The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas | Page 9

their own country
lies, as I have said, betwixt the Pacific Ocean and the 116th degree of
west longitude. As to the "hospitable" shores of the Great Salt Lake. I
don't know what it means, unless it be a modern Yankee expression for
a tract of horrid swamps with deadly effluvia, tenanted by millions of
snakes and other "such hospitable reptiles." The lake is situated on the
western country of the Crows, and I doubt if it has ever been visited by
any Shoshone.]
A proof of their antiquity and foreign extraction is, that but few of their
records and traditions are local; they refer to countries on the other side
of the sea, countries where the summer is perpetual, the population
numberless, and the cities composed of great palaces, like the Hindoo
traditions, "built by the good genii, long before the creation of man."
There is no doubt, indeed it is admitted by the other tribes that the
Shoshone is the parent tribe of the Comanches, Arrapahoes, and
Apaches--the Bedouins of the Mexican deserts. They all speak the same
beautiful and harmonious language, have the same traditions; and
indeed so recent have been their subdivisions, that they point out the

exact periods by connecting them with the various events of Spanish
inland conquest in the northern portion of Sonora.
It is not my intention to dwell long upon speculative theory, but I must
observe, that if any tradition is to be received with confidence it must
proceed from nations, or tribes, who have long been stationary. That
the northern continent of America was first peopled from Asia, there
can be little doubt, and if so, it is but natural to suppose that those who
first came over would settle upon the nearest and most suitable territory.
The emigrants who, upon their landing, found themselves in such a
climate and such a country as California, were not very likely to quit it
in search of a better.
That such was the case with the Shoshones, and that they are
descendants from the earliest emigrants, and that they have never
quitted the settlement made by their ancestors, I have no doubt, for all
their traditions confirm it.
We must be cautious how we put faith in the remarks of missionaries
and travellers upon a race of people little known. They seldom come
into contact with the better and higher classes, who have all the
information and knowledge; and it is only by becoming one of them,
not one of their tribes, but one of their chiefs, and received into their
aristocracy, that any correct intelligence can be gained.
Allow that a stranger was to arrive at Wapping, or elsewhere, in Great
Britain, and question those he met in such a locality as to the religion,
laws, and history of the English, how unsatisfactory would be their
implies; yet missionaries and travellers among these nations seldom
obtain farther access. It is therefore among the better classes of the
Indians that we must search for records, traditions, and laws. As for
their religion, no stranger will ever obtain possession of its tenets,
unless he is cast among them in early life and becomes one of them.
Let missionaries say what they please in their reports to their societies,
they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of
vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts from their tribes.
The traditions of the Shoshones fully bear out my opinion that they
were among the earliest of the Asiatic emigrants; they contain histories
of subsequent emigrations, in which they had to fight hard to retain
their lands; of the dispersion of the new emigrants to the north and
south; of the increase of numbers, and breaking up of portions of the

tribes, who travelled away to seek subsistence in the East.
We find, as might be expected, that the traditions of the Eastern tribes,
collected as they have occasionally been previous to their extinction,
are trifling and absurd; and why so? because, driven away to the east,
and finding other tribes of Indians, who had been driven there before
them, already settled there, they have immediately commenced a life of
continual hostility and change of domicile. When people have thus
been occupied for generations in continual warfare and change, it is but
natural to suppose that in such a life of constant action they have had
no time to transmit then traditions, and that ultimately they have been
lost to the tribe.
We must then look for records in those quarters where the population
has remained stationary for ages. It must be in the south-west of
Oregon, and in the northern parts of Upper California and Sonora, that
the philosopher must obtain the eventful history of vast warlike nations,
of their rise and of their