Comic History of the United States — Chapters 2 and 3

CHAPTER II. OTHER DISCOVERIES--WET AND DRY.

America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.

He had genius, and was also a married man.

He was a good after-dinner speaker, and was first to use the egg trick, which so many after-dinner speakers have since wished they had thought of before Chris did.

In falsifying the log-book in order to make his sailors believe that they had not sailed so far as they had, Columbus did a wrong act, unworthy of his high notions regarding the pious discovery of this land.

The artist has shown here not only one of the most faithful portraits of Columbus and his crooked log-book, but the punishment which he should have received.

The man on the left is Columbus; History is concealed just around the corner in a loose wrapper.

Spain at this time regarded the new land as a vast jewelry store in charge of simple children of the forest who did not know the value of their rich agricultural lands or gold-ribbed farms.

Spain, therefore, expected to exchange bone collar-buttons with the children of the forest for opals as large as lima beans, and to trade fiery liquids to them for large gold bricks.

The Montezumas were compelled every little while to pay a freight-bill for the Spanish confidence man.

Ponce de Leon had started out in search of the Hot Springs of Arkansas, and in 1512 came in sight of Florida.

He was not successful in his attempt to find the Fountain of Youth, and returned an old man so deaf that in the language of the Hoosier poet referring to his grandfather,-- "So remarkably deaf was my grandfather Squeers That he had to wear lightning-rods over his ears To even hear thunder, and oftentimes then He was forced to request it to thunder again."

Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien, and, rolling up his pantalettes, waded into the Pacific Ocean and discovered it in the name of Spain.

It was one of the largest and wettest discoveries ever made, and, though this occurred over three centuries ago, Spain is still poor.

Balboa, in discovering the Pacific, did so according to the Spanish custom of discovery, viz.

, by wading into it with his naked sword in one hand and the banner of Castile, sometimes called Castile's hope (see Appendix), in the other.

He and his followers waded out so as to discover all they could, and were surprised to discover what is now called the undertow.

[Illustration: BALBOA DRYING HIS CLOTHES.

] The artist has shown the great discoverer most truthfully as he appeared after he had discovered and filed on the ocean.

No one can look upon this picture for a moment and confuse Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific, with Kope Elias, who first discovered in the mountains of North Carolina what is now known as moonshine whiskey.

De Narvaez in 1528 undertook to conquer Florida with three hundred hands.

He also pulled considerable grass in his search for gold.

Finally he got to the gulf and was wrecked.

They were all related mostly to Narvaez, and for two weeks they lived on their relatives, but later struck shore--four of them--and lived more on a vegetable diet after that till they struck the Pacific Ocean, which now belonged to Spain.

De Soto also undertook the conquest of Florida after this, and took six hundred men with him for the purpose.

They wandered through the Gulf States to the Mississippi, enduring much, and often forced to occupy the same room at night.

De Soto in 1541 discovered the Mississippi River, thus adding to the moisture collection of Spain.

After trying to mortgage his discovery to Eastern capitalists, he died, and was buried in the quiet bosom of the Great Father of waters.

Thus once more the list of fatalities was added to and the hunger for gold was made to contribute a discovery.

Menendez later on founded in 1565 the colony of St. Augustine, the oldest town in the United States.

There are other towns that look older, but it is on account of dissipation.

New York looks older, but it is because she always sat up later of nights than St. Augustine did.

Cortez was one of the coarsest men who visited this country.

He did not marry any wealthy American girls, for there were none, but he did everything else that was wrong, and his unpaid laundry-bills are still found all over the Spanish-speaking countries.

He was especially lawless and cruel to the Peruvians: "recognizing the Peruvian at once by his bark," he would treat him with great indignity, instead of using other things which he had with him.

Cortez had a way of capturing the most popular man in a city, and then he would call on the tax-payers to redeem him on the instalment plan.

Most everybody hated Cortez, and when he held religious services the neighbors did not attend.

The religious efforts made by Cortez were not successful.

He killed a great many people, but converted but few.

The historian desires at this time to speak briefly of the methods of Cortez from a commercial stand-point.

Will the reader be good enough to cast his eye on the Cortez securities as shown in the picture drawn from memory by an artist yet a perfect gentleman?

[Illustration: BANK OF CORTEZ.

] Notice the bonds Nos.

18 and 27. Do you notice the listening attitude of No. 18?

He is listening to the accumulating interest.

Note the aged and haggard look of No. 27. He has just begun to notice that he is maturing.

Cast your eye on the prone form of No. 31. He has just fallen due, and in doing so has hurt his crazy-bone (see Appendix).

Be good enough to study the gold-bearing bond behind the screen.

See the look of anguish.

Some one has cut off a coupon probably.

Cortez was that kind of a man.

He would clip the ear of an Inca and make him scream with pain, so that his friends would come in and redeem him.

Once the bank examiner came to examine the Cortez bank.

He imparted a pleasing flavor on the following day to the soup.

Spain owned at the close of the sixteenth century the West Indies, Yucatan, Mexico, and Florida, besides unlimited water facilities and the Peruvian preserves.

North Carolina was discovered by the French navigator Verrazani, thirty years later than Cabot did, but as Cabot did not record his claim at the court-house in Wilmington the Frenchman jumped the claim in 1524, and the property remained about the same till again discovered by George W. Vanderbilt in the latter part of the present century.

Montreal was discovered in 1535 by Cartier, also a Frenchman.

Ribaut discovered South Carolina, and left thirty men to hold it.

They were at that time the only white men from-Mexico to the North Pole, and a keen business man could have bought the whole thing, Indians and all, for a good team and a jug of nepenthe.

But why repine?

The Jesuit missionaries about the middle of the seventeenth century pushed their way to the North Mississippi and sought to convert the Indians.

The Jesuits deserve great credit for their patience, endurance, and industry, but they were shocked to find the Indian averse to work.

They also advanced slowly in church work, and would often avoid early mass that they might catch a mess of trout or violate the game law by killing a Dakotah in May.

[Illustration: CONVERTING INDIANS.

] Father Marquette discovered the Upper Mississippi not far from a large piece of suburban property owned by the author, north of Minneapolis.

The ground has not been disturbed since discovered by Father Marquette.

The English also discovered America from time to time, the Cabots finding Labrador while endeavoring to go to Asia via the North, and Frobisher discovered Baffin Bay in 1576 while on a like mission.

The Spanish discovered the water mostly, and England the ice belonging to North America.

Sir Francis Drake also discovered the Pacific Ocean, and afterward sailed an English ship on its waters, discovering Oregon.

Sir Walter Raleigh, with the endorsement of his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, regarding the idea of colonization of America, and being a great friend of Queen Elizabeth, got out a patent on Virginia.

He planted a colony and a patch of tobacco on Roanoke Island, but the colonists did not care for agriculture, preferring to hunt for gold and pearls.

In this way they soon ran out of food, and were constantly harassed by Indians.

[Illustration: COULD NOT REACH THEM.

] It was an odd sight to witness a colonist coming home after a long hard day hunting for pearls as he asked his wife if she would be good enough to pull an arrow out of some place which he could not reach himself.

Raleigh spent two hundred thousand dollars in his efforts to colonize Virginia, and then, disgusted, divided up his patent and sold county rights to it at a pound apiece.

This was in 1589. Raleigh learned the use of smoking tobacco at this time.

[Illustration: RALEIGH'S ASTONISHMENT.

] He was astonished when he tried it first, and threatened to change his boarding-place or take his meals out, but soon enjoyed it, and before he had been home a week Queen Elizabeth thought it to be an excellent thing for her house plants.

It is now extensively used in the best narcotic circles.

[Illustration: RALEIGH'S ENJOYMENT.

] Several other efforts were made by the English to establish colonies in this country, but the Indians thought that these English people bathed too much, and invited perspiration between baths.

One can see readily that the Englishman with his portable bath-tub has been a flag of defiance from the earliest discoveries till this day.

This chapter brings us to the time when settlements were made as follows: The French at Port Royal, N. S.

, 1605. The English at Jamestown 1607. The French at Quebec 1608. The Dutch at New York 1613. The English at Plymouth 1620. * * * * * The author's thanks are due to the following books of reference, which, added to his retentive memory, have made the foregoing statements accurate yet pleasing: A Summer in England with H. W.

Beecher.

By J. B.

Reed.

Russell's Digest of the Laws of Minnesota, with Price-List of Members.

Out-Door and Bug Life in America.

By Chilblainy, Chief of the Umatilla.

Why I am an Indian.

By S. Bull.

With Notes by Ole Bull and Introduction by John Bull.

[Illustration: BONA FIDE PICTURE OF THE MAYFLOWER.

] CHAPTER III. THE THIRTEEN ORIGINAL COLONIES.

This chapter is given up almost wholly to facts.

It deals largely with the beginning of the thirteen original colonies from which sprang the Republic, the operation of which now gives so many thousands of men in-door employment four years at a time, thus relieving the penitentiaries and throwing more kindergarten statesmen to the front.

[Illustration: SAMPLE PURITAN.

] It was during this epoch that the Cavaliers landed in Virginia and the Puritans in Massachusetts; the latter lived on maple sugar and armed prayer, while the former saluted his cow, and, with bared head, milked her with his hat in one hand and his life in the other.

Immigration now began to increase along the coast.

The Mayflower began to bring over vast quantities of antique furniture, mostly hall-clocks for future sales.

Hanging them on spars and masts during rough weather easily accounts for the fact that none of them have ever been known to go.

[Illustration] The Puritans now began to barter with the Indians, swapping square black bottles of liquid hell for farms in Massachusetts and additions to log towns.

Dried apples and schools began to make their appearance.

The low retreating forehead of the codfish began to be seen at the stores, and virtue began to break out among the Indians after death.

Virginia, however, deserves mention here on the start.

This colony was poorly prepared to tote wood and sleep out-of-doors, as the people were all gents by birth.

They had no families, but came to Virginia to obtain fortunes and return to the city of New York in September.

The climate was unhealthy, and before the first autumn, says Sir William Kronk, from whom I quote, "ye greater numberr of them hade perished of a great Miserrie in the Side and for lacke of Food, for at thatte time the Crosse betweene the wilde hyena and the common hogge of the Holy Lande, and since called the Razor Backe Hogge, had not been made, and so many of the courtiers dyede."

John Smith saved the colony.

He was one of the best Smiths that ever came to this country, which is as large an encomium as a man cares to travel with.

He would have saved the life of Pocahontas, an Indian girl who also belonged to the gentry of their tribe, but she saw at once that it would be a point for her to save him, so after a month's rehearsal with her father as villain, with Smith's part taken by a chunk of blue-gum wood, they succeeded in getting this little curtain-raiser to perfection.

Pocahontas was afterwards married, if the author's memory does not fail him, to John Rolfe.

Pocahontas was not beautiful, but many good people sprang from her.

She never touched them.

Her husband sprang from her also just in time.

The way she jumped from a clay-eating crowd into the bosom of the English aristocracy by this dramatic ruse was worthy of a greater recognition than merely to figure among the makers of smoking-tobacco with fancy wrappers, when she never had a fancy wrapper in her life.

Smith was captured once by the Indians, and, instead of telling them that he was by birth a gent, he gave them a course of lectures on the use of the compass and how to learn where one is at.

Thus one after another the Indians went away.

I often wonder why the lecture is not used more as a means of escape from hostile people.

[Illustration: THE REHEARSAL.

] By writing a letter and getting a reply to it, he made another hit.

He now became a great man among the Indians; and to kill a dog and fail to invite Smith to the symposium was considered as vulgar as it is now to rest the arctic overshoe on the corner of the dining-table while buckling or unbuckling it.

Afterward Smith fell into the hands of Powhatan, the Croker of his time, and narrowly saved his life, as we have seen, through the intervention of Pocahontas.

Smith was now required in England to preside at a dinner given by the Savage Club, and to tell a few stories of life in the Far West.

While he was gone the settlement became a prey to disease and famine.

Some were killed by the Indians while returning from their club at evening; some became pirates.

The colony decreased from four hundred and ninety to sixty people, and at last it was moved and seconded that they do now adjourn.

They started away from Jamestown without a tear, or hardly anything else, having experienced a very dull time there, funerals being the only relaxation whatever.

But moving down the bay they met Lord Delaware, the new Governor, with a lot of Christmas-presents and groceries.

Jamestown was once more saved, though property still continued low.

The company, by the terms of its new charter, became a self-governing institution, and London was only too tickled to get out of the responsibility.

It is said that the only genuine humor up to that time heard in London was spent on the jays of Jamestown and the Virginia colony.

Where is that laughter now?

Where are the gibes and _bon-mots_ made at that sad time?

They are gone.

All over that little republic, so begun in sorrow and travail, there came in after-years the dimples and the smiles of the prosperous child who would one day rise in the lap of the mother-country, and, asserting its rights by means of Patrick O'Fallen Henry and others, place a large and disagreeable fire-cracker under the nose of royalty, that, busting the awful stillness, should jar the empires of earth, and blow the unblown noses of future kings and princes.

(This is taken bodily from a speech made by me July 4, 1777, when I was young.

--THE AUTHOR.

) Pocahontas was married in 1613. She was baptized the day before.

Whoever thought of that was a bright and thoughtful thinker.

She stood the wear and tear of civilization for three years, and then died, leaving an infant son, who has since grown up.

The colony now prospered.

All freemen had the right to vote.

Religious toleration was enjoyed first-rate, and, there being no negro slavery, Virginia bade fair to be _the_ republic of the continent.

But in 1619 the captain of a Dutch trading-vessel sold to the colonists twenty negroes.

The negroes were mostly married people, and in some instances children were born to them.

This peculiarity still shows itself among the negroes, and now all over the South one hardly crosses a county without seeing a negro or a person with negro blood in his or her veins.

[Illustration: NEGROES STILL HAVE FAMILIES.

] After the death of Powhatan, the friend of the English, an organized attempt was made by the Indians to exterminate the white people and charge more for water frontage the next time any colonists came.

March 22, 1622, was the day set, and many of the Indians were eating at the tables of those they had sworn to kill.

It was a solemn moment.

The surprise was to take place between the cold beans and the chili sauce.

But a converted Indian told quite a number, and as the cold beans were passed, the effect of some arsenic that had been eaten with the slim-neck clams began to be seen, and before the beans had gone half-way round the board the children of the forest were seen to excuse themselves, and thus avoid dying in the house.

[Illustration: PREPARING THE FEAST.

] Yet there were over three hundred and fifty white people massacred, and there followed another, reducing the colonists from four thousand to two thousand five hundred, then a massacre of five hundred, and so on, a sickening record of death and horror, even worse, before a great nation could get a foothold in this wild and savage land; even a toe-hold, as I may say, in the sands of time.

July 30, 1619, the first sprout of Freedom poked its head from the soil of Jamestown when Governor Yeardley stated that the colony "should have a handle in governing itself."

He then called at Jamestown the first legislative body ever assembled in America; most of the members whereof boarded at the Planters' House during the session.

(For sample of legislator see picture.

) This body could pass laws, but they must be ratified by the company in England.

The orders from London were not binding unless ratified by this Colonial Assembly.

This was a mutual arrangement reminding one of the fearful yet mutual apprehension spoken of by the poet when he says,-- "Jim Darling didn't know but his father was dead, And his father didn't know but Jim Darling was dead."

The colony now began to prosper; men held their lands in severalty, and taxes were low.

The railroad had not then brought in new styles in clothing and made people unhappy by creating jealousy.

Settlements joined each other along the James for one hundred and forty miles, and the colonists first demonstrated how easily they could get along without the New York papers.

Tobacco began to be a very valuable crop, and at one time even the streets were used for its cultivation.

Tobacco now proceeded to become a curse to the civilized world.

In 1624, King James, fearing that the infant colony would go Democratic, appointed a rump governor.

The oppression of the English parliament now began to be felt.

The colonists were obliged to ship their products to England and to use only English vessels.

The Assembly, largely royalists, refused to go out when their terms of office expired, paid themselves at the rate of about thirty-six dollars per day as money is now, and, in fact, acted like members of the Legislature generally.

[Illustration: JAMESTOWN LEGISLATOR.

] In 1676, one hundred years before the Colonies declared themselves free and independent, a rebellion, under the management of a bright young attorney named Bacon, visited Jamestown and burned the American metropolis, after which Governor Berkeley was driven out.

Bacon died just as his rebellion was beginning to pay, and the people dispersed.

Berkeley then took control, and killed so many rebels that Mrs. Berkeley had to do her own work, and Berkeley, who had no one left to help him but his friends, had to stack his own grain that fall and do the chores at the barn.

Jamestown is now no more.

It was succeeded in 1885 by Jamestown, North Dakota, now called Jimtown, a prosperous place in the rich farming-lands of that State.

Jamestown the first, the scene of so many sorrows and little jealousies, so many midnight Indian attacks and bilious attacks by day, became a solemn ruin, and a few shattered tombstones, over which the jimson-weed and the wild vines clamber, show to the curious traveller the place where civilization first sought to establish itself on the James River, U.

S.

A.

* * * * * The author wishes to refer with great gratitude to information contained in the foregoing chapter and obtained from the following works: The Indian and other Animalcula.

By N. K.

Boswell, Laramie City, Wyoming.

How to Jolly the Red Man out of his Lands.

By Ernest Smith.

The Female Red Man and her Pure Life.

By Johnson Sides, Reno, Nevada (P. M.

please forward if out on war-path).

The Crow Indian and His Caws.

By Me.

Massacre Etiquette.

By Wad.

McSwalloper, 82 McDougall St. , New York.

Where is my Indian to night?

By a half-bred lady of Winnipeg.

[Illustration]