splintered and drew back into the hiding places of the high mountains crossing the western territories, from where they, constantly in danger from waiting government troops holding them in check, now and then undertook bloody attacks on the most forward positioned settlements of the whites. Their power to resist nevertheless lessened over time, and it will not be long until the point is reached, when the image of Indians as natural born savages will be as forgotten as, as they are in Europe today, the former bands of robbers and outlaws.

The reservations lie, on one hand, near to the northern border (New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, Montana), but also in the area of the western mountains. A few small reservations are also in the southern Appalachians, and a few more in Missouri. As well as these, tribes mainly from the East have been settled in the middle of Arkansas, in the so called Indian Territory in the region of the Ozack Mountains. The Indian Territory was united with Oklahoma in 1906 to form a new State with that name. It is a prairie land crossed by the rivers of Arkansas and Red River. However, it is certainly not intended for the Indians alone, as the area has a much greater population of settled whites and, despite the protection measures, it has been hard for the Federal Government, to protect the Indians from the land hunger of the whites.

The total number of Indians living in the United States of North America in 1889 had dwindled down to 250,000 and, of these, about 40,000 understood English, 80,000 always wore European clothing and 60,000 sometimes, and only a minority lived wild and were migratory. Today, the number is estimated at about 230,000. The Indians are already extinct in the West Indies. In Middle and South America, however, there are still about 9 million. In the forest areas of South America there are still even wild, and partly unkown tribes. Because of this, Indians have been able to hold on longer here and there; in North and Middle America, in contrast, they are unstoppably facing their end; their numbers are constantly decreasing, and the survivors are crossing into modern culture*.

* Today, we find much about the original life and activities from the illustrated works of travelling researchers. Unfortunately, due to their great rarity, the copper engravings and woodcuts are already so expensive, that they are fully beyond the reach of most book lovers. Therefore, it was a timely and fortunate occurrence that Indianer, the work of Hermann Dengler, has also just been issued by the Kosmos Verlag in Stuttgart, and there is a selection of the best pictures united in this one volume. Here can be found completely reliable depictions, as the pictures have been excellently reproduced by a new process, and the accompanying text is kept gripping, lively and realistic. An illustrated book has been born that contains valuable information for both the expert and lay reader which, in this area of anthropology, is provided in a previously unknown form, and the challenge has been fulfilled with both wonderment and warmth.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.